10 minute read
Off the mark?
State needs to back public transit with funding
By Jeff Morales Special to CalMatters
Decades of federal and state transportation policy and funding have focused primarily on the automobile — and the roads and highways needed for us to get around in them. While this focus produced many benefits, it also ignored or created significant problems, such as greenhouse gas emissions, a key driver of climate change. Today, half of all greenhouse gas emissions in California come from transportation.
Agencies and processes have been built to support this focus. Caltrans and regional transportation agencies receive federal and state funds not only to build and maintain, but also to develop highway and road improvements — doing the planning, public engagement, preliminary design, environmental and other work needed to get projects ready. It can take years for major projects to make it through the approvals required before construction can start. Significant resources are dedicated to this annually, and there are statewide structures in place to carry it out. It is necessary work in order to have a pipeline of projects ready to be implemented when funding becomes available.
No parallel system is in place for public transit and rail projects, however.
Much of this structural disconnect flows down from decades of federal policy and funding constraints. For the most part, public transit and rail improvements are a series of one-off projects, with local agencies on the hook to develop and advance them. Unless the governor and Legislature address this, California’s ambitious climaterelated goals for increased public transit and rail will not be realized. If the state wants to change the outcomes, then it is vital that it change the processes and funding that produce the outcomes.
California has recognized the need to move away from our heavy reliance on cars and toward a more balanced transportation system. In the last decade, the state has taken important steps to reduce transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions, including through creation of the Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program (TIRCP), funded through the cap-and-trade program. Gov. Gavin Newsom has issued executive orders calling for the state to use its funding to create a shift in transportation and has proposed boosting funding for TIRCP with surplus funds.
For all the progress, an important problem hasn’t been addressed: the disconnect between statewide policy goals and funding structures. The lack of dedicated funding and structures to develop transit and rail projects — as compared with the well-established funding for highways — particularly undermines our ability to make systemic, strategic investments that can have broad, statewide benefits.
Significant state resources are going into transit and rail. But the “C” in TIRCP stands for “Capital” — meaning construction. State law effectively limits the use of TIRCP funds to the construction of greenhouse gasreducing projects — those that local agencies have been able to advance to readiness. The restriction means that the state is not able to support the growth of a pipeline of projects that can result in meaningful change — especially major transformative projects that maximize the reduction of greenhouse gases.
For example, both the state and the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission have identified a new transbay rail crossing as a critical investment for Northern California to meet both mobility and climate goals. But neither has ongoing dedicated funding to plan and develop that project, as they would for a major highway improvement. As a result, local agencies — in this case BART and the Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority — are left to track down and secure funding to advance a state and regional priority project. Ironically, once a project like this gets through the planning and development process, funding for actual construction is more readily available.
The state can take steps to better align policy and funding, including: n Taking full advantage of
commenTary
recent changes in federal programs that allow funds to be used to support the development of transit and rail projects n Investing in the resources needed to develop a pipeline of transit and rail projects, as is done for highway and road projects n Expanding the eligibility of state funding programs to allow for the development of projects n Dedicating a portion of federal and state transit and rail funding to the development of a pipeline of projects.
As part of its climate change strategy, California has set visionary statewide goals for transit and rail. But it needs to put resources and focus behind a statewide push to achieve those goals. — Jeff Morales, managing principal with InfraStrategies LLC, is the former CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority and former director of the California Department of Transportation. He wrote this for CalMatters, a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s Capitol works and why it matters.
Poem of the month
The Orgasms of Organisms
Above the lawn the wild beetles mate and mate, skew their tough wings and join. They light in our hair, on our arms, fall twirling and twinning into our laps. And below us, in the grass, the bugs are seeking each other out, antennae lifted and trembling, tiny legs scuttling, then the infinitesimal ahs of their meeting, the awkward joy of their turnings around. O end to end they meet again and swoon as only bugs can. This is why, sometimes, the grass feels electric under our feet, each blade quivering, and why the air comes undone over our heads and washes down around our ears like rain. But it has to be spring, and you have to be in love—acutely, painfully, achingly in love— to hear the black-robed choir of their sighs.
— Dorianne Laux from “Smoke,” (BOA Editions, 2000) reprinted with permission of the author
————
Dorianne Laux’s sixth collection, “Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems” was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her fifth collection,The Book of Men, was awarded The Paterson Prize. Her fourth book of poems, “Facts About the Moon,” won The Oregon Book Award and was shortlisted for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also the author of “Awake; What We Carry,” a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; “Smoke”; as well as a fine small press edition, “The Book of Women.” She is the co-author of the celebrated text “The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry.”
Laux is one of the most accomplished poets I know. This beautiful poem illustrates much of what I love about her work: its compression of image and meaning, the comic and erotic nature of her subject, and the ecstatic, divinely humane turn the poem takes at its end. Laux is a poet that sees the world deeply and never shies away from shadow, but more often than not, she chooses to celebrate the miracle of our time on this planet.
You can see this joy in the poem’s wonderful title, “The Orgasm of Organisms.” (Laux has previously stated that this title is borrowed from a poem by the late Adam Zagajewski, who is himself a poetry master). From there, Laux wastes no time launching into a description of a lawn alive with mating beetles that are not only skewing “their tough wings” to join, but are chaotically, frantically, oblivious to the humans gathered alongside and beneath them.
As the insects “light on our hair, our arms” and “fall twirling and twinning/ into our laps.”, we can see these mating bugs, feel them, and even hear something of their frantic activity in the rhythm Laux employs to enhance the ceaseless movement, the rise and fall, the joining and opening of these tiny creatures.
Further expanding on this wildly alive situation, Laux suggests that the orgasmic sounds of the beetles’ pleasure is audible. In fact, their awkward joy animates the grass with erotic energy until the very “air comes undone over our heads/ and washes down around our ears like rain.” This kind of amplification of a scene through both careful description and wonderful imagination is one of the central gifts that a poet like Laux can deliver to her reader.
But there is more! Laux now moves into the poem’s turn. A turn, which generally occurs at the end of a poem, is a way of opening the poem into a larger, unexpected, meaning. In the final sentence of this poem, Laux now turns from the sensory descriptions into an explanation of this improbable scenario. Laux lets us in on a beautiful revelation: that we can only hear the bugs little ahs of joy, or feel the grass made electric with erotic charge, if we, the reader, are in love. And furthermore, we must not simply be in love, but must feel desperately, completely, painfully in love. We must be lost in love. Only then will we be able to hear the black robed choir of their sighs.
It seems to me that Laux is making a comparison between a church choir in black robes singing to the divine mystery with the wildly mating beetles. This wonderful elevation of insect life underlies her transformation of beetles in their black carapaces into a mysterious, joyous act of divinity and love. This is the gift of the poem, how organisms like beetles can act together, can be driven together, in a way that suggests a larger presence. Most times we miss these moments.
We swat the beetles away and move indoors. But a poet like Dorianne Laux hangs on in the scene until we believe her, especially in spring on planet earth, and especially if we ourselves are attuned to such miracles because we are dissolving, desperate, achingly in love! — Julia Levine Davis Poet Laureate
leTTers
Davis needs lab space
It appears that the No on H are outmarketing the Yes on H with sky is falling messages. Here’s why I think DISC is a good project: We don’t have enough R&D space for homegrown entrepreneurs so they drive (totals of several hundred of cars each day) to locations such as Woodland (e.g. The Lab at Agstart) and West Sacramento.
Recently, the Sac Business Journal reported this about a UC Davis spin-out chocolate company: “But California Cultured needs to expand, (CEO) Perlstein said. It has 17 employees now, and the scientists sometimes work in shifts to have lab space. Perlstein said California Cultured will likely have to move out of Davis because it’s so difficult to find lab space in the college town, and the company will likely grow to 45 employees by the end of next year.”
Scientists need labs to do their work; they can’t do lab work remotely on zoom (as suggested by one No on H letter writer) and they need adjacent offices while waiting on experiments. I looked at many open office spaces available in Davis; DISC is highly unlikely to cannibalize existing space, as it is is simply not suitable for applied life science companies. The manufacturing space in the project will not allow polluting, dirty businesses (as No on H suggested) but is expected to include fermentation (we already have that in the city with Sudwerk) and formulation of natural materials.
R&D-based jobs means more people to eat at Davis restaurants for lunch. Note, during COVID lockdown, many of us with Davis businesses bought our employees (Marrone Bio has 65 employees in Davis) lunch at a different Davis restaurant each week to help keep them in business. A UCD sustainability prof informed me that the project connects two important habitats, now a disconnected patchwork, therefore improving the current ecosystem. We need affordable housing and this project requires to contribute both in and outside the project.
These are just some of the many reasons why I support Measure H.
Pam Marrone
Davis
Open letter by former mayors
I’m writing to express my sadness with the level of discourse that our community has sunk to under the ordinance that requires a vote on annexation of land into the city. The recent attack on a sitting city council member by six former mayors represents a new low.
While condemning Dan Carson for breaking protocol to respond to public comment the signers were comfortable enough with the Chair of the No on H campaign using public comment to call Carson “A bully and a thug” among other things, that their letter didn’t bother to mention what was said that provoked Carson’s response.
Certainly our elected officials should be held to high standards but shouldn’t the leaders of election campaigns also be expected to conduct themselves with some level of decency in our public discourse? Apparently these six former mayors aren’t concerned about that.
Ron Glick
Davis
icymi: our Top 5 sTories of The week
n UCD assistant water polo coach held on child pornography charges: http://wp.me/p3aczg-4agm n UCD student killed in campus collision: http://wp.me/p3aczg-4anM n COVID levels in city’s wastewater nearly as high as January peak: http://wp.me/p3aczg-4als
