ABAG EXEC DIRECTOR ''REGIONAL GOVERNANCE IS CONSTITUTIONAL

Important video. I would love to hear the rebuttal of Ezra Rapport by a constitutional scholar. No where does he mention the people right to self govern. His justification of "states authority" is positively socialist in concept. It changes our democracy into a authoritarian central planning model. I understand that Ezra Rapport was a lawyer.in his prior life.

I posed the question about how to rebuff Ezra Rapport's argument and received this response from a friend:

There are many arguments for local control but not based on the US Constitution. In the system of federalism, The federal and state governments co-exist as soverigns. The Constitution reserves the powers that belong to the federal government, and these pre-empt any contrary state or local laws. Anything not reserved to the feds belongs to the states to do as they please, as long as not in conflict with the Bill of Rights or other constitutional provisions. In contrast, the state and cities are not separate sovereigns. The cities are subordinate to the state, and derive any and all of their powers from what the state grants. The state has authority to delegate its powers to agencies, and has done so here. This is the constitutional explanation. As used here, I would argue it is bad governance, but it is constitutional.

Here are a few other comments: 

Constitutionally, he is right.

Just like, after the Reichstag fire in 1933, Hindenburg’s Reichstag Fire Decree suspending basic rights and allowed detention without trail, followed by Hitler getting the Enabling Act passed by the new Reichstag to respond to the emergency, and Hitler taking over as sole dictator of Germany after the death of Hindenburg, Hitler became all-powerful in a perfectly legal manner.

Remember the sequence in Star Wars III where Palpatine convinces the Senate to convert the Republic into the Empire with him as Emperor?

Guess what it was based on?

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

And this one:

Rapport may be correct that the state can subdivide into regional agencies, but this does not permit it to do so without democratic representation. Here is the portion of the Constitution, Article IV, Section 4: The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence. 

Article 4 Section 3 of the Constitution HERE

Attention MTC/ABAG (aka BAHA) Regional Government is Dead

Once upon a time Local Government

Regional Government is a threat to Democracy (applies to the coming SF Bay Regional Authority)

A Politician defends the Tyranny of Regional Government

A citizen speaks out at the May 19, 2016 Association of Bay Area Governments Regional Assembly.  He questions the legality and constitutionality of "regional government" where citizens don't even know about the meetings.  Scott Haggerty, Alameda County Supervisor responds to quiet the citizen (peasant) citing privilege of elected office.


Comment from a viewer:

Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution forbids forms of government that are not vetted by the citizenry. Regional Governments like ABAG and SCAG are the definition of this illegal activity and should be abolished.

China to Build the Largest City in Human History

China is working on building a megacity that will have more people than the UK, Canada, and Australia combined. It's called Jingjinji, a megalopolis with Beijing at the center. And it might be just as nightmarish as you imagine.

Regional Planning Czar finally admits he was WRONG about housing and transit

A Rebuttal to "Forceful solutions to Regionalism"

A Rebuttal to the San Francisco Gate Opinion piece. 

A need for Regional Thinking

Editor's Note: A reader sent me the following rebuttal to the opinion piece published in the the SF GATE HERE.   The commentary is published in bold type and the original article in italics.

"A giant tunneling machine dubbed Elizabeth is burrowing under London, part
of a $25 billion regional train line scheduled to open in 2018. The finished
product is intended to alleviate suffocating traffic, ease pressure on housing
costs and share growth across a booming urban center, not just the inner core."

London has a vast network of surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition software, voice recognition,  cellular and digital surveillance.  Do we want to imitate London?

What works for London, doesn't necessarily work for us.

"Those problems, if not the solution, should get the Bay Area thinking. Our
locale shares London’s anxiety about the future and the next steps to improve
livability."
I have no anxiety about London's problems.
"Costly housing and inadequate transit are concerns that occupy Bay Area
residents nearly every day, topics taken on in The Chronicle’s “City on the
Edge” editorial series. As the expansive London plan shows, these
shortcomings can’t be isolated to the big-city center. They’re regional
concerns, taking in dozens of communities."
Anyone who understands regionalism sees it for what it is, an end run around
our representative government and our democratic process. Never a good thing
even if you think you're solving a problem.

"Other areas — notably the vast region surrounding New York that includes
New Jersey and Pennsylvania — are moving in the same direction as London.
It’s time there, as well as here, for serious improvements that move beyond
the normal boundaries and levels of planning."

This language appears to be an attempt to create a reality that does not exist. I
hope your readers don't fall for it.

"An emphasis on commuter lines that reach deep into the areas surrounding
city centers is one element."

Who asked we the people if this is what we want?

"Another is regional government that oversees and enforces policies on a
broad scale." 

Regional government is unrepresentative and is a shadow government to our
own. A very dangerous thing as those who have studied history know.
"Portland, Ore., has a wide-angle lens on development over an area taking in
the city and its suburbs."

Please look at the problems with this Portland plan before extolling its virtues.
It sets limits and directs growth, breaking down barriers between small
towns that ring the larger urban center.  (See article HERE )

This regionalism is about breaking political jurisdictions which take away the
political power of we the people to determine for ourselves how we want to live.
This is nothing less than Soviet Russian planning which didn't work there and
won't work here. This is the United States of America, land of the free, home of
the brave.

Ugly stucco "big box" apartments replace quiet neighborhoods.

"After years of public battling, Seattle overcame misgivings about in-fill
projects and pushed ahead with new buildings in older neighborhoods where
NIMBY wars often raged."
At whose expense?

"The Bay Area has all the elements of these solutions in place. BART handles
400,000 riders daily, its highest passenger counts ever, and has proven so
popular that it needs bigger stations, more rail cars and possibly a second

Bay Area group’s housing solution: Punish cities that don’t build

Bay Area group’s housing solution: Punish cities that don’t build

By David R. Baker

November 6, 2015 Updated: November 6, 2015 12:04am






Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

About a hundred units of affordable housing might replace this parking lot on the southwest corner of San Jose and Geneva avenues in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, October 27, 2015.

To keep the Bay Area economy strong, all nine counties and 101 cities must work as a unified entity — adding housing and coordinating mass transit and road projects — according to a report from an influential business group.

But many of the group’s recommendations are sure to face resistance.

The Bay Area Council report argues that the clogged roads, packed commuter trains and astronomical housing prices plaguing the region can be solved only by cities planning and working together. The “Roadmap for Economic Resilience” calls for creating “super agencies” that would prioritize, approve and fund projects throughout the area, whether in bustling downtown San Francisco or suburban Livermore.

HOUSING CRISIS


Berkeley Plaza housing needed, but meets with resistance


Propositions I and F rejected by voters throughout S.F.


Prop. A, affordable-housing measure, wins in S.F.


Neglected Balboa Park offers opportunities for affordable housing

“We believe religiously that the best approach to solving challenges on a regional scale is to act on a regional scale,” said Jim Wunderman, the council’s chief executive officer.

The need is perhaps most visible in the housing crisis that has become one of San Francisco’s most contentious issues.

For years, the region has not been building enough housing, Wunderman said. Some cities have actively encouraged new housing while others have tried to shut it out. Unaffordable prices are the result.

“The core issue is under-supply,” Wunderman said. “We’re in a crisis now, there’s no question about it. The cost of housing in the Bay Area could be a very serious downer for the future of our economy.”

But the report’s prescriptions for solving the crisis would be difficult to carry out, in part because they would require cities to give up some of their power.

For example, regional planners already set goals for the number of housing units each Bay Area city should build, goals that many cities routinely ignore. The report recommends punishing cities that don’t meet the targets, perhaps by stripping them of the ability to approve or reject development projects.




Photo: Jerry Telfer, The Chronicle

Jim Wunderman of the Bay Area Council

Or the state could expand “by right” approval for housing. If a proposed housing project complied with local zoning and building codes, no city would be able to block it.

The report also suggests capping impact fees on housing developments and exempting some home construction from state-mandated environmental reviews.

Some of those steps would need the approval of the Legislature, while most would require the agreement of the Bay Area’s cities. Such agreement would not come easily.

“We have, in the state of California and in the Bay Area, a real commitment to local control over land-use issues,” said Jeremy Madsen, CEO of the Greenbelt Alliance, which encourages environmentally responsible development. “That’s something cities hold onto with a very tight fist.”

Wunderman says the report’s recommendations aren’t set in stone.

“The mission of the report isn’t to say, ‘It must be done this way,’” he said. “It’s to start a region-wide conversation. ... We don’t, in any way, want to put local governments out of the business of deciding what goes in their neighborhoods.”

The report also calls for creating a regional authority with the ability to raise and spend money for infrastructure projects that benefit the entire Bay Area. That money could come from establishing a regional gasoline tax, sales tax or vehicle license fee.

In addition, the region’s 26 transit agencies should immediately start coordinating their operations and future plans. Eventually, a regional transit agency would set priorities and distribute money for expansion projects, such as building another transbay tube or increasing ferry services.

“It’s definitely time for them to start coordinating,” Wunderman said. “It should be routine that, from scheduling to payment systems, they should act as one.”


David R. Baker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: dbaker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @DavidBakerSF

Thoreau on "Local Democracy" aka "Local Control"

Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond

I am more and more convinced that, with reference to any public question, it is more important to know what the country thinks of it than what the city thinks. The city does not think much. On any moral question, I would rather have the opinion of Boxboro than of Boston and New York put together. When the former speaks, I feel as if somebody had spoken, as if humanity was yet, and a reasonable being had asserted its rights — as if some unprejudiced men among the country's hills had at length turned their attention to the subject, and by a few sensible words redeemed the reputation of the race. When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town-meeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing the land, that, I think, is the true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the United States.

—Henry David Thoreau

How the Left and Right Can Learn to Love Localism: The Constitutional Cure for polarization

How the Left and Right Can Learn to Love Localism: The Constitutional Cure for polarization

Polarization is now only going to get worse? The only real answer? Localism. Let Birmingham be Birmingham and Berkeley be Berkeley.

JOEL KOTKIN
12.03.16 9:15 PM ET

The ever worsening polarization of American politics—demonstrated and accentuated by the Trump victory—is now an undeniable fact of our daily life. Yet rather than allowing the guilty national parties to continue indulging political brinkmanship, we should embrace a strong, constitutional solution to accommodating our growing divide: a return to local control.

Such an approach would allow, within some limits, local constituencies to follow their own course, much as the Founding Fathers suggested, without shaking the fundamentals of the federal union. Localism, as I label this approach, would address the sentiments on both right and left by reversing the consolidation of central power in Washington.

What Americans across the political spectrum need to recognize is that centralizing power does not promote national unity, but ever harsher division. Enforced central control, from left or right, polarizes politics in dangerous ways. The rather hysterical reaction to Trump’s election on the left is a case in point, with some in alt-blue California calling for secession from the union. Had Clinton and the Democrats won, we would have heard other secessionist sentiment, notably in Texas.

This is no way to maintain a “United” States. Under Obama, conservative states resisted ever expanding federal executive power; now it’s the progressives’ turn to worry about an overweening central state. Some blue states are already planning to go on their own in such areas as health care and somewhat less plausibly, immigration. Progressives may also face potential federal assaults on such things as legal marijuana by a now GOP-controlled central government.

Do people want Washington to rule everything? The real issue is not the intrinsic evil of government itself, but how we can best address society’s myriad problems. For decades, many progressives have embraced an expansive central government as the most effective method of changing society for the better. Yet it is far from clear that most Americans prefer that alternative. A rough majority in November cast their votes for either Trump, who attacked President Obama’s executive orders, or libertarian Gary Johnson, a candidate with an even stronger localist tendency. Since 2007, the percentage of people who favored expanding government has dropped from 51 to 45 percent.

In contrast, localism is widely embraced by a broad majority of the American public. By 64 percent to 26 percent, according to a 2015 poll—Americans say that they feel “more progress” on critical issues take place on the local rather than the federal level. Majorities of all political affiliations and all demographic groups hold this same opinion.

The preference for localism also extends to attitudes toward state governments, many of which have grown more intrusive in recent years. Some 72 percent of Americans, according to Gallup, trust their local governments more than they do their state institutions; even in California, where executive power has run riot, far more people prefer local control to that of Sacramento.

Critically, millennials, notes generational analyst Morley Winograd, generally favor community-based, local solutions to key problems. Indeed, a recent National Journal poll found that less than a third of millennials favor federal solutions over locally-based ones. They are also far less trusting of major institutions than their Generation X predecessors.

Any party, right or left, that wishes to expand federal power will face broad political headwinds. Roughly half of all Americans, according to a 2015 Gallup poll, now consider the federal government “an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens”; in 2003, only 30 percent felt that way. The federal bureaucracy is held in such low regard that 55 percent of the public says “ordinary Americans” would do a better job of solving national problems.

The election of Trump and his “deplorables” is leading more progressives, after years of cheering on President Obama’s ever increasing policy of rule by decree, to seek ways of preserving their own progressive bubble. Cheerleaders for Barack Obama’s imperial presidency, such as The New Yorker, are now embracing states’ rights with an almost Confederate enthusiasm. There are increasing plans to promote new progressive measures, for example on energy as a means to counter the nefarious, anti-planetary intentions of the new monarch.

Yet in reality, progressivism and localism are hardly incompatible. The progressive Justice Louis Brandeis invoked the notion that the states, not the federal government, should serve as “laboratories of democracy,” empowering them to “try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

This more decentralized progressive approach was also expounded by David Osborne in his 1990 book, Laboratories of Democracy. Notably, Osborne’s book featured a foreword by the then-governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. The future president praised “pragmatic responses” to key social and economic issues by both liberal and conservative governors. Such state-level responses, he correctly noted, were critical in “a country as complex and diverse as ours.”

Localism also has fans among grassroots leftists. Some embrace the ideal of localism as a reaction against globalization and domination by large corporations. For example, grassroots progressives often support local merchants and locally produced agricultural products. Some have adopted localist ideas as an economic development tool, an environmental win, and a form of resistance to ever-greater centralized big business control.

Yale Law professor Heather Gerken makes the case that progressive social causes like racial integration, gay marriage, marijuana legalization, and others have historically tended to be adopted first at a local level before spreading to other areas. Gerken argues that it’s necessary for cities and states to have these powers so that local “cities upon a hill” of social reform can be allowed to flourish and lead by example.

With Trump and the GOP ensconced in Washington for a likely four more years, more progressives can be expected to adopt Gerken’s strategy. Longtime Washington insiders such as Brookings’ Bruce Katz already have made a strong pitch for a supplanting federal control with a regional approach. Although this usually leads to the dominance of regions by well-connected urban elites, Katz’s approach at least leaves smaller cities and towns free to govern themselves.

President-elect Trump needs to recognize there is no great clamor to replace one “imperial president” for another. The authoritarian tendencies of some of his key allies, notably Senator Jeff Sessions, to perhaps overturn state marijuana, abortion and gay rights measures would simply extend, in different fields, the pernicious federalization of daily life. This is not exactly a consistent message for a party that often promotes itself as the voice of “liberty” and local choice.

We have already seen some harbingers of right-wing centralism on the state level, notes analyst Aaron Renn, where conservative state legislators contravene the progressive agenda of their core cities. Already in some states such as North Carolina and Texas, conservative legislatures have overturned actions adopted by certain cities on issues as diverse as transgender bathrooms and fracking. A better solution would be to allow blue places to reflect their values on as many issues as possible, while granting to conservative places the same right.

When it comes to preserving the character of our communities, there is often no red or blue. We choose places for their character and, if they need to change, this is preferably shaped along the lines favored by local residents. What may be fine with residents of Portland or Brooklyn does not necessarily work for people in suburban reaches of Dallas, Houston, or, for that matter, New York. As far as I am concerned: vive le difference!

Localism, of course, is not a panacea for all issues, some of which are indeed better addressed on a larger scale. And some basic rights need to be protected from local overreach. But overall, nothing is more basic to the American identity than, whenever feasible, leaving control of daily life to local communities, and, as much as practical, to individuals and families. Effective policy can only be shaped where there exists a “common civic culture” of shared values, something far more evident today on the local than the national level.

In his drive to make America “great” again, the new president needs to revitalize our flagging democracy not by doubling down on federal power but by empowering local communities to determine what’s best for them. Anything else gives us a choice between ideological despotisms that can only enrage and alienate half of our population by forcing down their throats policies they can’t abide, and, in most cases, should not be forced to accept.

Three Mayors propose Regional "Solutions" to Concentrate their Power

Three Mayors Meet on Bay Area Housing

Posted on May 25, 2015 by publisher5 in INDUSTRY news, Residential

From left: Tim Colen, SF Housing Action Coalition; Gabriel Metcalf, SPUR; Mayor Sam Liccardo; Mayor Libby Schaaf; Mayor Ed Lee

In a Bay Area civic version of the Three Tenors, the three mayors of our region’s largest cities met last week to discuss one of the most pressing issues afflicting their cities—housing. An event held at the SFJazz Center in San Francisco and organized by San Francisco Housing Action Coalition gathered Mayor Edwin Lee of San Francisco, Mayor Sam Liccardo of San Jose and Mayor Libby Schaaf of Oakland in front of hundreds of industry participants.

Tim Colen, executive director of the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition opened the event acknowledging the timing of this discussion. “Our interest in regionalism and hosting the discussion tonight is less because it’s a policy area a small group like ours can tackle, then because questions keep coming up in local conversations that we can no longer avoid,” he said.

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Colen solicited the help of Gabriel Metcalf, president and CEO of SPUR, and the founder of the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition, to moderate the discussion, and the first question went to Oakland’s Mayor Schaaf whose East Bay city has seen a surge in development activity, interest and subsequent price increases. According to Schaaf, the city is in the midst of a development boom with 850 units under construction (40 percent of which are affordable), with another 11,000 somewhere in the entitlement process—the potential for transformation is great, she added, even though it is faced with challenges of its own.

“Oakland struggles a little, because we share the construction costs of San Francisco, but the rents are not the same.” The ability for developers to pencil in new construction is more challenged, “but we have got to build more housing,” added Schaaf.

The city has the second fastest rising rent rate in the country, according to the mayor, which is creating a lot of fear that the city will change, and than the new prosperity will not lift all the residents and that it will push out the current ones.

“We cannot build our way out of the problem, we have to do other things that also provide security for the people who are already here,” said Schaaf, but also realizing that certain forces cannot be stopped. “I cannot build a wall around our city. I cannot keep new people from moving here. In some ways we should be proud that people have discovered the awesomeness of Oakland.”

In San Francisco, which is experiencing its biggest building boom since the 1920s, Mayor Lee is faced with an economy that has perhaps outgrown the physical place, the housing stock and the transportation system. At the same time, the city may be outgrowing the ability of its citizens to deal with the changes, said Metcalf soliciting a response from the mayor.

“This is a very different time for San Francisco, historically,” said Lee. “We have to have those delicate conversations with historic NIMBY attitudes.”

“A lot of people instantaneously forget that we’re still coming out of [the] recession. And we’re very fortunate to have come out of it quite quickly. We’ve always had strong tourism, we’ve kept that, but we didn’t know that tech and healthcare would be such drivers of strong economic vitality,” said Mayor Lee.

The city is pushing forward a number of initiatives in an attempt to curb escalating housing costs that are changing the fabric of San Francisco.

“The past two years, we’ve invested over $13 million to prevent evictions,” he said. “We’re pouring in millions of dollars in neighborhood stabilization funds. Can we buy wholesale buildings under threat? Yes, we can. We’ve done that.”

At the same time, the city is also tackling head on initiatives that propose development mortaria as a response to increased housing costs and is trying to find solutions that work with the proponents of those actions. “This is a time not to moratorium ourselves to death,” Lee added.

Mayor Liccardo agreed and provided a practical suggestion that may enable a more balanced discussion around housing development.

“A more collaborative approach is probably what the MTC has started…around the One Bay Area grants, which is try to incentivize cities to build the housing using transportation money, which is really the only lever that I know of regionally that we have,” he said.

The discussion also focused on some very specific items that each city could do in addition to current initiatives that could ease housing development.

Mayor Schaaf’s sights went to the specific plans, which the city has been championing in several neighborhoods. “We’ve had a lot of success using areas for specific plans, and so one thing that we need to do is do more of them,” she said.

Oakland has completed five of these, and in each the hard community conversations led to a productive change in land use, created more density in some cases and in others helped preservations of the communities in their current form.

Another area that she would like Oakland to place more focus was public land policy as well as moving faster on policies that create stabilization and security for existing, vulnerable tenants. The city owns a lot of land and “when we’re not clear how to dispose of that land, it causes a lot of chaos,” she added.

Mayor Liccardo wants to focus on leveraging technology to try to create better accountability and transparency in the planning and permitting phase of the project, while Mayor Lee’s focus would like to be on more inclusionary housing options. “Middle income, workforce housing. We haven’t done that,” Lee said.

The last question focused on regionalism, and the possibility of taking away the ability of local, municipal governments to make decisions on housing, perhaps in a model that mimics what had been done in Portland and Seattle.

”In some ways [that] is easy for us, because we embrace housing, and we want to be urban centers, and our neighbors don’t. So, it’s always easier for larger cities to say yes to regionalism,” said Liccardo.

He explained that the composition of our region and its 99 jurisdictions adds to the issue. ”In some of these towns and cities, our interests are so diverse; it’s not easy,” he added.

”There is a range. You’re talking about something that’s pretty punitive and regulatory, and that’s the stick, right? I like how Sam [Liccardo] was talking about the carrot—if you don’t do your fair share, no transportation funds for you. To find more carrots is something that is more politically feasible,” said Mayor Schaaf.

Mayor Lee called on the concept of advanced citizenship and participation in the regional discussions. While there could be changes made in the land use policy that may create delicate changes that can be more incentivizing than regulatory, smaller cities should make their fair share contribution to good transportation as well as fair housing.

”We have to have that regional conversation,” he concluded.

Posted on May 25, 2015 by publisher5 in INDUSTRY news, Residential

PD Editorial: Ready for regional government?

PD Editorial: Ready for regional government?

TOM MEYER / meyertoons.com



Housing, its availability and affordability, is at or the near the top of the public agenda throughout the nine-county Bay Area.

So, too, are roads and transit.

Despite the region’s robust economic growth since the Great Recession, or perhaps because of that growth, the increasingly high cost and tight supply of housing is making it difficult for many families to make ends meet or even to live near their places of employment. And frustration with commute-hour congestion is often accompanied by the fury that is producing threats of a property tax strike in rural Sonoma County unless deteriorating roads are repaired.

Is surrendering local control the solution?

That might be the easiest answer, but we aren’t convinced it’s the best one, or even that it’s equitable, much less politically viable.

Indeed, regional government has been considered and rejected before. However, it may get a new look after being put forward again in “A Roadmap for Economic Resilience,” a report prepared by the Bay Area Council, an influential organization representing some of the region’s most prestigious employers, a list including Apple, Intel, Kaiser and Oracle.

“For all its strengths, the Bay Area lacks any cohesive and comprehensive regional economic strategy for sustaining economic growth, weathering business cycles and supporting shared prosperity across the region,” the report says. “Given the regional nature of the economy, its labor pool, housing sheds, job centers and commute flows, viable solutions must reflect a regional perspective.”

That, the Bay Area Council report said, could include punishing cities that fail to meet housing targets set by regional planners. The report also suggests a cap on development impact fees (which, in theory, are supposed to offset costs of schools, parks and other infrastructure to serve new development), waiving environmental reviews for housing projects and taking away local discretion over plans that are consistent with local zoning and building codes.

To upgrade the transportation network, the report recommends allowing a regional agency to impose bridge tolls, sales taxes, fuel taxes and/or a vehicle registration fee.

The Bay Area already has two large regional government agencies — the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments — though neither has the kind of teeth that the report envisions.

And while major regional efforts, such as Plan Bay Area, usually respect local priorities, larger cities and counties tend to have greater influence on the governing boards. That’s a reason for concern in North Bay counties should there be a serious effort to give these agencies greater authority.

In its report, the Bay Area Council points at regional governing schemes in Portland, Ore., where commissioners are elected, and the Twin Cities, where they are appointed by Minnesota’s governor. However, it isn’t clear that residents of Sonoma and other smaller counties would have any more influence under either of these approaches.

It is undeniably true that housing and transportation are regional concerns and that solutions have proven elusive, but it won’t be easy to persuade people that their interests would be better served by a board of super-supervisors further removed from its constituents
.

One Bay Area: A Template for Regional Governance Advocated by" Build One America"

Stanley Kurtz book, Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities exposes the efforts of the administrative state, in conjunction with social equity interests, to regionalize decision making and funding for what in the past have been local government decisions. It includes requiring suburbs to take their "fair share" of all income levels. No where is this more obvious than in the San Francisco Bay Area with the One Bay Area Plan/Plan Bay Area. Regional unelected bureaucrats tell every city in the Bay Area how many housing units they MUST be prepared to accomodate. For many of the small village type towns, this will force their urbanization and destroy their uniqueness. Kurtz identifies an organization called Building One America. Here is a video, in their own words, of their plans.This is a shortened version of a video that was posted on the Building One America website (www.buildingoneamerica.org). The complete video can be viewed here http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=...

Terms used by Build One America in the video include:

Zoning out the poor
Affordable housing
Affordable transportation
Livable communities 
Regional Opportunity Agenda 
Combating poverty=controlling urban sprawl
Vestiges of segregation=suburbs
Segregation=sprawl=inequality
Suburbs must do their "fair share"
Metropolitan wide accept responsibility

All these terms and ideas are spread liberally throughout the One Bay Area Plan. MTC-ABAG are the epitomy of regionalization, taking control out of the hands of local city councils and mayors. The Obama Administration is firmly behind this effort through the support of Valarie Jarrett and Ronald Sims. California is one of the initial test cases. 

Invoke Article 50 now. The people of Britain want out ASAP

Interesting parallels to the Bay Area Plan and the new Regional Government being formed from ABAG /MTC.  The people left because local democracy was not being honored.

WikiLeaks' Assange - TPP Not Only Trade, 83% Is Fascists Controlling Our Daily Lives

Although this is not strictly about High Density Development, it has much to do with regionalism and the loss of local control. At the heart of the TPP is multinational corporate interests who seem to have been elevated to supra state citizens who are beholden to no locality or jurisdiction. Scary stuff. Cant wait for the full documents to come out. There is no place in a democratic society for secret agreements that even our representatives are restricted access to.

BREXIT THE MOVIE - A lesson in the failures of Central Government like Plan Bay Area.

BREXIT THE MOVIE is a feature-length documentary film to inspire as many people as possible to vote to LEAVE the EU in the June 23rd referendum.

While Brexit is off topic, I think it provides a good warning about perils of " regional government" controlled by unaccountable bureaucrats like the coming San Francisco Regional Goverment of ABAG/MTC.

Steve Hemminger, MTC Commissioner defends Regional Government

Another very important video. He gets paid over 360k and travels first class worldwide on the taxpayer dime. His business failures are epic. The Bay Bridge Fiasco and massive cost overruns at the new MTC headquarters should have had him fired many times over.

"The merger will make cities weak and counties strong"

Novato City Council person,  Pam Drew addresses the Association of Bay Area Governments General Assembly on May 19, 2016.

"The merger will make cities weak and counties strong"

A regional-planning coup

Bay Area could become the only region where unaccountable transit agency controls local planning policy

BY ZELDA BRONSTEIN -

 

May 16th

It’s more than a technical distinction: MTC, which would wind up with immensely expanded powers, has shown little or no interest in equity or the protection of economically vulnerable communities. It’s an unaccountable juggernaut that is poised to disrupt local planning policies with very little local input.

Here’s how this little-noticed but critical situation has come down:

See the story in the 48 Hills Blog HERE