CEQA - Why?

I've received a number of inquiries as to why we are revisiting the McKinley Avenue expressway. We set a preliminarly boundary years ago and citizens don't understand why we are holding meetings again. In addition, there are questions as to why we are required to analyze this and analyze our update to our plan for future street widenings and street extensions.

Staff put together the following summary in an attempt to answer some of these questions:

ENVIRONMENTAL ANALYSIS
FOR THE
CITY OF MANTECA'S
GENERAL PLAN CIRCULATION ELEMENT UPDATE


The City of Manteca is in the process of updating its Public Facilities Implementation Plan (PFIP). The Transportation Section of this plan includes a road network to service all known proposed development projects. Some of these projects are outside of the General Plan Circulation Element. This disparity of study areas between the General Plan and the PFIP establishes the need to update the General Plan Circulation Element. Additionally, the levels of service (LOS) used for the transportation network are also proposed to be amended at this time.

An update of the PFIP and/or the General Plan Circulation Element requires that the environmental studies that support them also be updated. In fact, the California State Guidelines for the implementation of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) specifically list general plan amendments among the examples of “projects” within the meaning of CEQA (14 CCR §15378). All “projects” must comply with CEQA (14 CCR §15002 (i)). If the updates result in significant environmental impacts, then CEQA requires that the City prepare an Environmental Impact Report that examines the potential impacts, recommends mitigation measures to reduce those impacts, and evaluates alternatives that might reduce those impacts while still accomplishing the primary goals of the update (14 CCR §§15002(k), 15126.4 and15126.6)..

The alignment of McKinley Avenue, between State Route 120 and State Route 99 is a good example of the work necessary to meet the environmental process requirement to look at alternatives. Very little input was sought or received when the alignment was shown in the 2003 General Plan Update. Essentially, there was a basic understanding of the need for an eventual roadway; however, not enough specifics were known about how the area would develop. Fast forward to 2009, and far more information is available about how and where the land is developing, hence the need to proceed with a greater level of analysis and detail as to the specific alignment and configuration of McKinley Avenue.

As it relates to the study of McKinley Avenue, public notices were posted and printed in the local paper (Manteca Bulletin) for the 2003 General Plan Update. Though it met the legal notification requirement, very few affected landowners were even aware of this process taking place and, therefore, did not participate in it. In contrast, direct mailings have been used to notify landowners of the public workshops for the McKinley Avenue Specific Street Plan. The result has been well-attended meetings by affected landowners and other interested parties, where there has been much discussion and exchange of ideas on the merits or demerits of the various alignments depicted. Though both methods of notifying the public meet the legal requirements for their purpose, the Specific Street Plan notification process has proven to produce more citizen-participation in the governmental decision-making process that affects them. By extension, a more solid environmental analysis is made possible because it has taken the extra steps necessary to truly analyze alternatives.

Response to Bulletin regarding redundant studies

Tuesday's Bulletin had an article entitled: "Redundant farm conversion studies adding to the cost of housing projects." (Click here for link)

The premise of the article is that the City requires developers to fund unnecessary farmland conversion studies when the impacts have already been identified and addressed with a litigated settlement that resulted in developers paying an agricultural mitigation fee. The article also references the San Joaquin County Multi-Species Habitat Conservation and Open Space Plan (SJMSCP) fee. The SJMSCP fee is not an agricultural mitigation fee; it is for the preservation of wildlife habitat, which in some cases includes land areas that are farmed.

While it is true that the fees exist and are used as partial mitigation for the loss of agricultural land and preservation of habitat, the article fails to mention that the fees are merely payment for impacts and have nothing to do with the State's requirement to review and analyze the project specific impacts.

The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), requires the City to identify and analyze all environmental impacts of a development project. Only a small portion of the environmental impact report (EIR) is dedicated to analysis of the loss of agricultural land and wildlife habitat. Relying on payment of an impact fee without identifying the unique impacts of the development would be not satisfy the requirements of CEQA.

Frankly, the article overstates the time and cost of the agricultural study. These studies are only small portion of the overall EIR.

The cost of preparing an environmental document that meets the State's requirements, identifies the impacts, and allows mitigation of these impacts (not completely, but to the greatest extent feasible (in this case payment of a fee)), is far less than the true cost of fully mitigating the impacts. The fact that these studies can identify payment of an agricultural mitigation fee of $2,213.17 per acre is far less than the cost of buying the development rights of an equal amount of agricultural land. The same goes for development rights of wildlife habitat.

Overall, the EIR gives the City and the Developer the security that the development has met the State's requirements and protects the City and Developer from lawsuits brought by farmland and wildlife habitat activists. The fee itself does nothing to protect the developer--the CEQA analysis is of paramount importance.

As noted above, the mitigation fee is often not enough to offset the impacts identified in the EIR. With an EIR, the City can approve projects that do not fully mitigate impacts by adopting "statements of overriding considerations". In other words, approving projects that the City finds to be of greater value to the community than fully mitigating the impacts identified in the EIR. EIR's are often seen as a negative, but in reality, they are the tool that allow us to build projects whose negative impacts are offset by a positive benefit to the community. Most development in the Central Valley would be eliminated if not for an EIR's ability override the negative consequences of a project.

The bottom line is that the agricultural and habitat studies are a small portion of an overall environmental impact report (EIR) that the City is required by State law to prepare for a project. The requirement to analyze a project and its impact are not optional, and the impact fees are the mitigation not the study.

NOTES:

The City participates in two separate programs in which fees are required. The first program is an agricultural land mitigation program and the second is a habitat and open space mitigation program.

The Ag mitigation fee is currently set at $2,213.17. This fee is the direct result of litigation by environmental groups. Per the agreement Manteca passes this fee to the Central Valley Farmland Trust, http://www.valleyfarmland.org/ .

The Habitat fee (San Joaquin County Multi-Species Habitat Conservation and Open Space Plan) was not the result of litigation, but rather a grass root program designed to protect the 90 or so state and federally protected species and their habitat within San Joaquin County.

- All projects in Manteca are subject to this plan, not only projects greater than 350 acres. All participating Cities in the County were mapped in 2001 and all properties were categorized either urban, ag, multi-use/open space, grassland, or vernal pool. The urban category has no fee.

- This program and the fees associated with it are voluntary. If a developer chooses to "opt-out" of the plan, they would need to deal with the State fish and game and federal agencies regarding protection of the 90+ species and habitat in this county. The program is designed to streamline the biological requirements for projects that choose to participate.

Public Meeting

McKinley Avenue Specific Street Plan: The second workshop for the McKinley Avenue Specific Street Plan will be held December 9 at 6:00 p.m. in the McFall Room of the Manteca Library. The discussion will include alignment refinements based on community input from the first workshop, and flood protection. The City encourages all interested residents to participate in the identification of the future route for the next major roadway in south Manteca.

The City's Master Plan has designated McKinley as a major thoroughfare to connect all of the neighborhoods south of Highway 120 with both Highway 99 and State Route 120. It will play a critical role in keeping much of our local traffic off of our local highways.

The High Cost of Infrastructure

I read the following recently in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. While I realize we can't be Europe--and probably don't want to be Europe, it is sometimes nice to be reminded that we pay a high price for our auto-centric lifestyle. Here's the post:

A void paved over with concrete

My wife and I own an apartment in the European city where her parents came from. Almería's population is over 200,000, and it's been around for hundreds of years.

As a pedestrian, one is in constant negotiation with cars and scooters because the streets are jagged in shape, cramped, sometimes lacking in sidewalks - and teeming with life. Shop storefronts display dresses and shoes that would star at the Oscars. The window of a hardware store accommodates three centuries of door latches, from the rustic to the ultra-high tech. Every step has my head craning in one direction or another, even if it is to wave a car right through a stop sign as I slip around behind - faster and friendlier for both of us.

Arriving home from Spain, we drove through Milwaukee from Mitchell International Airport, and the eerie calm of sealing ourselves behind car windows settled over us; the "carness" of our life here spread out like a gray pall all around us.

Instead of people, conversation, shopping, eating and attending to business on the hoof, we were surrounded by access roads, parking lots, highways and bridges until we eventually passed under the shadow of the hulking three-story garage whose gloomy, and empty, cavern overshadows our magnificent art museum.

We Americans are all infrastructure - and no people.

Friends here are surprised that we don't own a car in Almería. There's no need, even though life there is pretty regular and not some outlandish eco-haven like Carmel, Calif., with its boutique clothing shops and celebrity clubs.

Everything we bought for our apartment in Almería we bought on foot. Plumbers, furniture stores, computer equipment and appliances are only a few minutes away. When we bought our washing machine, the owner's brother was waiting for us at our door, our washer on a handcart, even though we lingered for only moments on the walk home.

What's the cost for living our American way? It's not just the thousands of dollars for the second car, insurance and gas. We also have to support a lake of concrete around us - and gas, electric and sewer lines to stretch out past the near-vacant belts beyond the older suburbs. Property taxes in Almería on our condo are one-twelfth our taxes in Milwaukee, even though the value of the two homes is roughly the same.

One-twelfth. Oh, and they throw in free health insurance.

That's a lot of concrete, wire and pipes to keep up - and patrol. Milwaukee's close suburbs have residential streets that have room for two lanes of traffic going each way, plus both parking and turning lanes. Six lanes of concrete.

I was driving on a street like that recently - it's residential, so I was the only car in sight, although several white lines directed me around like I had a ring in my nose on the rare chance that a second car may venture into sight. Not so long ago, people's eyes grew large when a news announcer glowed about "six-lane super-highways" in Los Angeles. Now we have them to serve blocks where only a few houses stand.

Where are the people? Nobody is coming; nobody is going.

If we gained something for our money, I'd happily pay it. But I look south out the window of my downtown office and see streets and highways, of course. Plus parking garages, ramps, driveways, surface lots and street parking - not to mention the gas stations, auto-part stores and car washes.

Our cities (and Milwaukee still remains one of the most attractive) are dead zones with small pods of life barricaded between the elements that support the passage, storage and care of cars. In our most densely trafficked sidewalks, it is a hundred feet between businesses whose windows have a chance of being interesting to look in at while walking past. Throw in a bank or two and one has to take a taxi to get between shops where people congregate over a cup of coffee or buy a shirt.

No wonder we all drive.

Almería is modern enough to need cars. For the most part, cars brought into the city are routed to underground parking. As expensive as that might sound, what otherwise would be dead space at street level goes instead to businesses with apartments above, as well as an interesting collection of squares, parks and kiosks that are a part of every day's stroll.

Read this again: one-twelfth our property taxes.

Still, it's not about the money. It's about life. We stood on the street one night in one of America's few cities that are dense and walkable: New York City. A local television station was hosting a karaoke event. Tough-looking teenagers in floppy pants were singing along with suited Japanese businessmen, middle-aged housewives in sensible shoes, Orthodox Jews in yarmulkes, students in backpacks and a couple of tourists from Milwaukee. An older businessman waited at a crosswalk with me the next day, giving directions to a pair of young guys who would raise hair at the back of my neck if I ran into them on a lonely stretch. They thanked the older man and headed off. The businessman explained, "When you're on the street, everyone knows you have to deal with people. We're all in this together."

A more ominous view about our expansively concreted lives came from a Bulgarian programmer who has just moved here. Commenting about our infrastructure, America's glory and disaster, he said, "People who are separate are easier to control."

Malls are about the only public place in America where people aren't separate. Look around a mall, though - teenagers hang with their high-school friends, parents keep toddlers in the firm grip of their hands, bums sag alone on a bench, while walkers stride by in the world of their headphones. We're as sealed off from each other as first-class is from economy on a long and monotonous flight.

In non-American cities, you see grandparents sitting with teenagers or elegantly dressed women mixing it up in a café with workmen taking a lunchtime coffee or beer. I've often seen fathers reading to their young children. Right out in public - an act that would rank as deprivation here, when the tykes could be mesmerized instead by a video in the back seat of their Escalade or Tundra.

Almería is seven hours ahead of Milwaukee, and my wife happened to call me at what was 3 in the morning her time. She'd just gotten in from dinner and a concert (whole families are out at midnight; nothing about their crazy schedule surprises me anymore). She had walked home alone, though of course she was not actually alone on the street. I was just leaving for a friend's who lived some blocks away, past several alleys, garages and shuttered stores flanked by asphalt pads.

I drove.

Richard L. Birch of Milwaukee is a business writer.

Fixing the Planning Process

Over the past 40 years, the process to build things in California has become (without debate) the worst process in the entire country. This is largely due to the fact that process and not outcomes seem to be the major result of our entitlement process.

While well meaning, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) has become a paper tiger. It puts projects through incredible hoops to get approved, but rarely is there follow up to ensure that the mitigations put in place are properly monitored. CEQA typically adds a year to the development process--and that is if no one litigates the process once it is completed--and the CEQA process provides plenty of opportunities to generate litigation over a project.

While many would argue that CEQA ensures that an open and public process is in place to disclose all potential impacts, it primarily becomes a venue for the proponent and the adjacent property owners to squabble endlessly.

In Australia, they've found a better way to reduce the squabbling. Andres Duany spoke about this recently at a conference in Sacramento discussing the development process. Urbanist Paul Shigley was at the presentation and reported about this recently in his blog:

Much of Duany's basic pitch is 20 years old: Replace Euclidian zoning with form-based codes. Build communities that are connected, compact, complete, complex and convivial. Plan for people, not cars. Avoid the monoculture of massive housing subdivisions at all cost. Some of these ideas have been around so long they have become conventional wisdom, if not conventional practice. What struck me Thursday, though, was a newer subject for Duany, and that’s process. He said the public review process is "old and sick," and must change.

“The public process is completely out of control. The public is completely berserk,” he opined.

Only a few weeks ago, I had a e-mail exchange with one of California’s leading land use lawyers in which both of us lamented Californians’ fixation with process. We don’t seem to give a damn about the final outcome as long as the process complies with all the rules. Of course, a key component of the process is public input. However, the vast majority of that input comes from vested interests – essentially, the developer and the people who live next to the proposed development site. Shouts of protest and sloganeering bombard the decision makers. No one speaks for the community as a whole.

How could things work better yet still be democratic? Duany described a process employed in Perth, Australia. When a development project is proposed, the city rounds up about 150 citizens, much like a jury pool. The city then asks this group for volunteers to participate in a review process. Maybe 50 people agree to volunteer and 30 stick out the whole process, which involves some education about land use planning and the project, a few charettes and a handful of public meetings. When it comes time for a decision on the project, a representative of the opponents gets to speak, as does a representative of the developer. But the “jury” called by the city testifies as to what it sees as best for the community as a whole. This is how Perth got a large community center located on the beach – ruining the view of wealthy coastal homeowners who naturally opposed such a project.

Would such a system be acceptable in California, the state where the term NIMBY was invented? It’s certainly worth a try. And here’s why: Most of what we need to do for the next generation – and maybe for much longer – will amount to retrofitting suburbia. That means tearing down and building lots of new stuff in people’s backyards, which means that virtually every project comes with a built in group of opponents. They can shout loud enough to block the new housing, additional job sites, transit stations, town squares, community centers and even the big box stores that could both benefit the community and help California meet its greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals. I’m not suggesting that every infill and redevelopment project is a good one. But could Perth’s process possibly result in a worse project than we would get now?

Click here for the entire post.

It is always refreshing to hear new ideas, particularly in planning, which has been trapped in quicksand in this state for over three decades.

Regional Planning for California

I've blogged in the past about the lack of any coordinated strategy for housing growth in California. Regional Housing Needs Assessments (RHNA) and Job-Housing Balance are great theories, but the state is a paper tiger when it comes to ensuring that the state grows in a humane and cost effective manner.

San Joaquin County is the poster child for the lack of any requirement for balance of housing and jobs. Most of our population growth is due to Alameda County's refusal to provide housing to match their job creation.

Well, the state is now taking "baby steps" towards addressing this issue. As noted in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle (click here for full story):

With little fanfare and a modest budget, work has begun that could lead to something California has never had - an explicit government vision for how and where the state should grow.

The official action is modest, a $2.5 million contract to devise a set of detailed growth scenarios for California, from classic suburban sprawl to compact development focused on older cities. The goal is to produce a single "preferred scenario" - one that conceivably could be used to prod local governments to accept or reject new construction.

The effort, called Vision California, will be overseen by the Strategic Growth Council, a Cabinet-level committee that awarded it a $1.5 million grant last month, and the California High Speed Rail Authority, which already has set aside $1 million for the work.

"We need better (modeling) tools," said Mehdi Morshed, the authority's executive director.

"Different patterns of growth can have a huge impact on how the state uses its resources."
The work will be done by Calthorpe Associates, a Berkeley firm that has developed similar plans for southern Louisiana and the Chicago region.

Vision California will begin by pulling together existing regional plans, which rarely have teeth, from such bodies as the Association of Bay Area Governments.

Calthorpe will then explore various what-ifs and compare them using comprehensive and coherent data.

For instance: If townhouses and bungalows are built instead of large single-family homes, how much agricultural land will be saved? If new housing is placed near existing jobs and shopping, rather than in distant subdivisions, what will be the effect on a household's transportation expenses?

"By showing people the results of different futures, you create a different political climate," Peter Calthorpe said. A founder of the influential Congress for the New Urbanism, Calthorpe was working for the Office of Planning and Research in 1978 when then-Gov. Jerry Brown released "Urban Strategies for California," the last serious statewide planning push.

In any case, it sounds like a fun exercise. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the works to actually make the state enforce the laws that are already on the books to ensure that regional growth is logical and affordable.

However, it is a good start--and you never know--it might get some traction.

Traffic Level of Service (LOS)

LOS is the three letter word that has created untold costs for just about every real estate project in the state. Mitigating perceived traffic congestion (often for just 15-30 minutes per day) has forced many projects to build huge intersections, widen huge swaths of roads, and forced our cities to be even more car-centric -- which was not an easy task. During the real estate boom, developers had enough play in their budgets to pay for these often excessive road improvements--but those days are gone -- possibly forever.

At this week's California Planning Conference, they presented some examples of cities that have begun to rebel against the never ending race to pave over every inch of our communities. Here in Manteca, I've been pushing back against LOS as well. We are currently updating our traffic standards to reflect economic realities (i.e. we can't afford to pave everything over) and my desire to see neighborhoods where the pedestrian can co-exist with the pavement. At the county level, the Lodi City Manager and I have convinced COG to convene a series of meetings to discuss the future role of LOS in all of our communities. Given the limited resources we have countywide for roads in the future, we need to make sure that every community in the county is taking a cost-effective approach towards managing future traffic issues.

While I wasn't able to attend this conference, here's an excellent blog post from Urban Planning author (and Ventura City Councilman) Bill Fulton about the presentation at this week's conference:

Cal APA Conference: Life After LOS

It's always been a mystery to me why traffic modeling -- and traffic mitigation -- is such a big part of analysis done under the California Environmental Quality Act. After all, traffic in and of itself is not an environmental impact, any more than building a building is an environmental impact. It may cause certain environmental impacts -- air pollution, for example, depending on the fuels used -- but there's nothing inherently damaging environmentally about traffic Nevertheless, CEQA traffic analysis has always focused on identifying -- and alleviating -- traffic congestion.

After careful environmental review, cities and counties have concluded -- many thousands of times -- that the solution to the environmental problem created by traffic is build wider roads in order to accommodate more traffic.

Those days may be waning, however. As panelists at the California APA conference in Squaw Valley pointed out today, new policies in many jurisidictions are bringing the "Level of Service" approach to both CEQA analysis and General Plans to an end. Even within the confines of CEQA, these jurisdictions are finding ways to place other priorities ahead of -- or at least alongside of -- alleviation of traffic congestion. "In the future, we're going to have fewer public resources for transportation," said Ron Milan of Fehr & Peers, "And we're going to have more objectives for our transportation system."

In particular, the panelists said, alleviating traffic congestion doesn't always jibe with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions -- which is suddenly a major goal of state policy and an important consideration in CEQA. And as Paul Shigley reported in these pages not long ago, proposed changes to the CEQA Guidelines may discourage the use of the LOS approach.
The APA panel presented cutting-edge techniques from both San Jose and San Francisco. Though the approaches are different, they show how local governments can end-run the LOS approach.

In San Francisco, the city came to the conclusion that using LOS was in conflict with its "Transit First" strategy and simply didn't measure the most important environmental impacts of driving -- which, in San Francisco's case, is particulates. "WE have to reallocate our limited right of way to other things," said Rachel Hiatt of the San Francisco County Transportation Agency. "We will degrade auto LOS in the short term as we implement our 'Transit First' policy."

In San Jose, the city took a different approach. Planners identified three job centers where transit is likely to be the primary transportation investment in the future, including Downtown, North San Jose, and Edenvale. Downtown was exempted from the LOS standard. In North San Jose and Edenvale, a master environmental impact report was completed that contained an override option for not hitting the LOS standard at 23 "protected intersections".

The rest of the city still uses an LOS standard, partly in deference to suburban-style neighborhoods and surrounding communities. "The City Council amended the General Plan to be more flexible in places where we wanted to do smart growth," said planner Hans Larsen.
Milam from Fehr & Peers also showed how an alternative approach can be used on specific project -- thought probably not in all locations.

As an example, he pointed to a intersection analysis his firm did which concluded, initially, that the intersection in question had to be greatly widened. Upon further examination, however, the firm and the city concluded that the problem was not cars but other -- that the slow-downs were created by the need to accommodate the large amount of pedestrian and bicycle traffic at the intersection. So a ped/bike overpass preserved the intersection in its current configuration.

Not everybody can be Davis or San Francisco or maybe even San Jose. But everybody can think about what they're really trying to achieve with their traffic standards -- and ditch the LOS if it's appropriate.