Transportation reform next on state's agenda (environmental reform, toll roads, housing)

Transportation reform next on state's agenda
Fancy Bay Bridge not in the plan, environmental reform, toll roads are

State transportation secretary Sunne Wright McPeak returned to familiar ground when she laid out for the Oakland Chamber of Commerce her and her boss' ambitious vision to restore California's golden luster.

Her boss, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, is expected to reveal details of his "GoCalifornia" initiative any day. It will feature toll roads, converting some carpool lanes into tolled "HOT lanes," streamlining the state's environmental laws and promoting high-density housing in urban areas near mass transit.

On Friday, McPeak offered the clearest, most comprehensive articulation to date of Schwarzenegger's transportation, environmental and development reforms. It's a matter of California's economic competitiveness, she said.

"We have to start thinking of California as golden again. We must build our infrastructure, which we've neglected for decades," she said. "We've got to build the state. That's the business we are in. We are building the future of California."

The still vague GoCalifornia plan gave McPeak the opportunity to delve into an issue that has been a hallmark of her career, first as a Contra Costa County supervisor, then as leader of the Bay Area Economic Forum: the mismatch between where Californians live and where they work.

"If we do not interrupt the land-use patterns, even though we'll spend billions on transportation, $300 billion in the next 20 years, there will still be a doubling of congestion. That's unacceptable," McPeak said.

An infusion of new cash sources — private investment in toll roads and Indian gaming money — is the best way to do better, she said, promising to build in 10 years the highways and rail lines that normally take 20 years to complete.

McPeak noted that the rapid development of the Central Valley and other inland areas remote from job centers is gobbling up prime agricultural land, causing monster two-hour commutes, jamming up freeways and blocking the shipment of port cargo. "We've concluded that land-use pattern is dumb," McPeak said.

She announced that the administration will introduce legislation that will require each city to meet its housing needs for the next 20 years. McPeak did not offer specifics but did highlight the BART-to-San Jose project.

Santa Clara voters overwhelmingly passed a sales tax to raise $2 billion toward a southern extension from Fremont to San Jose. But the project is in doubt because the federal transit administration has not endorsed it and a state promise of $725 million appears to have evaporated with the sagging state budget.

"We're not going to put that kind of money up and have a parking lot on the Sunol Grade and Altamont Pass," McPeak said, noting that along the proposed route cities are 60,000 units short of their fair share of housing.

McPeak's central point: California faces a sharp housing crisis, caused by lack of supply. Supply can be remedied by better zoning and cities can be induced with state transportation money into making more land available for houses.

Improving the housing supply and building vital transportation links can be accomplished by loosening environmental laws. She told East Bay business leaders that $1 billion is spent every year on reports and lawsuits, not actually improving or protecting the state's ecology.

McPeak talked about the Bay Bridge fiasco, repeating past claims that a switch in design will save money and time, and warning, "If the Legislature proceeds with the (tower), be prepared for a time delay and, therefore, further cost increases."

Hot Dang! The BugmeNot works like a danged charm!!!

Dan Walters: As population soars, politicians need to deal with effects now By Dan Walters -- Bee Columnist Published 2:15 am PST Tuesday, February 8, 2005

Population expansion is an old story for California, but there have been periods of faster and slower growth. The end of the post-World War II baby boom in the 1960s, for example, presaged a very low-growth period in the 1970s - one that misled California's political leaders into slowing development of highways and other infrastructure to a crawl.

By 1980, California's population growth rate soared anew, driven by a new wave of immigration from Southeast Asia, Latin America and other foreign locales, and a new baby boom, especially among immigrant mothers.

California developed a very steady pattern of growth during the 1980s: 500,000-plus births each year (a baby a minute) and about 300,000 foreign immigrants, offset by 200,000-plus deaths for a net increase of 600,000. This pattern ran for a decade, raising California's population by almost exactly 6 million in the 1980s.

Population growth dipped a bit in the 1990s, not because the underlying factors changed, but because more than a million Californians packed up and left the state in the early 1990s during the worst recession in a half-century. But as the economy improved, the outflow of bodies ebbed, and because immigration and births remained high, growth resumed its previous pattern.

In the past couple of years, demographers and politicians have wondered whether California would see another growth dip as birthrates declined. Some school districts began experiencing enrollment drops, which added to the speculation that California wasn't destined for the continued high growth rates that had been projected earlier.

The latest population numbers drawn up by the state's respected demographic researchers, however, indicate that the hopes - or fears - of lower growth are misplaced. The numbers, covering the year that ended July 1, almost exactly mirror the pattern that developed in the 1980s and has continued, except for the recession, ever since.

The Department of Finance Demographic Research Unit estimates that during the 2003-04 period, 551,000 births and 283,600 in net immigration, offset by 235,000 deaths, produced a net growth of 599,000, bringing the state's population to 36.6 million.

There are several ways to put that number in perspective, but two of them sharply illustrate its dimensions: It's roughly 20 percent of all the population growth in the United States, and over just one decade, it would be the equivalent of adding the entire population of Indiana, the 14th-most-populous state, to California.

What it means, most of all, is that we would be very foolish to repeat the mistakes of the 1970s and fail to adjust public policy to the simple fact that every year we can expect 600,000 more people. They will need 200,000 more units of housing and a quarter-million more jobs, will add about 500,000 more cars and trucks to already crowded highways and roads, send tens of thousands more kids to school, and will demand retail stores, water, health care and recreation.

Political action to meet those demands is more than overdue - especially since politicians have so often ignored the effects of the 50 percent increase in population we've already experienced since 1980. Our increasingly congested highways are just the most obvious example of how growth's impacts have been sidestepped.

The odd thing is that individually, California politicians know that population growth and its effects, including ever-greater levels of cultural diversity, are the most important challenge facing the state. They wax nostalgic about how their predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s faced similar pressures and met them with historic infrastructure improvements, including hundreds of miles of new roadways, vast new water projects and school-and college-building on a massive scale.

That individual understanding, however, gets buried in a political system that focuses on minutiae of the moment. As the new population data were being released Monday, the state Assembly conducted a brief session that consisted almost entirely of feel-good resolutions and ceremonies. By the time legislators convene again on Thursday to do more of the same, California will have added 5,000 more human bodies.

I did a little more digging.

What a plan! Take all of the accumulated amounts that have been diverted from the Transportation account to supplement General Fund spending (including any amounts to be spent/raided prior to July 1, 2007, per ACAX1 4 introduced by Keene, Arnold's "Spending Control" measure) and turn it into long term debt, to be paid over 15 years. Then, since the highways are in such terrible shape, and we have spent all the transportation money on "the children" or some other social program, Arnold will sell toll roads to the people. When added to raided education funds that are also being proposed as 15 year debt, it looks like this will exceed my original $10 billion estimate.

Mercury News, Feb 5, 2005

Transportation funding shortfall worst that state has ever faced
BILLIONS DIVERTED TO OTHER USES MAY NEVER BE COMPLETELY REPAID
California's budget crisis is delaying or downsizing dozens of key transportation projects across the state, from expanding BART to uncorking nasty bottlenecks. Some rural counties are downgrading from asphalt to gravel as they resurface roads.
The transportation crisis is called the worst California has faced, with the state up against a $12 billion annual shortfall in the money needed to build more transit and expand highways, not to mention fill potholes.
(snip)
Regional, county and state officials complained for more than three hours, upset with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and before him Gray Davis for diverting more than $5 billion away from transportation to bail out the state's general fund. The state has frozen almost all new projects for the past two years and expects to have little if any cash to spend through 2007.
"We're literally bankrupt,'' said state Sen. Tom Torlakson, D-Concord.
A state report six years ago revealed an annual need of $16 billion for transportation, but today only $4 billion is available. An additional $1.8 billion a year is needed for safety improvements and storm-related repairs, but only $900 million was available last year. The Bay Area faces an $8 billion shortfall for transportation projects on the drawing board, and San Jose has 200 miles of city streets in need of major repairs, but no money to make them. (snip)
Three years ago, state voters approved a measure to earmark sales tax revenue on gasoline purchases for transportation. But an out clause allowed Gov. Davis, and then Schwarzenegger, to divert more than $5 billion to the general fund in a financial emergency. State officials say those funds will likely again be diverted next year, to the tune of another $1.3 billon.
Schwarzenegger has said he will pay back those funds over the next 15 years [IF people are dumb enough to vote for his "spending control" reform!! It's MORE borrowing!]. If the governor fulfills that promise -- and few are banking on it -- it will still have a ripple affect, delaying work on numerous hot spots.

OC Register, Transcript of interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger, published 2/01/2005

I strongly believe that wealways have to look for alternatives and for mass transportation. That's clear. But that does not mean that an era of highway building is over unless we have a great replacement for it. Nothing is over. I think that we see right now there is many, many freeways that have congestion problems that need to build extra lanes.
We have, as a matter of fact, we're going to make an announcement really soon where we're going to look at our whole infrastructure and transportation and we have a very creative way of financing it. We don't just rely on Prop. 42 money because that money is, even though it is a billion and a half dollars or sometimes more. But the fact of the matter is that is not enough to really create the infrastructure that we are talking about. We want to approach it in a very radical way and then look at all kinds of transportation, if it is trains, if it is how do we move goods from the Long Beach harbor and from various different harbors on land and get it going.
Because, as you know, that transportation is the key thing for moving goods and for moving people. That's the power of our economy. And so we have to concentrate on that.

Arnold says proposition 42 money is a billion and half. That is the amount that is leftover after they spend the money on things for which it was not intended.

And toll roads will facilitate the movement of goods and services? Flawed logic.

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