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.
Don Perata, California’s former state senate pro tem, has been representing the California Infill Builders Federation for a few years now. But you wouldn’t know it if you heard the arguments in his San Francisco Chronicle op-ed today deriding one of the most pro-infill reforms the state has proposed in years with the SB 743 guidelines.
Perata tries to make the point that the SB 743 guidelines will introduce more “uncertainty” and litigation for infill. But in fact SB 743 will have the exact opposite effect, making infill easier and sprawl more difficult.
Let’s go down the list of his arguments. From the third paragraph in:
The guidelines add many untested impacts under CEQA. The biggest would add a new transportation impact to CEQA: total vehicles miles traveled required for all projects, even those that comply with local transit-oriented development plans and regional greenhouse gas and vehicle use reduction plans such as the comprehensive Plan Bay Area, which have already completed the CEQA review process.
First, the SB 743 guidelines don’t add “many” new untested impacts to the CEQA process. They relate to transportation-related impacts only, as directed by the statutory language of SB 743. Perata is correct that VMT is the new metric proposed by OPR, but that metric replaces the old auto-delay traffic study (again, as directed by statute) and will likely only be used, per the proposed guidelines, for areas outside of a 1/2 mile distance to a major transit stop (including high-quality bus stops) and in areas with above average VMT levels. All projects near transit and in areas with below average VMT will be presumed to have no impact on transportation at all. That is a huge victory for infill projects, any way you cut it.
As another inaccuracy, Perata claims the proposed VMT analysis measures “total vehicle miles traveled” from a project. Instead, OPR requires that VMT “be measured per capita, per employee, per trip, per person-trip or other appropriate measure.” That makes a big difference in the results and once again benefits infill projects immensely.
Fourth paragraph:
The vehicle miles traveled element would measure a project’s traffic impacts in an entire region by calculating driving miles. These guidelines treat all auto trips the same, whether they are driven in a Prius or a Hummer. It does not take into account if a project is helping the state to meet its greenhouse-gas reduction mandates. The state received more than 100 letters critical of its proposal to expand CEQA and make it more litigation friendly.
VMT is directly correlated to greenhouse gas emissions, as Perata should well know. That’s the basis for implementing SB 375, which he mentions in the piece as a good measure of infill. Second, while it would be nice to differentiate among polluting miles by car type, the VMT metric is a major step forward in assessing and reducing overall traffic and pollution. Would Perata really want to inject another layer of analysis on VMT, particularly when VMT alone is already a great measure of pollution and traffic? VMT is already a huge win for infill, why complicate it?
Final paragraph:
The Office of Planning and Research is heading in the wrong direction. Its guidelines promote costly and duplicative environmental impact reports and cumbersome CEQA processes for projects that meet greenhouse gas reduction targets. By expanding CEQA into untested strategies, the office has created new opportunities for abusive lawsuits. This serves no purpose other than NIMBY-ism, costly litigation and cynical abuse of real concern for the environment. The Office of Planning and Research must not aid and abet these foes of economically sound infill development.
VMT is the exact opposite of “costly and duplicative.” That might describe the current traffic study process under CEQA, which these guidelines do away with. VMT is an off-the-shelf metric that is easy and cheap to use. Local governments use it all the time in putting together climate action plans. The state is moving aggressively to enshrine VMT as the metric of choice in many of our policy decisions, precisely because of its simplicity and correlation to traffic and pollution.
Ultimately, despite Perata’s complaint that this CEQA relief for infill will only boost NIMBYism, OPR and infill advocates’ purpose in tossing out the hated CEQA traffic study in favor of VMT is to make urban infill easier and cheaper to build. It’s a shame that Perata does not recognize the SB 743 process for what it is: a significant victory for infill development in California.
