WILL URBAN SPRAWL AGAIN BE A BIG HOUSING ANSWER

 

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2024, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“WILL URBAN SPRAWL AGAIN BE A BIG HOUSING ANSWER?”

 

        Urban sprawl has been anathema to California housing planners for the last 10 years or so. As they passed law after law eliminating zoning for single-family residences and emphasizing high rise buildings and other infill housing near mass transit, the old California pattern of building outward became passe.

 

        But maybe not anymore.

 

        Two prospective massive new developments emerged from obscurity into the realm of distinct possibility over the last few months.

 

        One would be in mostly rural portions of Solano County, an often-overlooked county covering much of the ground between Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay area and stretching south toward Stockton. The other would extend Fresno to the southeast.

 

        Together, the two proposed developments (neither as yet has won even a single government agency’s approval) could account for as many as 85,000 new housing units, mostly single family. That would provide a sizeable chunk of the 1.8 million new dwelling units in one estimate of current housing need from the state Department of Housing and Community Development.

 

        But some words of caution are advised here: Tejon Ranch. Housing advocates rejoiced in 2021, when the big land company with huge amounts of vacant property atop the Grapevine area between Los Angeles and Bakersfield, got an OK from Kern County. But less than two years later, a Los Angeles County judge sent the project back to the drawing board, and its approval process may now drag on for many years.

 

        Still, in this era when every new law seems to seek a knockdown for existing housing and commercial buildings in exchange for large new apartment buildings with stores, gyms and other commerce on the lowest floors, there’s may be broad appeal to brand new homes on what has been agricultural land.

 

        In Solano County, a group of Silicon Valley billionaires including Lorraine Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple Corp. co-founder Steve Jobs, and other venture capitalists, quietly bought up more than 55,000 acres (78 square miles) of pastureland wind farms and other low-density development. They appear willing to pay whatever penalties are needed for taking the land out of agricultural use, where the state’s Williamson Act has long given much of it preferred tax status in exchange for remaining rural.

 

        This projected new city, which would have more than 10,000 acres of parks, could eventually become the largest town in Solano County, where Fairfield is the county seat and other significant locales include Rio Vista, Vacaville, Dixon and Suisun City.

 

        To change the use of so much land would require first a vote of the entire county and then a slew of other permits from state and regional agencies. So this is years away, but promises lots of affordable housing, plus European-style homes for wealthier buyers. And plenty of profit for the billionaire investors.

 

        Then there’s the Southeast Development Area on the edge of Fresno, a mostly-rural area of about 9,000 acres whose prospective developers promise a series of “walkable” neighborhoods in what would be one of Fresno’s most sprawling suburbs. Plans tentatively call for each neighborhood to have its own elementary school, community garden, shops and parks. Plenty of public transit is also proposed.

 

        This one also would need public votes and myriad government permits before going forward.

 

        In both places, local opposition has already formed. Solano County Supervisor Monica Brown, a former schoolteacher, told one reporter that “We’re growing food and helping people (now). Why would you stop economic growth like that? Why would they spend $800 million and not be transparent about it?”

 

        Brown referred to the five years of secrecy investors maintained while becoming Solano County’s largest landowners. Their spokesman responded that secrecy was needed to prevent speculative land price increases.

 

        At the same time, school officials and others worry about “gaping holes” in infrastructure if the southeast area plan goes forward.

 

        But prospective developers of both areas say they will take care of all those concerns.

 

        So it will initially be up to local voters to decide: Do they want new, but traditionally California-style developments near them, or do they want to leave things alone and thus have the state continue stressing urban infill? Or could these possible new suburbs be harbingers of other new developments in California deserts and the Central Valley?

 

         

            -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

AT LAST, SOMEONE SLOWS WILDLAND DEVELOPMENT

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 8, 2022, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

        “AT LAST, SOMEONE SLOWS WILDLAND DEVELOPMENT”

 

        For decades, it’s been a truism of California life and politics: The more development pushes out into formerly wild lands, the more damaging the forest and brush fires that follow.   

 

        This has played out to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in damage and more than 100 lives lost over the last five years, with fire after fire destroying homes and cutting off escape routes.

 

        But still, development continued virtually unabated. Until early this year, when a judge in sparsely populated Lake County said “No!” to a 16,000-acre luxury mixed use project on land partly singed by past fires and partly deemed likely to flare up in future ones.

 

        Most seriously, Lake County Superior Court Judge J. David Markham wrote in his landmark ruling, the development could close off or overcrowd fire evacuation routes, dooming many to death, as happened during the 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County.

 

        Markham also noted that parts of the land involved in the putative Maha Guenoc Valley project have burned in 1952, 1953, 1963, 1976, 1980, 1996, 2006, 2014, 2015 and 2018.

 

        It’s hardly surprising that such a landmark ruling comes in Lake County, which since 2012 has been victimized by the Cache Fire, the Clearlake Fire, the Ranch Fire portion of the Mendocino Complex, the Jerusalem Fire, the Pawnee Fire, the Valley Fire, the LNU Lightning Complex Fire and the August Complex Fire, which covered 1.032 million acres by itself in Lake, Glenn, Mendocino, Tehama, Trinity and Shasta counties after originating as 38 separate blazes.

 

        The judge ruled in a lawsuit brought by state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and several environmental groups claiming the project could prove disastrous to both its own future residents and guests but also to present area residents.

 

        So Lake County and the developer are back to Square 1. This project won’t happen unless it is reduced, with major design changes and perhaps more roads.

 

        Other judges had previously struck down smaller developments in both San Diego and Los Angeles counties due to fire risks, but the likelihood is that they will ultimately proceed, with a few changes. The fate of the Lake County project is less certain.

 

        What is certain is that every time a major fire burns hundreds or thousands of homes, California’s serious housing shortage gets worse.

 

        But state legislators don’t even try to be innovative or forward looking about this. Their steady answer for housing problems: More new development.

 

        That was the thinking behind last year’s SB 9 and SB 10, which all but eliminated single family zoning. They are now law, allowing virtually every current one-house lot to be split, with six new units replacing today’s one. But those new laws require no new parking, no new water supplies, no new school buildings, no traffic mitigation – none of the measures developers of new tracts have had to provide over the last few decades.

 

        The only way to keep these laws allowing massive amounts of piecemeal new housing from becoming permanent is to qualify a currently circulating ballot initiative for the November ballot and pass it, thus returning local land use decisions to locally elected city councils and county supervisors.

 

        State lawmakers, many of whose campaigns are funded in large part by developers, assiduously ignore the fast-expanding vacancies in office buildings all around the state. These are created when white collar workers at law firms, insurance companies, stock brokerages and many other concerns shift to working at home, as happened en masse when the coronavirus pandemic began two years ago.

 

        Now a huge part of California’s work force says it will continue working at home indefinitely, and major companies from Google to Twitter to Hulu are saying OK. Meetings and conversations happen virtually, and employers say efficiency has not suffered much, if at all.

 

        Some conversion of the office space left vacant by all this has already begun. But it needs to happen on a much larger scale if it’s to put a real dent in the housing problem.

 

        Maybe, just maybe, the increasing difficulty of building near the convergence of wildland and urban sprawl will force legislators to make OKs automatic for the much less expensive conversions, even if that mean less profit for their developer patrons.

 

-30-
    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

BROWN’S LEGACY PROJECTS WON’T HAPPEN AS PLANNED

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2019 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

       “BROWN’S LEGACY PROJECTS WON’T HAPPEN AS PLANNED”

          The farther four-term Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown gets from the state Capitol’s “horseshoe” office suite, the less anyone in power has seems to care about completing either of his two “legacy” projects.

          For one,the fate of the high speed rail “bullet train” project authorized under a 2008 ballot proposition just became more clear. New Gov. Gavin Newsom has decided the state should keep and use bridges and viaducts already built in the Central Valley. But not as part of a Los Angeles-to-San Francisco bullet train. Rather, he sees a high speed rail project of a different scope, confined to running between Bakersfield and Merced.

Not exactly the same vision Californians voted for, as they figured on eventually whisking from one metropolis to the other in about two hours.

“Let’s be real,” Newsom said in his first state of the state speech. “The project as currently planned would cost too much and take too long.” So he’ll shorten it, while not wasting work that’s already done.

The shortened high-speed route, he predicted, will “unlock the enormous potential of the Central Valley.”

          Newsom, who predicted last year that the bullet train could help solve housing affordability problems by linking the Central Valley and its lower-priced homes to high-priced, high-salary areas of both the San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles areas, has concluded that won’t happen.

          Newsom never made any such hopeful prediction about Brown’s other big plan, the so-called “Twin Tunnels” water project to bring more reliability to supplies of Northern California river water flowing toward urban Southern California and farms in the San Joaquin Valley.

          The Twin Tunnels, planned to run beneath the Delta of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers to the point near Tracy where giant pumps now send millions of gallons southward, now won’t happen as designed. Instead, Newsom indicated he’ll try for a single tunnel because, as he put it, “The status quo is not an option. We need to protect our water supply from earthquakes and rising sea levels, preserve Delta fisheries and meet the needs of cities and farms.”

The two-tunnel notion earlier suffered a huge setback midway between Newsom’s election and his inauguration, when the state Department of Water Resources withdrew certification of the plan.

          This essentially sent the tunnels back to the drawing board just as Brown left office.

          Newsom had little to say about the tunnels plan during his campaign and remained noncommittal when Brown, Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Bakersfield Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House GOP leader, agreed in late 2018 to try to extend a federal law aiming to deliver more Northern California water south over environmental objections.

          They backed an extension beyond 2021 of key provisions in the 2016 federal Water Infrastructure for Improvements for the Nation (WIIN) Act via a year-end federal spending bill.

          This will make almost $1 billion in federal funds available for new California water storage, both surface and below ground, and lets the federal Central Valley Project provide some water to the state project to increase southward water deliveries. The one-tunnel approach will be cheaper than two and provide most of the same benefits, Newsom seemed to say.

          Whether or not that’s correct, statements by lawyers for outfits like the Natural Resources Defense Council make it seem certain that the WIIN funding won’t come for years while legal infighting persists in both federal and state courts.

          Newsom sees the single tunnel as a way to improve drinking water quality in much of the Central Valley, while also stabilizing water supplies and fishing, goals not nearly as ambitious as Brown had for the plan.

          But unlike Brown, whose father Gov. Pat Brown pushed through the state Water Project in the 1960s, Newsom has no family legacy at stake here. This might make it easier for him to take a cool, clearheaded look at Brown’s ambitious plans.

          Which means that no matter how unhappy it might make Brown in his Colusa County retirement, neither of his largest plans will proceed in anything like the form he envisioned.

    -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net.

GASOLINE PRICE GOUGING INDICATIONS GROW STRONGER

CALIFORNIA FOCUS

FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 8, 2016, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “GASOLINE PRICE GOUGING INDICATIONS GROW STRONGER”

          As corporate profit reports rolled in this winter from the gasoline refining industry, the case for gas price gouging grew steadily stronger.

          Start with the profits of the largest refiners operating in California. Then proceed to strange activities by an oil tanker, ExxonMobil’s SR American Progress. Close with hard figures provided by the state Energy Commission’s senior fuels specialist during a mid-February hearing. Look also at the almost 80-cent price differential between gasoline here and the average price everywhere else in the continental U.S.

          The profits: An analysis (so far unchallenged) by the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group found the state’s second-largest refiner, Tesoro, also known as tsocorp, netted $1.9 billion in profits last year from California refining operations. At a time when crude oil prices were lower than they’ve been in half a generation, Tesoro, maker of 27 percent of this state’s gas (marketed under the USA and Shell labels, among others), took $423 million in fourth quarter profits alone.

          Meanwhile, Valero, the state’s No. 3 refiner, netted $852 million in California last year. Valero is the only refiner reporting California-specific data. Its 2015 profits were four times Valero's average annual take since 2010, which was just over $216 million per year.

          Chevron, the state’s gasoline-producing leader with a 28 percent market share, does not break out California operations, but had worldwide refining profits last year of $3.1 billion. More than half the company’s worldwide refining is here.

          Refining profits in California, then, set records even as the price of crude oil dropped sharply through the year to generation-low levels, along with the profits of most other oil companies. Many responded by laying off more than 200,000 workers and decreasing investments in oil exploration.

          The usual excuses for keeping California prices almost a dollar higher than elsewhere included both complaints about the state’s gasoline and refining taxes and claims of short supplies caused by a long outage at ExxonMobil’s refinery in Torrance.

          But that doesn’t explain the voyage of the American Progress, which Consumer Watchdog analyst Cody Rosenfield reported was “suspiciously hidden in (and near) Singapore for 70 days during the peak of California’s gas price crisis.” ExxonMobil did not deny this odd stay, which was only partly in port and occurred while gas prices in the Los Angeles area were $1.50 more than the U.S. average, some stations selling fuel for as much as $5.49 per gallon.

          ExxonMobil has two refineries in Singapore making gas to California specifications, but when the 30,400-ton American Progress eventually reached California with a full load, it offloaded nothing, but proceeded on to Florida with that gas.

          The company, which normally makes about 10 percent of California gasoline, said only that it “has operated responsibly and in strict compliance with all laws.”

          So in the unlikely event there was a lasting shortage, it was at least partly caused by an ExxonMobil decision to keep things that way.

          Meanwhile, Energy Commission senior analyst Gordon Schremp reported that only about half the California price differential can be attributed to taxes: 10.3 cents per gallon for the cap-and-trade levy, 4.3 cents per gallon in costs for making gas to the state’s low carbon fuel standard and 30 cents per gallon in excise taxes – the total about 45 cents per gallon.

          The refiners’ record profits, then, came from the additional almost 40 cents per gallon in differential between California prices and those elsewhere.

          The industry insists it does not and has never operated as a cartel, yet none of its major players has broken with the pack in recent years and cut prices down to average U.S. levels, plus the California taxes.

          Instead, the industry’s group, the Western States Petroleum Assn., said in a emailed statement from its president, Catherine Reheis-Boyd, that “Over the past decade, state and regional agencies have promulgated a long list of new regulations that has increased the isolation and uniqueness of California’s fuel market… It is important…to take into account the contributing factors that influence California’s fuel markets.”

          But even when those factors are accounted for, as Schremp did, there’s still that windfall of almost 40 cents per gallon.

          As long as that remains unexplained, Californians will be more than justified in assessing the refiners’ behavior as similar to a cartel, and the prices they charge as the very definition of gasoline gouging.

                  

              -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

TIME TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT TEXAS WAR ON CALIFORNIA

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “TIME TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT TEXAS WAR ON CALIFORNIA”

          It’s easy to see the four-day job-poaching foray into California just completed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry as an isolated incident. But it’s really just the latest skirmish in the economic war the Lone Star state has waged against California for more than a decade.

The energy crunch this state suffered through between 2000 and 2002 was the earliest episode in this conflict. One year-2000 scene in a waiting area of Houston’s Intercontinental Airport (now named for the first President George Bush) indicated the mindset behind it.

A crowd of youngish men milled around in expensive suits, mocking California as they awaited a Continental Airlines flight to Los Angeles. Many were employed by big energy trading companies like Enron and Dynegy (both now defunct in large part due to their illegal market manipulations).

Jokes rippled through the throng,  themed on how their companies were ripping off California “grandmas” for what would eventually amount to more than $10 billion in excessive electricity costs.

          The manipulations that so amused the yuppie Texans sent California reeling through an unprecedented crisis of rolling blackouts and escalating rates. A steady barrage of attacks on California’s reputation and economy has followed.

          Actual war was never declared, but then-Gov. Gray Davis publicly spoke of calling up the California National Guard to force the restart of power plants in this state that had been purchased and then temporarily shut down by energy trading firms.

          Charges abound about other Texas companies trying to gouge Californians: The Consumer Watchdog advocacy group has charged that Valero, for example, averages a 37 percent higher profit margin on every barrel of oil it produces in California than at its refineries elsewhere. Is that one reason gas costs more here than anywhere else in the Lower 48 states?

          Perry’s latest sortie in this warfare began with radio commercials in which he took some shots at California’s business climate.

          This won him enormous publicity here and back home, as he continues trying to recover from his goof-up presidential campaign of last year, when he quickly went from early favorite to early dropout in the race for the Republican nomination.

          Perry spent most of his time here trying to convince some businesses to move to Texas and away from this state, America’s largest market for most products.

          California Gov. Jerry Brown laughed off Perry’s effort, calling it “not a serious story…it’s not a burp, it’s barely a fart.” He mockingly invited Perry to try harder. “Everyone with half a brain is coming to California, home of Apple, Google, Hollywood studios,” he said, adding an invitation for Texans to “come on over.”

          But the Perry effort and the economic warfare of which it is part are not laughing matters. California consumers got back pennies on the dollars extorted by corrupt energy traders during the electricity crunch. Some California companies have relocated to or placed new plants in Texas, to the extent that Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom went there shortly after taking office in 2011 to see what Texas was doing.

          The bottom line turned out to be this: Texas and its cities offer companies big incentives to locate there, from subsidized land to years of tax exemptions. The state has lower taxes on corporations and individuals than California partly because of its oil and gas depletion levies, which make up for much revenue that otherwise would have to come from income tax. Meanwhile, Texas- and-Oklahoma-based oil operators like billionaire T. Boone Pickens fight fiercely against it every time California considers imposing a similar levy. California is now the only major oil producing state without such a tax.

          As in any war, there can be turncoats. A prominent one this time is Chuck DeVore, a former Republican California assemblyman who migrated to the Lone Star state and became vice president of policy for the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation.

          DeVore now tries to spin negatives about Texas into positives – one example being the fact that his new state ranks last in percentage of adults with high school diplomas. He points out that California is third from last, but notes that the numbers in both states are pulled down by their vast populace of “the foreign born.”

          Then there are Texas state legislators who at Perry’s bidding authorized a study to find ways of enticing California businesses to their state, targeting California and no other state. Why only California, and not Oregon or New York or North Carolina?

          Real wars have begun between nations over far less than Texas has inflicted on California, so this is more than a mere joke. It’s time for Brown and the California Legislature to stop laughing and recognize Texas as an economic enemy whose denizens have schemed for more than a decade to harm this state and all its citizens.

         

-30-

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 8, 2011, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“TIME FOR BROWN TO USE THE BULLY PULPIT”

It’s high time for Gov. Jerry Brown to use the bully pulpit that comes with his office. The somewhat vague but nonetheless real deadline for getting legislative approval to put his budget plan before the voters this June now draws near and he still hasn’t won over a single Republican lawmaker.

Brown has almost exclusively played an insider’s game so far, trying to jolly the GOP into giving him the handful of state Assembly and Senate votes needed to reach the two-thirds majority required to get a special election vote on his ideas for resolving California’s $26 billion deficit.

Simply put, Brown’s budget plan depends on a combination of severe cuts and a five-year extension of several temporary taxes in effect since 2009. With a legal June 30 deadline for passing a budget, Brown must have an early June vote on his plan or he’ll have to come up with alternatives that involve only cuts.

The reductions already in Brown’s plan will close many state parks, place new burdens on homebound seniors and the developmentally disabled, increase class sizes in public schools while decreasing course offerings, severely limit doctor visits by Medi-Cal patients and much more. So far, the governor has spoken only vaguely about the consequences if voters reject his ideas, but it’s clear reductions would then be much wider and deeper. He’s said he will accept that if it’s what the people decide in a fair election.

But he believes it would unwise, maybe even immoral, for legislators to deprive the public of a chance to vote. Yes, Brown as an almost lifelong politician is well aware of the pressures on Republicans, who have seen every party mate who went along with the 2009 increases booted from office.

Which means it’s high time for him to create a different kind of pressure on those same lawmakers. Enter the bully pulpit.

Ever since President Franklin Roosevelt used “Fireside Chat” radio broadcasts during the Great Depression to build both national morale and public support for his economic programs, politicians have commandeered radio and television time to go over the heads of Congress or state legislatures.

So far, Democrat Brown has confined himself to lobbying the lawmakers and has won praise even from Republicans for reaching out to them. He set examples of frugality for all of state government by cutting off half the state’s array of cell phones, slicing hundreds of cars from the state fleet and ordering a hiring freeze. He even flew sans retinue on a Southwest Airlines flight from Sacramento to one speech in Los Angeles, a highly symbolic contrast with ex-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who usually traveled with an entourage on a private jet. It was one of only a handful of forays Brown has made outside the capital since his election last fall.

Still, he has not changed even one Republican vote. Brown knows this better than anyone.

Which means he must do more. Brown needs to ask television stations everywhere in California for 15 minutes or half an hour of air time soon in order to reach masses of voters. Expect this soon. “Stay tuned,” press secretary Gil Duran said when asked whether it will happen.

The last California governor to use this tactic with any frequency was Ronald Reagan, who later employed the same technique to reach beyond Democratic majorities that dominated Congress during most of his presidency. As governor, Reagan went straight to the people to explain why he cracked down on students at the University of California’s Berkeley campus. He also did it to plump for a property-tax cutting initiative he sponsored in a 1973 special election. The tactic eventually won Reagan the “Great Communicator” sobriquet, even though he didn’t always achieve his immediate aims.

Brown’s most effective campaign commercial last fall was one where he concluded a pitch by looking straight into the camera and making the simple promise “No new taxes without voter approval.”

Now he needs to look the voters in the eye again. The image of a governor flying coach class with the hoi polloi only goes so far. Brown must ratchet up the debate by showing voters all over California exactly what they stand to lose if they’re deprived of a chance to vote on his budget plan.

If he makes the case that further cuts would devastate programs beloved by partisans of both parties, he might arouse enough public pressure to convince reluctant Republican legislators their future depends on a yes vote, especially with the new “top two” primary election system looming in all their futures.

One thing for sure: Brown will have to do this soon and probably more than once, if he's to generate the groundswell he needs.

-30-
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net