Taking the Next Step – Opportunities to Make a Difference during the Week of June 5

Residential density near
Kew Gardens, London

This is my third week of providing a calendar of opportunities to become more involved in urbanist advocacy.  I’m still fiddling with the content and format, but have received supportive feedback, so will be continuing with the concept.

This is also an interesting week to write about advocacy.  I have examples and am observation to share.

On Wednesday, I attended the Board meeting of Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit, the folks who are returning commuter rail to the North Bay later this year.  The agenda included Board consideration of a fare structure for the train.  I attended with several other members of Friends of SMART, most of whom shared my concern that the fares under consideration by the Board were too high.

I had a number of specific reasons for my fare concerns, starting with the fact that the system is incomplete, missing extensions north and south, the second station in Petaluma, transit-oriented development throughout the system, and parking facilities, bike and car, at many stations.  I feared that the fares initially considered didn’t adequately reflect the unfinished state.

Also, I was concerned by talk among Board members about the need to “recoup” the costs of building the system.  Consumers don’t make spending decisions based on what the product costs to make; they make decisions based on the value they receive versus other choices, such as driving.  Being blind to how consumer decisions are made seemed a risk.

Lastly, I believed that the future success of SMART can’t rest solely on enticing current commuters out of their cars, but instead on nurturing the next generation of commuters to live transit-oriented lives, with fewer household cars and daily reliance on trains and buses.  To foster that generation required a fare that would encourage them to experiment with the new train until it became integrated into their lives.  And until the non-railroad improvements, such as transit-oriented development, were in place.

It was the last point on which I chose to focus in my comments.  Other public speakers chose different perspectives, but all expressed concern about the fares.

As best, we had partial success.  The Board approved a fare structure lower than we had feared, but higher than we had hoped.  However, several of the points that I’d made found their way into the Board discussion, including comments by one director who ended up voting against the adopted fare structure.  I’ve had many less successful advocacy efforts.

On Thursday, I was on the other side of the dais.  As the chair of the Petaluma Transit Advisory Committee, I’d been advised that a number of residents from a Petaluma neighborhood would attend our committee meeting to express displeasure with a proposed bus route.  They didn’t show up.  Instead, several seniors who were thrilled about the bus route provided supportive testimony and engaged in a helpful discussion on how to do effective community outreach with a limited budget and staff.

Both experiences reinforced a long-time observation.  Not every advocacy battle can be won.  But if you keep showing up, undeterred by past failures, you’ll find a moment in time when ground is suddenly gained.  The needle of public opinion on deep-seated cultural standards, such as our land-use forms, doesn’t spin easily, but it will move in fits and spurts if we keep our shoulders to it.

Please make use of this observation, perhaps starting with one of the opportunities below.

Upcoming Meetings

MTC/ABAG, Saturday, June 4, 8:30am, Corte Madera Community Center, 498 Tamalpais Drive, Corte Madera – This is one of a series of meetings seeking input for the Bay Area 2040 plan on transportation funding strategies.  (Reminder: These are the meetings that were largely shut down by Agenda 21 disruptions during the last planning effort in 2012.  I was at the Sonoma County meeting back then and ruminated at length on the disturbances, here, here, and here.  I still agree with much of what I wrote four years ago.)   I’ll attend this meeting and am willing to carpool from Petaluma if anyone wishes.

Petaluma City Council, Monday, June 6, 7:00pm, 11 English Street, Petaluma – Until yesterday afternoon, the agenda included a vote on whether to proceed with a grant application for Petaluma Boulevard South.  The scope of work would have “right-sized” the roadway, likely similar to the changes made several years ago to the downtown segment of Petaluma Boulevard.  The changes would have made the street friendlier to pedestrians and bicyclists.

It would have been a great project, one that Petaluma Urban Chat recently designated as one of the top five urbanist opportunities in Petaluma.

However, the item was removed from the agenda late yesterday, without explanation or a date to which the item would be deferred.

I suggest that proponents of right-sizing of Petaluma Boulevard South attend the Council meeting regardless and express their desire for the improvement during the Public Comment section.  (I’d do myself, but will be away at an urbanist conference.)

Petaluma Urban Chat, Wednesday, June 8, 7:00pm, Aqus Café, 2nd and H Streets, Petaluma –Urban Chat will discuss the Bay Area 2040 plan and the role of regional planning.  One goal will be encouraging folks to attend the Sonoma County outreach meeting on June 13.  Those who attended the June 4 Marin County outreach meeting will report on their impressions.  (Note: I normally facilitate Urban Chat but, in my absence, Bjorn Griepenburg will facilitate.)

MTC/ABAG, Monday, June 13, 6:00pm, Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa –This will be the Sonoma County outreach meeting for input to the Bay Area 2040 plan.

Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit Board, Wednesday, June 15, 1:30pm, 5401 Old Redwood Highway, Petaluma – The agenda isn’t yet posted, but it was noted during the last meeting that a further discussion of Clipper, the only source of payment to be accepted on SMART, would be held, including the mechanics of using a Clipper card, the limitations of the current iteration of Clipper, and the possibilities of the coming Clipper 2.0.

Rail~Volution, October 10-12, Hyatt Regency, San Francisco – The leading conference on the use of rail for community building is coming to San Francisco this fall.  I’m tentatively planning on attending.

Other Involvement Opportunities

City of Petaluma – The City is seeking volunteers for openings on City Commissions and Committees.  In many years, some bodies, notably the Planning Commission and Pedestrian/Bicycle Advisory Committee, attract more applicants than openings, but other bodies struggle to maintain full complements.  Citizens willing to take an active role on these commissions and committees can be surprisingly capable of making community changes.  The application deadline is Thursday, June 9, so now is the time to make the commitment.

Lots of opportunities to get involved.  Please grab at least one and hopefully more.

My plan is to write an involvement post every week.  However, I’ll be at the urbanist conference next week, so my next involvement post will follow my return.

The conference will be in Detroit.  My next post will be a personal perspective on the past failures and future hopes of Detroit.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Taking the Next Step – Opportunities for Public Education and Participation, Week of May 29

Urban setting in London

I write about urbanism and enjoy doing so.  I hope I’ve opened some eyes to different ways to configure our North Bay communities, alternatives that will make us more resilient, sustainable, and financially solvent.

However, growing a cadre of enthusiastic, but closeted, urbanists doesn’t change the world.  Instead, those converts must take part in the decision-making processes.  Voting wisely in November is a good start, but attending meetings with urbanist angles and looking for the right moments to put a shoulder to the wheel is also important.

Thus, I present a weekly summary of meetings that urbanists, newly-minted or long-standing, might consider attending and at which they can look for the right time to add their thoughts.  I also note a few other opportunities for public involvement.

Upcoming Meetings

Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit, Wednesday, June 1, 1:30pm, 5401 Old Redwood Highway, Petaluma – The SMART Board is scheduled to meet, although the agenda isn’t yet posted.  (Update: The agenda has now been posted and will include the discussion of fares, a subject noted below under Other Involvement Opportunities.)

Sonoma County Transportation and Land-Use Coalition, Wednesday, June 1, 4:00pm, Environmental Center of Sonoma County, 55 Ridgway Avenue # A, Santa Rosa – SCTLC has been a long-time leader in forward thinking about more sustainable land-use options, including early advocacy for SMART.  Their next meeting will consider the next generation of land-use changes, including a discussion of rail options beyond SMART.

MTC/ABAG, Thursday, June 2, 11:00am, Finley Community Center, 2060 W. College Avenue, Santa Rosa – The Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments are kicking off their Bay Area 2040 plan to identify the best strategies for efficient investment of transportation resources.  This will be the scoping meeting to elicit public input on the environment impact study to be prepared for Bay Area 2040.  (Note: This meeting is strictly on the EIR and is different than the outreach meetings that will seek input to Bay Area 2040 and are noted below.)

Petaluma Transit Advisory Committee, Thursday, June 2, 4:00pm, Petaluma City Hall – MTC has delayed the due date for the Short Range Transit Plan, allowing more time for North Bay transit agencies to consider their interconnections with the coming SMART train, but the Transit Committee will still have SRTP decisions to ponder, including possible adjustments to evening service.  (Acknowledgment: I serve as chair of the committee.) 

MTC/ABAG, Saturday, June 4, 8:30am, Corte Madera Community Center, 498 Tamalpais Drive, Corte Madera – This is one of a series of meeting at which input will be sought for the Bay Area 2040 plan on transportation funding strategies.  (Reminder: These are the meetings that were largely shut down by Agenda 21 disruptions during the last planning effort in 2012.  I was at the Sonoma County meeting back then and ruminated at length on the disturbances, here , here, and here.  I still agree with much of what I wrote four years ago.)

Petaluma Urban Chat , Wednesday, June 8, 7:00pm, Aqus Café, 2nd and H Streets, Petaluma –Urban Chat will discuss the Bay Area 2040 with the goal of enticing folks to attend the Sonoma County outreach meeting on June 13.  Those who attended the June 4 Marin County meeting will report on their impressions.  (Note: I normally facilitate Urban Chat, but will be away at an urbanist conference.  Bjorn Griepenburg will facilitate in my absence.)

MTC/ABAG, Monday, June 13, 6:00pm, Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa –This will be the Sonoma County outreach meeting for input to Bay Area 2040.

Other Involvement Opportunities

City of Petaluma – The City is seeking volunteers for openings on City Commissions and Committees.  In many years, some bodies, notably the Planning Commission and Pedestrian/Bicycle Advisory Committee, attract more applicants than openings, but other bodies struggle to maintain full complements.  Citizens willing to take an active role on these commissions and committees can be surprisingly capable of making community changes.

California Road Charge – Although the deadline is only days away, volunteers are still being sought to help conduct a pilot study on the use of vehicle mileage charges to replace the gas tax.  Although 7,400 volunteers have already signed up for 5,000 spaces in the study, the organizers are still trying to fill demographic groups they believe are underrepresented.  (I’ve previously signed up.)

SMART – The SMART Board is still seeking your thoughts on a fare structure.  Since I first mentioned this poll a week ago, questioning its over-simplicity, the North Bay has largely agreed with me and gone much further.

A Petaluma architect wrote a pointed email to SMART management asking about connections between fares and whether employees would get living wages, whether the extension to Larkspur would be completed sooner, and whether the second Petaluma station would be build sooner.  To my knowledge, he didn’t get a response.

Perhaps even more importantly, many in the North Bay are greatly concerned by the fares, with the fear that ridership will be depressed if the fares don’t offer a sufficient incentive to overcome the advantages given to cars in our car-centric land-pattern.

I find the point reasonable.  My thought is that fares need to be set such that ridership approximates the initial estimates.  If we’re going to spend the money to build a game-changing rail system, we need to ensure that enough people ride for the game to be truly changed.

Meanwhile, folks interested in the role of SMART in the North Bay may want to mark June 15 on their calendars.  It seems likely that the SMART Board will continue their consideration of fares at that meeting.  (Update: The discussion will instead be on the June 1 agenda.)

Lots of opportunities to get involved.  Please grab at least one and hopefully more.

With the full-scale testing of the SMART train likely coming in June, my next post will offer some perspective on the immediate impacts to the communities to be served by the train.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Is It Time for Regional Government?

Housing in the Goose Hollow District of Portland

Events might be leading the Bay Area to a fundamental change in our pattern of governance.  I think it’d be a good change although, as on most topics, I remain willing to consider counter-arguments.

Let me begin the discussion with a hypothetical question.  Imagine a large business with operations in many regions.  Within its domain is one particular region where it produces several highly profitable products.

To earn that profit, there are three departments in the region, sales, manufacturing, and shipping, which must work well together.  Each department is organized with a staff overseen by a department manager.

Here’s the question.  To whom should the three department managers report?  Should there be a regional director to oversee interdepartmental coordination first hand?  Or should the departments report to a vice president in the corporate office who would be at a distance and would have more departments in other regions to also oversee?

Perhaps I’ve presented the question with a too obvious slant, but I expect it’s apparent to most that a regional director would be the better solution.  If effective integration is essential to an operation, the person responsible for that integration should be in a position to closely oversee the integration, which almost always means daily eye-contact.  Most readers who have worked for larger corporations have likely experienced this structure as the standard organizational approach.

(I once worked for a corporation that tried the other approach, with each group within an office reporting to group directors in the corporate office.  It wasn’t effective.  Along with most other offices, the office where I worked gave lip service to the corporate dictate, but resumed coordination within the office long before the corporate office gave up the experiment.)

Now, here’s the unfortunate fact.  What is a commonsense organizational structure throughout the business world isn’t followed at a crucial level of government.

Within a region, cities and counties are the equivalent of departments.  The roles of the local governmental units may not be as clear-cut as sales, manufacturing, and shipping, but each city and county is unique, providing a distinctive blend of residential, agricultural, manufacturing, professional, creative, and tourism roles without which the region would be diminished.

And yet much of the coordination between the local governments is overseen not at the local level, but at Sacramento, where the governor and legislature must worry not only about the Bay Area, but also San Diego, Los Angeles, Fresno, and a multitude of other regions and districts.

Regional government isn’t an unknown concept in the U.S.  Portland is often cited as the gold standard, with the only elected regional government in the country.  Minneapolis –St. Paul is often noted as rivaling Portland for regional coordination and Unigov in Indianapolis has also had successes.

But the origins of those regional governments trace back several decades.  With the exception of some rumblings in Cleveland, creation of new regional governments doesn’t have any current momentum.  As a former head of Portland Metro was quoted in CityLab on Portland and Minneapolis-St. Paul, “How is it that you can have these two models who apparently sit atop two very successful metropolitan regions, where costs have been managed more efficiently than other places, where they’ve gotten their regional act together – why doesn’t that spread?  Why isn’t it imitated?”

To be clear, it’s not that the Bay Area is without regional coordination.  There are a number of organizations that fill a coordination role, starting with MTC (Metropolitan Transportation Commission) and ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments).  But their roles are more related to setting regional strategies and serving as conduits for state and national funds than as a true level of government.  To the extent that they have authority, it comes from the control of purse strings.

But there are rumblings of change.  MTC’s Bay Area 2040 plan, now getting underway, will again focus attention on the correct role for regional planning.

Also, using their role as a principal funder of ABAG, MTC is conducting a study into the merger or “functional consolidation” of the two agencies, a possible step toward regional government.  Although MTC is aggressively promoting the idea as good for the region, some journalists are questioning the process and the underlying motives. 

Within the North Bay, the Press Democrat considers regional government worth possible study, but remains concerned that the North Bay would be trampled under a regional government.

I share the concerns of the Press Democrat, but lean more strongly toward a regional government.  I lived for many years in Oregon and watched as Portland made progress as a region.  They didn’t reach perfection, no place ever does, but they made better progress than they would have without the regional focus.

Alert readers may see hints of contradictions in my intended support for official regional problem-solving.

For one, I’ve always argued for the primacy of cities as the level of government from which economic productivity flows.  However, regional government would put another level of government above cities.  I see the conflict, but will argue that it’s the only possible response to the growth of suburbia.

San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose are the beating hearts of the region and set the stage for much of the economic activity.  It’s hard to conceive Silicon Valley or the Wine Country having the worldwide impact they do without the biggest cities having established the regional framework.

But the other cities and counties also play roles.  If San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose are the triple beating hearts, then San Rafael, Santa Rosa, and Healdsburg are other essential organs.  (This is an analogy that I’d best not carry too far.)  In the absence of strong regional coordination, the flow of oxygen and nutrients isn’t as effective as it should be.

So regional government wouldn’t be about suppressing the biggest cities, but about adjusting the region to allow the biggest cities to excel at what they do best.

Also, barely more than a year ago, I argued that Petaluma Transit shouldn’t be folded into a regional transit provider.  (Acknowledgment: I chair the advisory committee for Petaluma Transit.)  My grounds were that Petaluma Transit was better positioned to respond to the local demands on transit, such as adjusting bus schedules to better accommodate the final bell at local high schools or modifying routes to serve newly opened senior communities.

I still believe that argument, while also seeing the value in more regional government.  It’s the eternal challenge to government of how to provide a friendly, helpful attitude toward local problems while also claiming the efficiencies of bigger operations and coordinated strategies.  But the fact that it’s a hard balance to find doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep trying.  And any attempt at regional government must decide which functions should be regionalized and which should stay local.

So, I favor regional government, at least until someone convinces me otherwise.  But I’m eager to hear other perspectives.  Feel free to join the debate.

When I next write, it will be to provide a schedule of upcoming meetings and other involvement opportunities at which urbanist thinking can be advanced and urbanist voices can add to the conversation.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)