Streetsblog LA has excellent coverage of the continuing saga of AB 779, to roll back badly needed CEQA reform on transportation analyses for infill projects. I detailed the bill and the sad spectacle of a nominally pro-infill group pushing it last week. From Streetsblog:
The bill’s sponsors claim that having to analyze VMT would be burdensome and duplicative, since in some cases they would still be required to produce an LOS analysis to meet local planning requirements.
However, that claim looks pretty specious, for several reasons.
For one, OPR’s guidelines will excuse most true infill projects from any transportation analysis under CEQA, so there would be no need for “duplicative analyses.” This is because projects within a half mile of a major transit stop, as defined in the bill, would be exempt. It’s useful to remember than an earlier draft of A.B. 779 would have removed the word “major” in this definition, thus would have exempted pretty much any kind of development near any bus stop anywhere in the state, no matter how sparse the transit service there.
The article quotes yours truly and cites the opposition of the Council of Infill Builders, creating an unusual infill vs. infill battle. For her part, the bill’s author defends it by saying, “this isn’t about getting rid of VMT. VMT is a fine measure. This bill would press ‘pause’ on the process.”
But pressing pause only benefits the status quo. And as any observer of California development can tell you, the status quo does not benefit infill like it benefits sprawl.
With a name like the “California Infill Builders Federation,” you’d think this organization would be pro-infill. But not so much with the group’s signature legislative effort this year. As Streetsblog LA covers, CIBF is pushing AB 779 to roll back or delay changes from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR) to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) — changes that serve only to benefit infill projects:
The new guidelines are being formulated as required by S.B. 743, which calls for OPR to come up with a new way to measure the impact of traffic from development projects. Until recently, traffic impact was measured by Level of Service, or LOS, which only evaluates projects on how they affect the flow of traffic. OPR has said it is considering replacing LOS with Vehicle Miles Traveled, or VMT, which would give a measure of how much travel a project produces, rather than focusing on whether it slows down nearby traffic.
The bill’s sponsors say that developers still have to do LOS analyses outside of CEQA because of local requirements, and that having to do a VMT analysis as well would be too much work.
This is nonsense. VMT is an off-the-shelf metric suitable to all kinds of land uses, and is used by local governments all the time. But more importantly, the proposed guidelines essentially exempt almost all infill projects from any transportation analysis at all under CEQA. And when one is required (which will only be for sprawl projects and rarely for infill), the guidelines provide local governments with significant discretion on a VMT analysis.
Furthermore, a local traffic study doesn’t carry the same litigation risks that the traffic study in CEQA carries. And this state transition to VMT will only make it easier for local governments to follow suit and kill LOS once and for all.
So why is CIBF opposing? As Streetsblog reports:
But it turns out the executive committee of the Infill Builders Federation is not what it seems. Most of its members are developers who work on very large projects not usually thought of as “infill.” Like the Warriors Arena in San Francisco. And business parks. And regional malls. All big, lousy sprawl projects pretty much guaranteed to create more traffic and more greenhouse gases.
AB 779 is a sad, disingenuous effort that should be called out for what it is: bad policy based on false premises.
Back in 2011, the San Diego Association of Governments issued a really bad regional transportation plan. These plans must prioritize transportation investments across the metropolitan region for the coming decades and are the basis for receiving state and federal infrastructure dollars. And while most regional transportation plans are usually pretty bad (i.e. favoring highway expansion over core maintenance and transit/biking/walking infrastructure), SANDAG’s happened to be the first in the state to have to comply with SB 375, a law linking transportation investments with land use policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So it held even more significance.
Environmental groups, along with the California Attorney General’s Office, sued SANDAG under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), alleging that SANDAG inadequately considered the plan’s effects on greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. They argued that the agency should have taken those impacts into account given a 2005 executive order to reduce emissions by that year.
They had a strong case. To comply with SB 375, SANDAG essentially fudged the short-term numbers, relying on highway expansion and more telecommuting to reduce greenhouse gases through 2035. But by 2050, the plan actually showed increasing greenhouse gas emissions, out to a time when we need to be reducing emissions significantly. As a result, SANDAG lost in the trial court.
And today they lost the appeal. Judge McConnell of the Fourth Appellate District wrote the decision affirming [PDF] the trial court decision, sending the case back to the trial court for SANDAG to beef up its analysis of the 2050 goals and the range of options the agency has available to comply:
As evidence in the record indicates the transportation plan would actually be inconsistent with state climate policy over the long term, the omission deprived the public and decision makers of relevant information about the transportation plan’s environmental consequences. The omission was prejudicial because it precluded informed decisionmaking and public participation.
Judge Benke wrote a fiery dissent, calling the court’s decision “breathtaking” in its judicial overstepping into local planning matters. But the reality is that SANDAG needs to own up to the backsliding in emissions by 2050 and provide the public with a reasonable range of options to avoid this outcome. It fundamentally failed to do so in the first round. Even if some of those options might seem politically difficult (like asking rural or exurban areas to take a backseat on highway expansion in favor of investing in the populated core areas), SANDAG should lay it out there for people to understand.
Regardless, SANDAG’s next transportation plan (already well underway) should be a vast improvement. In fairness to the agency, they did not have much time to incorporate SB 375 goals into the original plan, which was already being written at the time SB 375 passed. But the agency has now had four years to do so for the next plan. So SANDAG has no excuse to avoid improving the CEQA document on the old plan and coming up with a decent new plan.
Perhaps more importantly, the case has served an important political role in letting other regions know that they need to do a solid job complying with SB 375. Nothing wakes an agency up like a lawsuit, and advocates have been able to leverage the threat of a lawsuit to encourage meaningful changes in transportation plans across the state since the SANDAG plan. So in that sense, the case was already a victory for advocates even before today’s ruling.
