Carl DeMaio’s Latest Scheme: Greenhouse Gases Don’t Matter
Talk show host Carl DeMaio has announced a campaign to unseat ten or so local government officials who have indicated an interest in overhauling the region’s transportation needs to meet future challenges.
The former City Councilman’s recent efforts include failing to repeal the so-called Gas Tax (Proposition 6), falling short of drumming up enough interest to recall Governor Gavin Newsom and a dozen state legislators, and floating an unsuccessful petition campaign to interest union members in bankrupting their state and local representatives.
Now, DeMaio and his Reform California group are hoping to galvanize support for clogged freeways and increased greenhouse gases by playing on fears a realignment of future infrastructure will deprive residents of their freedom.
https://twitter.com/LorenaSGonzalez/status/1126888994170474497
Let’s step away from this trainwreck of an idea for a moment and take a look at the bigger picture.
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There are some problems too big for local governments to solve. Transportation is one one of them. Imagine if every city in San Diego County had its own scheme of highways and transit. Bridges to nowhere and bus schedules out of sync. Most big projects would be unaffordable; commerce would go elsewhere thanks to lack of infrastructure.
State and local government officials began to grapple with the idea of a regional agency more than 50 years ago. In 1980, the Comprehensive Planning Organization renamed itself San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG). While its areas of responsibility go beyond the region’s transportation needs, the business of getting people from one place to another has been its most prominent feature as far as the public is concerned.
The promise of a change in vision, brought on in the wake the hiring of Hasan Ikhrata as the organization’s Executive Director has stoked controversy, reigniting old geographic and political divisions.
Ikhrata was hired by SANDAG in the wake of the agency’s failure to persuade votes to support Measure A in 2016, supposedly needed to fund future projects throughout the region. In the run up to the election, Voice of San Diego’s Andrew Keatts discovered a major problem with SANDAG’s economic forecast.
The formula the agency used to predict sales tax revenues to pay for big projects was (being polite here) flawed. And it had been wrong for years, meaning a 2004 sales tax measure (TRANSNET) was coming up way short in its ability to deliver funding. Measure A, as it turned out, was needed to fill the gap for financing construction for already promised projects. And the inaccurate projections meant some promises made in 2016 were unlikely to happen.
And here’s the thing: the agency’s leadership knew the books were cooked.
For many years SANDAG had been isolated from public scrutiny. The former executive director utilized the agency’s staff resources to assure its Board of Directors, made up of elected officials and/or appointees from 18 cities and county government, everything was fine. Given that everybody on the board was already committed elsewhere, most projects got rubber stamped.
2016’s Measure A failed to gain the support of environmental (and some labor) groups, who felt it failed to put enough emphasis on transit in favor of additional funding for highways. Since a tax measure of this sort needed to pass the threshold of two thirds voter approval, the inability to build a grand coalition meant it was doomed.
Advocates for Measure A said the language being voted on was the best that could be done, given competing interests in localities needing to be taken into account. The behind the scenes reality was that a handful of politicians were, in fact, climate change deniers. They wanted more highways and less transit. Since small cities had equal weight in terms of voting on the SANDAG board, these reactionaries were able to get their way.
Along came Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez with a solution, namely AB 805.
The bill created an audit committee, mandated the hiring of an independent auditor, and--most importantly-- gave each of the cities on the board a vote proportional to their population.
Large cities like San Diego and Chula Vista were empowered at the expense of small and rural cities like Del Mar and Santee, meaning it would be more likely transit projects would get at least an even footing over freeways.
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In April, SANDAG’s Hasan Ikhrata rolled out a new vision for the future.
The proposal aims to complete corridors, build a network of high-speed transit, provide mobility hubs, provide on-demand and shared electric vehicles, and create an integrated platform that will make all of the strategies work together.
From the Union-Tribune:
New details of a controversial plan to prioritize rail over widening freeways are starting to emerge — from laying hundreds of miles of high-speed commuter rail to charging drivers to use many of the most congested freeways.
Officials with the San Diego Association of Governments told the Union-Tribune last week that the agency plans to run trains along highway corridors that travel as fast as 100 miles an hour. The most current plan calls for no further expansion of the trolley system, which only goes about 35 miles an hour on average.
At the same time, SANDAG plans to roll out so-called congestion pricing on those stretches of freeway, which would charge drivers a fluctuating toll based on traffic conditions.
https://twitter.com/sd_nw/status/1126940048971034624\
Predictably, the big city folks liked what they saw. Others, not so much.
Also (different story) from the Union-Tribune:
Ikhrata also called for nixing many long-anticipated highway improvements and expansions to free up funding and contain greenhouse gases in line with state mandates.
Those projects — promised when voters approved the half-cent sales tax Transnet in 2004 — include adding express lanes to state routes 78 and 52, as well as widening state routes 67 and 56.
East and North County elected officials quickly pushed back, arguing that abandoning those and other projects would undermine the SANDAG’s credibility if and when the agency goes back to the voters for another tax increase.
SANDAG’s “credibility” already took a big hit with the disclosure of its faulty accounting system. And even if no changes to the future plans for the region were made, basic math shows not all of the highway projects promised to the voters will be funded.
Lacking the votes to block any amendments to the TransNet extension ordinance, opponents of Hassan’s new vision are reduced to making a lot of noise.
The County Board of Supervisors voted (3-2, Supes Fletcher & Cox opposed) to draft a letter to SANDAG opposing any future amendments affecting the use of local transportation infrastructure funding.
https://twitter.com/GretchenNewsom/status/1126953360756658176
Leave it to KUSI to give DeMaio and company the spin they wanted:
Former San Diego City Councilman and Reform California Chairman Carl DeMaio has threatened to recall officials on the SANDAG Board of Directors who vote in favor of the amendment.
County Supervisor Jim Desmond, Santee Mayor John Minto and El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells are expected to join DeMaio to launch the campaign and release a list of SANDAG Board members who have publicly supported the amendment proposal.
“It is time that voters band together and speak out loudly to demand an end to the raid on our road repair funds,” DeMaio said. “Any politician on SANDAG that votes to raid our road funds should prepare to face a recall against them and removal from office.”
Note that DeMaio is attempting to muddy the waters by using the term “road repair funds.” Sorry folks, this is just more bs from a master of mangling language. No potholes will be affected by SANDAG’s change of direction.
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The proposals being rolled out by the new regime at SANDAG are mostly conceptional at this point. There is a growing realization that simply adding lanes to freeways does not work much of the time.
The state agency (CalTrans) which manages freeways says it has given up on expanding roadways. The Leviathan Sepulveda Pass Improvements Project on I-405 in Los Angeles serves as a cautionary example of what can go wrong. The work lasted five years, cost more than $1 billion and current rush-hour speeds are for the most part slower than they were before it began.
Constructing transportation corridors making connections and time of travel more realistic will resolve the ongoing problem of getting more people to use transit. Ongoing reforms with San Diego’s MTS system have, it appears, reversed a long term decline on ridership. Now that we finally have somebody in charge (Councilmember Georgette Gomez) of the board at MTS who has actually ridden a bus on a regular basis, I expect we’ll see much improvement.
Finally, there is the HUGE problem of greenhouse gas emissions. There is no environmental issue posing an existential threat to humanity and the planet earth more than climate change.
There is roughly a decade to figure out how to reverse global warming and it’s going to take a full, species-wide effort to figure out how to do so.
Keeping doing what we have been doing is not an option, NBC7:
“You cannot build your way out,” Hasan Ikhrata said when discussing the recent criticism lobbied at the San Diego Association of Governments.
"Some people think we should only expand highways. We cannot do that and still meet the state and federal mandates," Ikhrata said. "People who advocate just for expanding highway pretty much are saying, 'Let’s not meet the mandates. Let’s ignore them.'"
It suspect we’ll hear lots of noise about how this or that part of SANDAG’s new approach won’t work, and to that I say: Show me your plan.
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Sad!
https://twitter.com/AlecMacGillis/status/1127609389316222977
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