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Conflict over a proposed housing project in the Sonoma County city of Sebastopol offers proof of just how politically difficult infill development can be.

Recent polls suggest that Proposition 13 remains as popular today as when it was enacted. Yet, at the same time, residents demand a high level of services which exceed the ability of local officials to fund absent innovation in developing new funding strategies. This innovation in turn has generated a series of voter-enacted limitations designed to further restrict new revenue measures, absent voter approval. Part of this voter legacy is Proposition 218, enacted in 1996 (California Constitution Art XIIID).

Tuesday's California Supreme Court ruling in a CEQA case involving San Diego State lays down an important marker: State agencies can't claim that a mitigation measure is infeasible just because they didn't get a legislative appropriation to pay for it. It's the second time the Supreme Court has rejected an argument by Cal State that fiscal considerations under state law should trump CEQA.

After doling out $120 million in essentially free money in 2015, the program staff behind the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities grants discovered almost as many opinions as there were dollars in the program. Public and private stakeholders alike expressed concerns about both the fairness and efficacy of the selection process. Large urban areas lobbied for population-based preferences, rural areas lamented their lack of qualifying transit, and fierce discussions took place over jurisdictional caps and underserved communities.

The big camp on Coyote Creek north of Story Road in San Jose is familiar to Sandy Perry and Pastor Scott Wagers, leaders of an activist ministry known as CHAM. But during the past couple of years they have been amazed to see people pour into the place from elsewhere in the city -- some of them evicted from an embarrassingly visible camp near the airport. What was a mere few tents now fills a broad open space on the creekside below Story Road and continues along the west bank of the creek. Tents are pitched every few yards, many in tiny courtyards fenced with sheets, tarps and pallets.

The First District Court of Appeal has upheld the City of Napa’s decision to rely on its 1998 general plan environmental impact report in adopting its 2009 housing element.

A decision to remove 200 acres of the Anheuser-Busch-owned Warm Springs Ranch from the Western Riverside County Multiple Species Habitat Plan is not exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act even though the property would be replaced in the plan by 1,000 acres on two other nearby ranches, the Fourth District Court of Appeal has ruled.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system is slowly making its way to San Jose, although the journey there continues to be bumpy. The first trains will arrive to one northeastern San Jose neighborhood in 2017, but whether they'll ever serve more of the city remains an open question. BART trains began running in 1972, when San Francisco was the biggest city in the region, and many workers commuted to jobs there from newly-built East Bay suburbs. But in recent years, much of the job growth has been in tech jobs in the South Bay. BART currently ends in the middle of Fremont, which is about 15 miles from downtown San Jose. BART added miles of new track throughout Alameda and Contra Costa Counties in recent years, and came south to San Francisco International Airport in San Mateo County in 2003. It is now 109 miles long. During the same period, San Jose grew to become the largest city in Northern California, and Santa Clara County became a prime commuting spot for thousands of Silicon Valley jobs. But decisions made in the 1950s by the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors to stay out of BART still reverberate to this day, and have kept the county out of the regional system. Santa Clara County has its own light rail transit system and is part of Caltrain, a commuter train service that runs through San Mateo County to San Francisco. Light rail and buses in Santa Clara County are operated by the San Jose-based Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA), which is now the agency responsible for bringing BART to the county. Santa Clara County voters agreed twice to increase their sales tax to bring BART to the South Bay, in 2000 and 2008. As a result, a new ten-mile extension to San Jose, through Fremont and the city of Milpitas, is expected to be completed in 2017. The first station on the extension is expected to open in Fremont's Warm Springs neighborhood in late 2015, close to that city's Tesla factory. The $2.3 billion extension will also continue several miles into San Jose, terminating at the Berryessa station on the city's East Side when it opens in 2017. But since San Jose spreads out over 176 square miles, adding one BART station is not expected to provide much traffic relief or impact development patterns. In comparison, BART has eleven stations in Berkeley and Oakland, two cities whose population is less than half of San Jose's -- as noted by John Pastier, a noted architectural critic now retired in San Jose. Pastier spoke at a recent VTA-sponsored forum, encouraging the district to add more stations. "We have to look at things in a more urban way," he said. But BART isn't sure how it will pay for the next four promised stations in a proposed six-mile expansion. (For a map of the four-station plan as reviewed in 2004, see below or click here .) Proponents of South Bay expansion have long dreamed of the day when BART would circle more of the South Bay, crossing underground through downtown San Jose, and ending in the city of Santa Clara. Initial campaigns for sales tax increases promised this benefit. But plans for that six-mile stretch were shelved in 2009 when funding dried up from a variety of sources. Questions of how well BART will serve the South Bay were raised again in October, when a VTA staff report analyzed whether the six-mile extension could ever be built as planned, with four stations. To keep costs lower, the report suggested cutting two of the four stations, one on the city's East Side and one at the terminus at Santa Clara, while still tunneling under downtown San Jose. The proposal triggered widespread community criticism, especially from the East Side, a poor area where long existing plans called for transit-oriented office and residential development around the Alum Rock station. Plans for revitalizing the area suggest building 845 residential units and 1.2 million square feet of office space around the station. The six-mile extension is expected to cost $4.7 billion, and cutting two stations would shave $1.3 billion from the project. That lower cost was expected to help attract federal funding to the project. But at recent VTA forums, its staff and elected officials said they now intend to move forward with the four-station plan, with federal assistance. VTA Chairman Ash Kalra, who is also a San Jose City Councilman, said that VTA has not cut any stations from its plans. "The board is committed to all four stations," he told CP&DR. "I'm committed to all four." "We have some grand plans, and some grand costs," Kalra said. VTA officials are now working on environmental studies and identifying funding sources for the proposed extension. That work is supposed to last into 2016. One possible way to fund the project is through another sales tax measure in 2016, Kalra and other VTA officials said.      BART Director Zachary Mallett of San Francisco recently questioned whether BART needs to go underground through downtown San Jose, nothing that many of the city's tech businesses are located north of that area, closer to the city's airport. He suggested an alternative plan in a recent op-ed in the Mercury News. "It would also build on pre-existing real estate and development plans�rather than necessitating new development projects for the mere purpose of justifying an extension designed to aid the parochial dreams of Downtown San Jose," he wrote. VTA staff said the majority of BART's board remains committed to the current plan to go through downtown, despite Mallett's opposing view. Even if BART makes it to Santa Clara, the system will probably never ring the rest of the Peninsula to San Francisco International Airport. The Santa Clara station, if and when BART gets that far clockwise around the Bay from Fremont, will connect with Caltrain, just as the Millbrae station does at the peninsula BART line's current southernmost point near San Francisco Airport. (Also, if the BART branch from Fremont gets as far as the Diridon Amtrak/Caltrain station in downtown San Jose, then there may be no need for BART to continue from there northwest to Santa Clara.) Over the years, BART expansions have often been opposed by Caltrain advocates, who have argued that upgrading existing rail lines and bus service is more cost-effective. There's still considerable skepticism whether it is worth the expense to run a BART train directly all the way from Fremont through San Jose to Santa Clara, when the route to Santa Clara from Diridon Station in downtown San Jose is already served by Caltrain. According to executive director Adina Levin, the Friends of Caltrain organization is among supporters of a BART extension from Fremont as far as the Diridon station in downtown San Jose. Further north, BART continues to grow into Alameda County, where voters in November approved Measure BB, a sales tax increase. The measure included $400 million in funding to extend BART five miles from its current Tri-Valley terminus station of Dublin-Pleasanton to the city of Livermore. The total cost of the project is expected to be $1.15 billion. In addition, BART opened a 3.2-mile rail link between its existing Oakland Coliseum station and the city's airport in November, with a starting fare of $6 per ride. That controversial project cost $484 million to build.

CP&DR Vol. 30 No. 9 - September 2015

CP&DR Vol. 30 No. 12 - December 2015

CP&DR Vol. 31 No. 1 - January 2016

CP&DR Vol. 30 No. 8 - August 2015