Blogs

A hot potato — or should I say a hot sugar beet — is headed back to the Delta Protection Commission, which is scheduled on March 27 to reconsider a proposal for the first housing development within the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta's "primary zone" in 15 years.

The hearing comes at a time when concern about Central Valley flood safety and the overall health of the Delta is at an all-time high, a setting that must have project proponents feeling like a smelt swimming too close to a State Water Project pump.

Will transportation and land-use planning get its share of dough from federal climate change programs? Not if the coal industry has its way.

That was the message from a Capitol Hill staffer at a plenary session of the American Public Transit Association's annual legislative conference in Washington, D.C., on Monday. To combat the coal industry, smart growth and public transit lobbyists will have to prove they have an important national asset that can help meet the climate change challenge.

Just about everyone has assumed that a "cap and trade" mechanism would be part of the implementation of California's AB 32, the greenhouse gas emissions reduction law. But cap and trade may not come about without a big, and potentially very political, fight from environmental justice advocates.

This is going to sound like sour grapes, I know. But it's not. Honest. It's a real policy beef – and one that I've had for a long time.

I own a Prius. But I don't own an access sticker that gets me into the carpool lanes. That's because I bought my Prius in December of 2006 – the exact time when the State of California doled out the last of 85,000 "Clean Air Vehicle Stickers."

State lawmakers introduced hundreds of bills just before the February 22 deadline, and many of them concern land use.

At the time of the Legislature's deadline, we were putting together our big overview of land use legislation, so we were not able to look at every last bill. The late introductions don't change the fact that SB 375 (Steinberg) is the most important piece of land use legislation currently circulating. But we want to make sure you know about all the important and just plain weird land use bills.

If you live in the Bay Area, where everybody thinks they are the coolest people on earth, or in Los Angeles, the world's biggest experiment in infill development, it's hard to swallow the idea that Sacramento may be ahead of us on planning. But it's true.

Unlikely as it may the seem, Sacramento Area Council of Governments – the six-county regional planning agency commonly known as SACOG – has actually made the idea of higher-density projects conforming to the regional plan seem cool, even to suburban politicians.

Alaska's "bridge to nowhere" would really be a bridge to sprawl - and that's why it'll be a crucial issue in the upcoming Senate re-election campaign of 84-year-old Ted Stevens.

The Newhall Ranch project has acquired a substantial new foe: The City of Los Angeles. And not a moment too soon for longtime project opponents.

Newhall Ranch, of course, is a 21,000-unit, 12,000-acre project west of Santa Clarita that has been "in the planning stages" since the mid-1990s. In fact, the second story I ever wrote for CP&DR was about Newhall Ranch water supply issues (see CP&DR, January 1999).

Earlier this month, I was in our nation's capital, which served as the stage for the most recent federal theatrics on the issue of climate change regulation. The seventh annual New Partners for Smart Growth conference, sponsored by the Local Government Commission (an organization of locally-elected officials, city and county staff, planners, architects, and community leaders), took place in the hotel neighboring the site of the Conservative Political Action Conference. While we attended sessions such as "Where is the Money?

California's Central Valley is a distinctive place. It is a place of flat ground and extreme weather. It is a place of fruits, nuts, grains and dairy products, yet it's also a place of extensive suburban sprawl. It's a place with some of the worst air pollution in the country, but, when the sky is clear, a place with stunning mountain views. It's a place of recent immigrants and extreme poverty, and of fourth and fifth generation landowners.

California state officials aren't even dancing around the issue any more. They're openly admitting that the state can't possibly meet the greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals contained in AB 32 without a statewide strategy to reduce driving.

How do you implement smart growth successfully? Take one bite of the apple at a time.

That was the advice from local smart growth leaders in Nashville and Baton Rouge at a panel on implementing smart growth at the New Partners for Smart Growth conference in Washington, D.C., Friday.