Tag Archives: Land Use

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Blog Roundup, Environment, Health Care, Prisons

July 5, 2007 Blog Roundup

Blog Roundup on the flip: More on the Global Warming Solutions Act, the Air Quality Board, and other environmental and land use notes, a couple posts on health insurance, D-Day on prison privatization, the California Foundation for Consumer and Taxpayer Rights, and some shots from the Fourth. If I missed something, toss it into comments.

P.S. Still haven’t solved the link issue in the RSS feed, but working on it.

Environment (Especially
AB32, the 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act)

Health Insurance (or the
failure thereof)

A Couple Other Things

Some Pictures from the
Fourth of July

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Blog Roundup, California, Environment, Health Care

July 2, 2007 California Blog Roundup

Blog roundup from over the weekend is over the fold: A couple more week-in-review posts, a couple health care posts, land and water in the Central Valley, Peter Schrag on the recent gutting of Brown, and a couple more items. If I missed something nifty and lefty over the weekend, toss it into comments.

A Couple More California
Weeks-in-Review

Health Care

Environment

More California Stuff

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Blog Roundup, Environment, Health Care, Prisons

June 29, 2007 Blog Roundup

3 Comments

It’s been a while, but there’s a California Blog Roundup on the flip. Lots of health care coverage, some land use, water worries and environmental coverage, and a fair bit about the atmosphere in the legislature.

If I missed a blog post that should have been here (and it’s a liberal or lefty post), feel free to promote in the comments.

Wow, there’s a lot of
health care posts

Land and water

Federal Representatives
and Elections

Other State Issues

Environment

[From NCP] Upcoming South Bay Land Use Battle

[Originally posted at NorCal Politics February 14, 2006]

This Mercury News Article outlines an upcoming measure to limit growth in Southern Santa Clara County:

The Sierra Club, Greenbelt Alliance, Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society and other members of the coalition — which already has $300,000 in the bank — must collect 36,040 signatures from registered county voters to qualify for the November ballot, something they and their opponents expect will happen.

The measure, which farmers and ranchers fear would drive down the value of their land, would affect nearly half of Santa Clara County’s 839,000 acres.

The complex proposal would essentially do two things. First, it would reduce the number of homes that could be built in unincorporated, rural areas along the east foothills of the Diablo Range from Milpitas to Gilroy, the Santa Cruz Mountains from Gilroy to Los Altos and east of Mount Hamilton. On lands zoned for ranching, for example, it would allow only one home per 160 acres, down from up to eight homes per 160 acres now.

It also would set limits for new development in those areas: curbing the amount of square footage that could be built per parcel, reducing building on ridgelines and banning building unless adequate water is available.

The article has an interesting mini-profile of the author of the measure and a standard set of he-said, she-said quotes.  The final quote of the article is interesting, though:

“Owners have been taking care of their land all these years knowing that at some point they’d be able to sell a piece or two and be able to retire on their land,” said [Jenny] Derry [executive director] of the [Santa Clara County] farm bureau. “We see it as a property rights issue.”

I’m incredibly sympathetic to the need to balance conservation, profitable use, and the traditional rural culture of America.  I’m not, however, sympathetic to painting a rentier’s desire to speculate for extraordinary profit as a “right”.

Land use is where the knives come out in local politics, so this is going to be interesting.  NorCal Politics will try to get sufficiently educated to be of use.

Uncategorized

Angelides: Cleaner Energy, Less Sprawl

3 Comments

I like the way Phil
Angelides is thinking:

Vowing to be “pro-business and pro-environment,”
Democratic
gubernatorial hopeful Phil Angelides unveiled a “Clean California” plan
Thursday that seeks to cut the state’s oil consumption by 25 percent
over 10 years.
…
Angelides said that if he is elected governor, he will introduce
legislation to mandate all new vehicles sold in the state be flexible
fuel cars, capable of running on any mix of gasoline and bio-fuels,
such as ethanol.

He said he would also require major oil companies to supply
bio-fuels
at filling stations to match the number of flexible fuel vehicles on
the road.

In addition, Angelides said he would require state and local
governments to purchase vehicles that use alternative fuels, or to buy
efficient vehicles, such as hybrids, when replacing or expanding their
fleets.

Angelides also said he would:

* Seek to shorten commutes and pollution through
smart-growth plans
that place housing near work and transit. He said he would use state
grants, loans and bonds to rebuild and improve neighborhoods in hopes
of avoiding more sprawl. And he would urge the adoption of laws
requiring regional and local general plans that limit sprawl.

* Propose changing sales tax collections to discourage the
practice of
approving large shopping malls and other tax-producing developments to
help cities and towns pay their bills. Angelides said he would seek to
collect and share sales taxes regionally to eliminate competition
between adjoining cities for development and tax revenues.

* Increase partnerships and investments to encourage the
creation of
clean fuels and technology. He said he would provide incentives to
encourage fuel-efficient choices by business and consumers.

California is a huge market for any business, including the
automotive industry.  They can’t afford to ignore the
California market, so changes in the kinds of vehicles they can sell in
California will also change the vehicles they sell throughout the rest
of the United States.

A statewide emphasis on smart development and public-private
development partnerships would be great, and the change in the tax
distribution model is genius.  One of the perverse outcomes of
Proposition 13 is that every locality wants businesses because they
generate tax revenue for the local governments.  Residential
development, by contrast, is a dead-weight loss — under Proposition
13, it’s almost impossible to pay for the services (schools, police,
fire, roads, water, etc.) that residential development needs.

Some market fundamentalists will protest the state’s intervention in the market. They are of course missing two important issues:

1. The state has already intervened in the market by building roads with tax dollars and encouraging sprawl with its development policies. There’s no inherent reason that further policymaking is inappropriate.

2. Sometimes the market is stupid. In particular, the market is impatient, and wants to externalize as many costs as possible. In the case of energy, it’s not obvious that the market will respond to the long-term needs of the American people, as long as the costs of supplying the market (like the military, pollution, and carbon dioxide) can be externalized to the population at large.