From Vision to Reality: Bay Area Regional Planning (Apr/May 2005 Monitor)

Tinkering with agency structure is less important than defining what the Bay Area "wants to be when it grows up", according to a group of regional planning experts at the annual conference of the League of Women Voters of the Bay Area. The panel agreed that regional plans have critical gaps, and that unless a more focused strategic plan is defined soon, changing the relative roles of state, regional and local decisionmakers may be a side issue for the region's future.

Making Regional Planning Work: Keynote speaker Ted Droettboom, Regional Planning Program Director for the three-agency Joint Policy Committee (JPC), observed that the impacts of regional planning are long-term. Since the region grows at roughly 1% per year, in any given year 99% of the region is already in place. However, over 3 decades, it is possible to affect a significant fraction of the future region. According to Droettboom, that can be done "only if we know what we want to do, have the will, are persistent, and have the right tools".

The Joint Planning Committee (JPC) is composed of 21 representatives, 7 each from the Association of Bay Area Governments, Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and Bay Area Air Quality Management District. A representative of the California Secretary of Business, Transportation and Housing is a non-voting member. The JPC Regional Planning Program Director reports to the heads of the three agencies.

One tool is the Regional Livability Footprint/Smart Growth Vision, developed by five regional agencies in 2003. However, Droettboom's analysis of the regional planning process indicates that the there are gaps where more work needs to be done. Although the region is required to prepare air quality plans, other environmental issues such as open space have no regional framework. Also, while communities share the region's labor force and markets, there is no Bay Area economic plan, one reason why goods movement has not been included in regional transportation planning until this year and was overlooked during the Vision process.

Since the JPC is coordinating implementation of the Smart Growth Vision, Droettboom has identified some mechanisms which are available to accomplish this: strategic public investment, partnership with other levels of government, collaboration with private and voluntary efforts, incentives such as state funding assistance, and communication and sharing of ideas.

Alternative Models of Regional Planning: Droettboom's observations are based on an intensive study of Bay Area regional planning since he arrived in the region eight months ago. However, a number of his points were echoed by two speakers with decades of Bay Area planning behind them—Revan Tranter, former Executive Director of ABAG, and Will Travis, Executive Director of BCDC.

Tranter emphasized that there is no time to waste in determining how the region will grow, because growth is coming. "Think back forty-five years, to 1960 when Kennedy was elected—we are where we are now because of planning done then," he said. "We need to look forward for the next forty-five years and care about the future we will have then." That future will see growth from 11 million to 19 million residents in an extended Bay Area that reaches Monterey, San Joaquin and Sacramento. "We will be more like LA than we want, no matter what," said Tranter. He predicted more communities like the new town of Mountain House on the Alameda/San Joaquin County border, and relatively sudden changes in demographics as ethnic and cultural communities shift within the metropolitan region.

Tranter feels that although local efforts are vital to the success of planning in the region, they are not enough. He stressed the need for coordinated action, both by individuals and agencies. "Looking at the right policy for an individual city and multiplying that by over 100 cities in the region, it would be a miracle if all those added up to the right result," he said.

Droettboom suggested three main keys to making progress: focus, collaboration and commitment. Travis restated these as: defining what needs to be accomplished, determining how to organize government to do what is needed, and maintaining political will. BCDC illustrates these strategies—Save San Francisco Bay set a clear goal of stopping massive Bay fill, and legislatively set up a structure to govern the process that cannot be easily changed. The economic and environmental advantages of BCDC's policies, demonstrated over the years, enjoy strong public support.

Agreement that the goal needs to be defined first did not keep Tranter and Travis from commenting on the potential changes in agency structure which might be considered later. Travis observed that we now have several types of regional agencies in the Bay Area. He feels that the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) is primarily a surface transportation funding agency and does not work well on other transportation issues such as seaports and airports. He quoted a description of ABAG as "a guild of local planners", while at the other extreme, the Air District and the regional water board are subsets of state agencies. BCDC has "cross-subject authority, but only within a doughnut 100 feet around the Bay." Although missions differ, BCDC is structurally similar enough to MTC so that with a few adjustments, the same people could sit on both boards and the agencies could be combined, but, Travis cautioned, "there should be some reason to do this that can't be accomplished with what we already have."

Tranter reminisced about some proposals from the past—"electing a regional `mayor' scared the heck out of people when Speaker Leo McCarthy suggested it in 1976," he said—but he doesn't favor directly elected regional government because of the cost of campaigns. He urged the JPC to look at other regions, which usually have a single agency doing transportation and land use, and encouraged them to "think deeply about it, but not for very long!" Whatever changes are made should be targeted at a definite date in the future, which will mean that some people have left office before they take effect but everyone knows when to expect change.

Nick Bollman, CEO and President of the California Center for Regional Leadership, spoke about regional planning beyond the Bay Area. He agrees with the conclusion reached in the early 1990s by Joint Venture Silicon Valley that "jurisdiction is not the issue, it's the problem that is the issue". Looking at other parts of the state, Bollman has found about 20 different types of regional partnerships, ranging from San Diego Dialogue, a group focusing on immigration, to the 12-county Sierra Network.

The California Center for Regional Leadership was formed in 2000 and is currently working to implement the conclusions of the Hertzberg study on regionalism, which was completed in 2002 and called for region-based state government, not top down. There are now an increasing number of regions that are doing growth visions, particularly Sacramento, San Diego, Riverside and SCAG. Tranter commented that by failing to provide leadership on how we should grow, state government is "the big elephant which hasn't come into the room and sat down", but Bollman feels that with the passage in 2004 of Proposition 1A to protect local government revenues, other fiscal reforms included in the Hertzberg report can begin to be implemented and the state will have a growing role in regional planning.

Thinking Regionally, Acting Locally—A Fundamental Challenge: According to a recent study by the Public Policy Institute, while 82% of respondents want regional planning for housing, jobs, air quality and transportation, a majority also wants development decisions to be made at the local level, creating a conflict for decision makers. Four local officials formed a second panel at the conference to speak to the problems of implementing regional policy in cities and counties. Although the four represent very different parts of the Bay Area—West Contra Costa County, urban Alameda County, the City of San Mateo and the City of San Jose—there was general agreement on several points.

The San Jose councilmember observed that the 'sacred cows' of autonomy and local control don't allow a true picture of what communities want. General Plans are not comprehensive enough, and most communities lack economic plans that tell how many jobs they want and where the jobs should go. "It is foolish to think we can do the work locally, either in San Jose or the Napa Valley", he said. Cities need to start looking at four areas—environment, economy, transportation and housing—and need to include the private sector in the discussion of economic development and housing.

Droettboom reported that JPC members want to work on planning gaps and needs now, and wait to consider recommendations from the 3-agency staff about any structural changes that seem necessary.

He noted that while residents may differ on regional planning and local control, they agree on one thing_they expect government to "get it right". The JPC is the latest and so far the most promising attempt to get it right.