Josh Stephens at the California Planning and Development Report (CP&DR) has an excellent article on the foibles of the California Infill Builders Federation, which is pushing a bill (Garcia, AB 779) to delay the badly needed transition to a driving miles standard for California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) review. Unfortunately the article is pay-walled, but you can read the excerpt here. Here’s a snippet with a quote from yours truly:
Garcia’s office declined to speak to CP&DR on the record. IBF’s lobbyist Erin Niemela declined as well. IFB board members did not respond to repeated requests for interviews. The Council of Infill Developers, which is a nonprofit advocacy group that was once affiliated with IBF, as well as other critics claim that the IBF does not truly represent the interests of infill developers but rather is a front for greenfield developers (some of whom also do infill).
“The idea that’s coming out of a nominally infill builders organization is really disappointing,” said Ethan Elkind, Associate Director of the Climate Change and Business Program at UCLA Law School and advisor to the Council of Infill Builders. “Their arguments are wrong, but I also question why a group of infill builders would be pushing a measure that would hurt infill.”
I’ve been following this bill for a while now. While it’s depressing to see this bill sail through committees, perhaps the fact that none of the supporters want to defend the bill to CP&DR is a sign that they realize the embarrassment this is causing their nominally pro-infill organization.
Still, it’s not enough to hope. We need legislators to vote down this misguided attempt to preserve a dysfunctional status quo.
Who needs more housing in coastal California after all?
Another argument for ditching the Level of Service-based traffic study under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA): a judge yesterday halted a proposed infill apartment tower complex in Hollywood because the proponents failed to adequately study the potential backup the project could cause on the Hollywood Freeway:
The judge cited concerns by Caltrans, which wanted a study of the 101 Freeway on-ramps and off-ramps near the project to address concerns about long lines of cars as a result of the development. The judge said the city’s traffic study did not comply with what Caltrans wanted, “and the city was not free to ignore it.”
The judge also cited Caltrans’ concerns about safety, including long queues of cars on the off-ramps between Vermont and Highland avenues, where vehicles could back up into intersections.
So we can’t get 35- and 39-story apartment buildings right next to a heavy rail subway station because it might inconvenience car drivers on the freeway nearby. I can’t think of a better poster child for why the state should continue its effort to ditch this kind of traffic study in favor of one that deals with the overall impact on driving miles.
Oddly, the pro-infill California Infill Builders Federation is pushing AB 779 to keep this status quo. But under the state’s proposed guidelines per SB 743 (Steinberg, 2013), this kind of analysis wouldn’t even be undertaken in the first place, and we’d have hundreds of housing units in the pipeline above major rail transit.
Somehow I don’t think the developer Millenium will be rushing to join the Infill Builders Federation board anytime soon. But then again, with this group, you never know.
Streetsblog LA has excellent coverage of the continuing saga of AB 779, to roll back badly needed CEQA reform on transportation analyses for infill projects. I detailed the bill and the sad spectacle of a nominally pro-infill group pushing it last week. From Streetsblog:
The bill’s sponsors claim that having to analyze VMT would be burdensome and duplicative, since in some cases they would still be required to produce an LOS analysis to meet local planning requirements.
However, that claim looks pretty specious, for several reasons.
For one, OPR’s guidelines will excuse most true infill projects from any transportation analysis under CEQA, so there would be no need for “duplicative analyses.” This is because projects within a half mile of a major transit stop, as defined in the bill, would be exempt. It’s useful to remember than an earlier draft of A.B. 779 would have removed the word “major” in this definition, thus would have exempted pretty much any kind of development near any bus stop anywhere in the state, no matter how sparse the transit service there.
The article quotes yours truly and cites the opposition of the Council of Infill Builders, creating an unusual infill vs. infill battle. For her part, the bill’s author defends it by saying, “this isn’t about getting rid of VMT. VMT is a fine measure. This bill would press ‘pause’ on the process.”
But pressing pause only benefits the status quo. And as any observer of California development can tell you, the status quo does not benefit infill like it benefits sprawl.
Last week I noted the curious case of a pro-infill group pushing an anti-infill bill. AB 779 seeks to delay or roll back reform to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which greatly benefits infill by removing the requirement for a traffic study for most infill projects.
Now today another pro-infill group, the Council of Infill Builders, weighs in against the bill [PDF]:
As we discussed in an op-ed published in the San Francisco Chronicle (“’Driving Miles’ is Best Measure of New Development,” November 19, 2014), the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) unduly penalizes urban-oriented infill projects over outlying, auto-centric projects when it comes to evaluating impacts on traffic — an analysis that too often provides project opponents with leverage to defeat projects or scale back their environmentally friendly elements. As a result, we strongly supported SB 743 (Steinberg, 2013) and its requirement that “level of service” traffic studies be replaced with a metric like vehicle miles traveled.
…….
The members of the Council of Infill Builders are committed to building a better California through well-planned, beautiful, and convenient infill projects. We were gratified that the state recognized the undue burdens placed on infill through CEQA’s transportation analysis process and sought to instead reward them through a much more sensible VMT metric. Any effort to delay or rollback this badly needed reform will only serve to benefit the status quo, with its inherent bias in favor of business-as-usual development patterns that have greatly harmed California’s environment, economy and quality of life. California should move forward to encourage infill options for its residents. AB 779 will serve only to halt that progress.
The Assembly Natural Resources Committee will have a hearing on the bill at 1:30pm. I’ll stay tuned in case fireworks fly.
UPDATE: The Committee passed it 7-0, so I’ll continue to track this story.
With a name like the “California Infill Builders Federation,” you’d think this organization would be pro-infill. But not so much with the group’s signature legislative effort this year. As Streetsblog LA covers, CIBF is pushing AB 779 to roll back or delay changes from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR) to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) — changes that serve only to benefit infill projects:
The new guidelines are being formulated as required by S.B. 743, which calls for OPR to come up with a new way to measure the impact of traffic from development projects. Until recently, traffic impact was measured by Level of Service, or LOS, which only evaluates projects on how they affect the flow of traffic. OPR has said it is considering replacing LOS with Vehicle Miles Traveled, or VMT, which would give a measure of how much travel a project produces, rather than focusing on whether it slows down nearby traffic.
The bill’s sponsors say that developers still have to do LOS analyses outside of CEQA because of local requirements, and that having to do a VMT analysis as well would be too much work.
This is nonsense. VMT is an off-the-shelf metric suitable to all kinds of land uses, and is used by local governments all the time. But more importantly, the proposed guidelines essentially exempt almost all infill projects from any transportation analysis at all under CEQA. And when one is required (which will only be for sprawl projects and rarely for infill), the guidelines provide local governments with significant discretion on a VMT analysis.
Furthermore, a local traffic study doesn’t carry the same litigation risks that the traffic study in CEQA carries. And this state transition to VMT will only make it easier for local governments to follow suit and kill LOS once and for all.
So why is CIBF opposing? As Streetsblog reports:
But it turns out the executive committee of the Infill Builders Federation is not what it seems. Most of its members are developers who work on very large projects not usually thought of as “infill.” Like the Warriors Arena in San Francisco. And business parks. And regional malls. All big, lousy sprawl projects pretty much guaranteed to create more traffic and more greenhouse gases.
AB 779 is a sad, disingenuous effort that should be called out for what it is: bad policy based on false premises.
