residential
On Balance Regional home builders contest a new report that stipulates the Bay Area should limit development on so-called ‘green fields’ to 900 acres a year. By Broderick Perkins
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lawsuit is opening new fissures between a regional planning agency and area home-builders over what constitutes adequate public discourse regarding proper land use. The suit, filed by attorneys with Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of the Home Builders Association of Northern California, considers a biennial planning document just released by the Association of Bay Area Government illegal because it could impose significant land-use restrictions without complying with a key state environmental law. But ABAG says the industry complaint is moot because it challenges the biennial projections report as a planned development document rather than as a planning projections and targets report. For the first time, ABAG set forth a land-use performance target to restrict annual green-field development in the nine-county Bay Area. The target is stated in ABAG’s “Projections and Priorities 2009.” The report stipulates that there should be no more than 900 acres of green-field development a year across the region. Green-field development refers to building on land not built on before. The suit alleges that because federal and state law require ABAG’s projections to be incorporated into land-development and planning efforts included in the Regional Transportation Plan produced by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission that ABAG’s planning document must also produce a California Environmental Quality Act study. CEQA requirements kick in when a proposed public or private development directly or potentially impacts the environment. Along with an environmental impact review of the land in question, CEQA also triggers a
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period of public comments and hearings. “As much as anything, this litigation is about public participation and the lack of procedure and an unwillingness of the staff to follow procedural safeguards that have been part of California law for 30 years,” said Paul Campos, HBANC senior vice president and general counsel. “It’s very telling and troubling,” he said. Perhaps, but Chris Calfee, an attorney with the California Natural Resources Agency charged with enforcing CEQA, said a CEQA study is generally required when a lead agency has the authority to act on a specific project. “Usually that’s a planning commission or the city council,” said Calfee, who has not seen the suit. The MTC, the transportation planning, coordinating and financing agency for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area, says it has not used data from ABAG’s 2009 report and likely won’t. That’s because MTC’s latest Transportation 2035 Plan for the San Francisco Bay Area, which does include a CEQA report, was finalized in April this year. The 2035 plan did incorporate ABAG’s 2007 land-use projections, but there were no ABAG land use targets in its 2007 report. MTC’s next transportation plan is four years away. “We will probably use an updated projections series when we adopt out next plan four years from now,” said Doug Kimsey, MTC’s planning director. “I’m not sure how Projections 2009 plays into this lawsuit with regard to us using it for the regional transportation plan because we didn’t use