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Health & Fitness

Is Regional Planning too Complicated?

 

With an angry audience behind her, at a special June 20th ABAG meeting, Novato Mayor Pat Eklund complained about the poor of quality outreach for Plan Bay Area.  “People don’t understand this” said Eklund, who would later abstain from the vote to approve the Plan.   Perhaps as a direct retort to this criticism, at a July 28th hearing of the Metropolitan Commission, ABAG staffer Gillian Adams noted that there had been 249 meetings involving Plan Bay Area.  

By any measure, the amount of outreach was considerable and included town halls, open houses, special workshops, opinion polls, and info on websites.  The number of public meetings in the Bay Area dwarfed the number held by in other parts of the state.   Altogether, nearly half a million dollars was spent in our region just on supplemental communications.  And yet, more than a few participants walked away from Plan Bay Area confused and frustrated.

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Some commentators have suggested that any lingering alienation is concentrated in a group of Tea Party activists who are more interested in venting than understanding.   It is true that this iteration of the Plan saw a rise in the participation of conservative activists, some of whom brought extreme hyperbole, a rumor mill, and way too much yelling at public agency working stiffs.

However, the problem with the most recent round of regional planning wasn’t its inability to handle the Tea Party.   The problem is that it’s not set up to handle any meaningful public involvement from ordinary citizens.  The Tea Party is just one group that happened to show up this time. 

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The process has simply become too complex and too expansive to fully understand for all but a small coterie of professional participants.  Most of our local elected officials (especially at the City Council level) don’t really understand it, either.  Our media don’t enlighten and mostly focus on covering conflict.  Even Linda Jackson, a highly competent veteran of San Rafael’s Planning Department, noted at Dominican University forum that, “like other planners, she was on a journey to try to understand Plan Bay Area.”

Our current regional plan is a mega-process that seeks to bundle together a series of other already extremely complex and technical processes.   As result, in the Bay Area we have created arguably the most complicated regional planning process in the United States.   

How Does the Bay Area Compare ?

All metro areas in America do some regional planning.  Federal law requires Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) to carry out regional transportation planning every few years.  The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) plays this role in the Bay Area.   

In some parts of the country, MPOs go further and produce regional plans that seek to guide the amount, location, and character of real estate development in the future.   We do that in the Bay Area too, but it’s confusingly led by a separate regional organization, the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). 

Where regional development plans are done, they are usually pure vision; an inspiration that local jurisdictions can rally around.  By contrast, MTC and ABAG don’t have land use authority but use an increasing number of financial carrots and coercive sticks to try to implement the regional plan.

It’s rare for organizations other than local governments to affect planning and zoning decisions.  Those that do are typically directly accountable to voters.   In Portland, for example, a regional government called METRO has considerable land planning authority but its members are elected by the people, not appointed.  The state of Hawaii is unique for its direct involvement in land use planning.  It’s a centralized arrangement, but one that at least produces clarity.

Our two-headed and highly active (but non-elected) regional planning organizations have now been joined by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), along with the new “Joint Policy Committee”, a kind of committee to coordinate committees.  This complicated arrangement with its blurred lines of authority, was recently unflatteringly compared by Dick Spotswood to the European Commission in Brussels.

Valuing “Comprehensiveness” over Comprehension

Increasing organizational confusion is just one trend.  Another is the tendency for the Plan to address an ever expanding array of public policy issues.  In addition to the standard regional planning goals of improving mobility and managing growth, we have added housing the poor and solving global warming.

The state has merged its complex, quota-oriented Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) process with the regional planning process.   As such, this complex (and relatively distinct in the nation) method for promoting affordable housing has been put front and center.

Our state has also our wrapped regional planning up in the completely unique Senate Bill 375, which attempts to wield planning in the service of reducing greenhouse gases.   The requirement for Plans to show that land use and transportation decisions are leading to fewer emissions has resulted in the creation of highly complex computer models to help influence those decisions. These models will never be complex enough to simulate reality, and yet never simple enough to be anything more than a black box to most Plan Bay Area participants.  They help limit the Plans accessibility.

In the meantime, Sacramento is busy contemplating a web of new statutes to create still more funding carrots and regulatory sticks to accomplish certain planning objectives.   We are gradually moving toward a situation in which planning will not be something well understood by local policy makers and carried out by planners at $40 per hour, but will be baffling to local policy makers and carried out by lawyers at $200 hr. 

To make things a shade more complicated, California is one of a few states that require environmental reviews for everything, including plans, meaning that our regional plan must come along with environmental impact reports that are multi-thousands of pages long with appendices.    

And yet, many of the comments received by MTC/ABAG call upon regional plans to do still more! -  to more fully integrate: earthquake safety regulations, water resources planning, school management and school funding issues, policing strategies and fire protection issues, and a host of other things.

Perhaps conditioned by CEQA, even Plan critics often speak in the language of “inadequacy” rather than challenging the architecture of the Plan as overwrought.  They should be careful what they wish for.

The instinct to try to address all policy issues at once is rooted in a fear that some policies may not perfectly align.  The necessity of alignment, however, can be greatly exaggerated, and the downside risk of creating a behemoth completely ignored. 

Conclusion

The confusing governance of our three-year regional planning process, its technical complexity and expanding scope, and its penchant for using complex and indirect policy tools rather than simple and direct ones, all put it out of the reach of regular citizens.  It is simply not something that can be explained and debated in an evening at a New England style town meeting.   The local “town halls” that our regional agencies have created to make something colossal and opaque feel intimate and clear are just a feel-good pastiche.  

We need greater clarity and simplicity or we risk a further deterioration of regional planning’s legitimacy in the eyes of the public.  Without structural reform, “more public outreach” will just involve more attempts to try to explain the unexplainable.
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