In 2008, one of the bills featured in the FR "Top 20 Bills To Veto" column (co-authored by Senator Dutton and Assemblyman DeVore) was SB 375 (Steinberg).  Unfortunately, that was a bill that despite our singling it out for termination, was signed into law by the Governor.  This ultimate "nanny state" social engineering bill is all about Sacramento politicos imposing their ideological agenda on local planning decisions.  This was a bill that said that if local projects aren’t built to discourage commuting and force people to live a low-carbon lifestyle, then state funds would be withheld.  Sound like something out of the former Soviet Union?  We all thought so…

Fast forward a couple of years and now we sit on the eve the imperial California Air Resources Board getting ready to adopt new mandates for emissions reductions in planning that the contortions that would need to be gone through to meet them would completely trample the most important principles of our republic — freedom and liberty…

After SB 375 was signed into law, all of the various groups, organizations and entities that deal with planning development rolled up their sleeves, to figure out how to deal with yet another onerous regulation out of Sacramento.  They came up with emission reduction targets that most of them felt were "ambitious and reasonable" (repeal of the bill would have been better, but these folks need to deal with the cards they are dealt — though there is a special place down under for those in this constituency who supported SB 375).

That said, the "as good as it gets under the circumstances" targets that were developed through an 18 month process were literally hi-jacked by environmental zealots, many of whom are on the CARB staff, to jam through emission reduction targets that greatly exceed anything modeled or previously discussed. Just as CARB’s diesel regulations were based on incomplete and faulty data, these proposed targets were released with no documentation that explains the radical change, no fiscal or economic analysis of the impacts, and no plan for securing the funding that will be necessary to finance the changes.  This is government planning at its worst and social engineering at full speed. 

The program has not been designed to help Californians reduce carbon emissions, it is instead being used as the justification to raise fuel prices, force residents to live in urban areas and make mass transportation the only economic means of transportation.  SB 375 has become the perfect vehicle to promote a radical social agenda.  Even worse, the proposed regulations will have the immediate effect of driving more manufacturing and construction jobs out of the state by discouraging investment in new developments. 

To their credit Steve Heminger, the Executive Director for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, explained truly how flawed the process was:

Steve Heminger has completed his job. He has laid out all the scenarios and what it would take to get there.  Yet CARB has once again has created a program that far exceeds it publicly stated purpose and poses a significantly greater threat to the freedom and liberty of Californians than even we had envisioned when we urged a veto of SB 375.
   
This type of policy making goes to the heart of what is wrong with California government.  The state establishes goals that are impossible to meet which require individual taxpayers and business to pay more money to the state.  In this case, SB 375 requires a massive increase in government spending to meet the targets. 

This goes straight to the heart of many of our objections about AB 32 implementation.  AB 32 is yet another bill that gives unelected commissioners (like CARB) the ability to wreak havoc on the state’s economy.  We need to pass Prop. 23 because even if the next Governor suspends AB 32 regulations for a year, after that it will be implemented with all of its onerous provisions (long before the economy can recover)…  But I digress…

Under these SB 375 regulations, the fine urban planners and local government officials in San Francisco would be stuck trying to figure out how to get hundreds of thousands of suburbanites from the Bay Area to sell their homes and instead move into The City so that they can try to meet their targets.  How would they do this? 

An independent consultant determined that the Bay Area will need to increase gas prices over $9 per gallon, impose a congestion fee for workers traveling to and from their jobs, and add new parking fees that will discourage people from driving to their workplace.  And, if these “pricing” tactics do not change resident’s behavior, the region will need to relocate 200,000 people from the suburbs to the cities to cut the traffic.

People living outside the urban areas such as Solano County, Roseville, and the Inland Empire can expect their quality of life to change dramatically.   The zealots really do not support ‘smart growth,’ they support no growth. They don’t want California as the land of opportunity, they want less people.  SB 375 has given the elitists the means to make life in California so expensive for working people and small business they will be forced to move elsewhere. 

The Southern California Association of Governments rejected the target levels as unachievable. We urge CARB to put on the brakes before they enact these draconian targets.  Below is a well written letter to CARB from Senate Republican Leader Dennis Hollingsworth, Senate GOP Leader-Elect Bob Dutton, and Assembly Republican Leader Martin Garrick — their message — don’t do this!  Hopefully Governor Schwarzenegger will also weigh in, assuming that this extreme agenda goes way beyond what even he envisioned when he signed Steinberg’s bad bill.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.