Carolyn Chase
Reform Badly Needs a Citizen-Based Effort

Carolyn Chase is this region’s most independent-minded “smart growth” activist. She is President/Director of Earth Media Inc./San Diego Earth Day/San Diego Coalition for Transportation Choices.

RGEC’s mission statement was excellent. Their recommendation of an independent, full-time, official, accountable agency for regional transportation planning is right on. But the airport authority should not be separate. It should be included in the new agencies’ responsibilities. Delinking airport planning and decision-making from the democratic process is an expediency to be reviled. If a new international airport is such a good and important thing, then an acceptable deal should be able to be brokered within the region to design it, site it, identify financing and to fully mitigate and minimize the impacts. Projects should not be “rammed down” the throats of the public by appointees, essentially unanswerable to voting, taxpaying citizens.

By establishing an accountable agency for all matters related to transportation and mobility, candidates would run on platforms related to those issues, and this would help move the public debate forward enormously.

But regardless of imperatives for reform, the RGEC process did little to capture the imaginations of the voting public and gave no time to examine and establish the benefits or address the flaws of proposed changes. Regional government is, shall we say, a bit dry as a topic - yet billions of tax dollars are pouring through government “processes” (meaning SANDAG) - without outcome-based accountability for the results of their planning decisions. And while reform is much needed, it’s unlikely to “catch fire” with existing electeds without an independent, citizen-based effort demanding it.

Finally, there will never be regional government without clearly identifying a regional plan and the constituency for that plan. Without that, it’s always going to be reduced to bickering between the jurisdictions and fear over what may be lost - not a debate about what’s to be gained.

The foreseeable problems identified by RGEC - continued declines in quality of life, sprawl, loss of open space, funding and infrastructure deficits, pollution and traffic - cannot be solved until some accountable decision-making body is established to reduce the current limitations and biases of the SANDAG structure. Unfortunately, the RGEC structure was unable to overcome it’s own weaknesses, so it doesn’t appear there is enough public momentum behind any of it to pass a later ballot test.