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In a 19-3 vote, the executive board of the Association of Bay Area Governments last week approved a resolution outlining the tools and techniques that will be used to yield projections for Plan Bay Area 2050, a regional blueprint for addressing the economy, the environment, housing and transportation.
Prior to the vote, Los Altos Mayor Lynette Lee Eng, a member of a citizens group that alleges ABAG has violated two state codes in its push to adopt the plan, called on the executive board to reject the resolution.
Lee Eng and nearly all of the 10 other members of the West Bay Citizens Coalition – comprising members of Palo Altans for Sensible Zoning, Better Cupertino and an unnamed group from Los Altos – who spoke at the meeting began their pleas with variations on the same statement: “Please do not vote for a methodology that ignores California government codes and leaves out public participation.”
In an email to the Town Crier, Lee Eng explained why she, as an individual and not in her official capacity as mayor, got involved with the coalition.
“Bay Area residents experience the incredibly consequential impact Plan Bay Area has had on traffic, housing and affordability, yet few have heard of this regional entity,” she wrote.
Sharing concerns
A handful of other city officials spoke at the Sept. 19 meeting in San Francisco, clarifying that they were acting on their own behalf and not on behalf of their respective cities. They included Kitty Moore of the Cupertino Planning Commission, Palo Alto Mayor Eric Filseth and Lafayette City Councilwoman Susan Candell.
The West Bay Citizens Coalition claimed in a Sept. 15 press release that ABAG’s executive board would be violating “key legal requirements of several California codes” in its action to vote on approving the methodology process. Specifically, the group cited CA Codes 65584 and 65890.
Following the release of the statement from the newly formed coalition, which media contact Greg Schmid said began working together over the past few months, ABAG representatives denied that bringing the item before the board for a vote was illegal. To the contrary, Plan Bay Area 2050 project manager Dave Vautin said the state codes had absolutely nothing to do with the metropolitan planning organization.
After the public comment period, Vautin said that though the substance behind the codes – public participation and jobs-housing imbalance – is vital and continually addressed by ABAG, 65584 and 65890 refer to regulations required of the California Department of Housing and Community Development.
Doing ‘more and more’
With the coalition highlighting the need for public outreach, Vautin and Cynthia Kroll, ABAG’s chief economist and assistant planning director, countered with a timeline of opportunities for comment: Presentations were given at committee and board meetings in June and July, followed by a public comment period for which notifications were posted in the nine Bay Area counties and online from July 19 through Aug. 19. An additional public hearing process and further engagement is set to begin this fall and extend into the spring.
Still, coalition members and a few members of the executive board remained unsatisfied. Campbell City Councilwoman Liz Gibbons called ABAG’s outreach efforts “woefully insufficient, verging on a fatal flaw.” Gibbons told Vautin that if he expected each city to study up on the methodology, he should develop a schedule for the jurisdictions to review immediately.
In her response to the Town Crier, Lee Eng agreed with Gibbons, noting that expecting residents or municipalities to visit Plan Bay Area’s website and educate themselves on consequential hearings is “not truly democratic community engagement.”
“Receiving a blanket approval from the board and then claiming to back an iterative process where the community can weigh in when the methodology is already locked is quite perplexing,” Lee Eng said.
Ken Kirkey, planning director for both ABAG and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, prefaced a presentation by Kroll with three key ideas to keep in mind about the current stage of Plan Bay Area 2050: Thursday’s review focused solely on the procedures that would be used to craft the plan’s Regional Growth Forecast and not the forecast numbers themselves; the methodology is specific to Plan Bay Area 2050’s long-term predictions and not the Regional Housing Need Allocation; and some worries raised by coalition members – such as income inequality – have already been addressed through ABAG’s last project, Horizon.
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