Editor’s Note: Mark wrote this article a few years ago, however, it has relevance today as SACOG moves toward adoption of the new MTP for the Sacramento Region.
Environmentalists recently filed suit to stop some of Sacramento’s federally funded highway projects. The precedent for this was a case that brought Atlanta’s federally funded road construction to a halt because the road improvements would make enough traffic to break Federal clean air regulations. Predictably, business groups and the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) who requested these projects are outraged, portraying their environmentalist opponents at best as obstructionists.
But is this really just obstruction? Having sat on one of the Planning Advisory Councils that helped make Sacramento County’s land use policy, I’ve seen seen how developers and politicians discourage the alternatives to the kind of development that requires all trips be made in a car. The lawsuit “obstruction” may the only way we have to ensure the Sacramento Valley does not become a north-state version of the congestion-plagued, smog-filled Los Angeles basin.
Current development practices offer enormous subsidies to those who build in outlying areas. (Outlying development requires long, unproductive, polluting commutes.) If they have enough political clout, developers can get Cities and Counties to “upzone” agricultural land purchased at $2,000 an acre, making this commercial/industrial/residential land worth $40,000 an acre. They can do this even if that land is godforsaken flood plain surrounded by weak levees. With profits like these, developers can even afford to build a constituency clamoring for the upzone by purchasing a sports franchise.
