By Thomas K. Pendergast
California State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and SF Mayor London Breed seek to streamline housing development near Ocean Beach by slicing off a piece of San Francisco from the jurisdiction of the California Coastal Commission (CCC).
But critics say that, at best, Wiener and Breed are pushing a solution looking for a problem and, at worst, benefiting developers and the real estate sector by setting a bad precedent that could undermine environmental protections that have been in place for about half a century.
Among those critics are several members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which recently passed a resolution opposing the bill as written in an 11-3 vote, with Supervisors Joel Engardio, Myrna Melgar and Matt Dorsey voting against the resolution.
Wiener's office says his legislation, SB-951, will remove urbanized San Francisco from the Coastal Zone – while retaining coastal natural resources in the zone – and refine the role of the CCC in housing approvals under certain circumstances. By "resolving unnecessary permitting delays in the disproportionately low-housing Coastal Zone, SB-951 will aid cities' efforts to meet state housing goals" according to a press release.
"The Coastal Commission plays an important role in protecting coastal resources like beaches, bluffs and wetlands, but the commission should not be in the business of second-guessing – and frequently delaying or undermining – local housing decisions in urbanized areas that are not natural resources," Wiener said. "We need local planning departments and state housing agencies to handle housing permitting. SB-951 eases the process for housing that has no effect on coastal resources and in the midst of this housing crisis, we should all agree on the need for that."
"San Francisco is changing how we get housing built, and we need to remove barriers that get in the way of that important work, including at the state level," Breed said. "SB-951 addresses a key issue impacting urbanized areas in coastal cities like San Francisco, while still protecting important coastal resources across the state. This is the kind of surgical, smart policy we need to expand housing opportunities while still being strong protectors of our natural environment."
The CCC was established by ballot initiative when voters approved it in 1972 and codified it into law in the Coastal Act of 1976. It was granted powers to protect coastal resources, including authority over zoning within the Coastal Zone, which stretches 840 miles along the Pacific Coast from Oregon to Mexico.
SB-951 narrows the CCC domain by removing privately owned urban parcels along the City's western edge from its oversight.
"As the supervisor representing the area that actually is impacted by this legislation, I am adamantly against that," District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan said. "I don't think that there's any way that you slice and dice it with this bill that we could actually excuse Senator Wiener in his intent, what he's trying to do.
"And for that I will not only strongly – as a co-sponsor of the legislation opposing this state bill – continue to do everything that I can to make sure that we not just protect our coast in San Francisco, up and down the state of California, but also really look at what has been happening to us with other bills that Senator Wiener has put forward and passed by our legislature that really continue to single San Francisco out, for whatever reason. Our own representative cannot be protecting San Francisco's best interests," Chan said.
Board President Aaron Peskin said he served on the CCC and he "intimately got to know just how important this piece of statewide policy – that was passed by the voters in a monumental fight that pitted Californians of every stripe against the real estate industry in 1972, when Proposition 20 passed against all odds – it was a grass-roots effort that was outspent by many multipliers to one. Every major newspaper in the state of California was on the side of the real estate industry.
"(SB 951) has been done under the guise of housing and nothing could be further from the truth. And I state this as a matter of objective fact," Peskin says. "The way the California Coastal Act works is that once a coastal zoning is approved by the Coastal Commission, which in San Francisco's case, happened in 1986, all permitting jurisdiction is turned over to the county. This county has issued its own coastal development permits since 1986.
"In that period of time, there have been two appeals of the issuance of a coastal development permit to the Coastal Commission from a local action. One of them having nothing to do with housing; it was actually an appeal in 2009 over artificial turf soccer fields in the western end of Golden Gate Park. The Coastal Commission decided in favor of the City and County of San Francisco and rejected that appeal.
"The other appeal came from the late 1980s. It was never heard by the Coastal Commission and the permit was upheld," Peskin elaborated. "This goes far beyond San Francisco. If one state senator can rip out Coastal Commission jurisdiction in his or her county, it's going to be open season on the Coastal Act. The precedent here is remarkably dangerous about one of California's model, cherished pieces of law."
In a public letter by Laura Walsh of Surfrider San Francisco, an environmental advocacy group organized by surfers, she says "SB-951 assumes that the affordable housing shortage in San Francisco is affected by the Coastal Commission's implementation of the Coastal Act, which is simply not the case.
"Coastal zone boundaries haven't been redrawn since the early years of the Coastal Act's implementation in 1976, and passage of this bill would signal that any jurisdiction which wants to evade Coastal Act review of development could support a similarly designed bill."
According to a San Francisco Chronicle article by reporter Julie Johnson, the San Francisco Planning Department's Chief of Staff Dan Sider says the Coastal Commission's oversight has not resulted in any change to development projects in the City's coastal areas. Sider says this shows the city's permitting process is adequate for vetting projects and so SB-951 "gets rid of a bunch of extra bureaucracy that's not doing anyone any good."
In a letter to the Board of Supervisors, however, Christopher Pederson, a former chief counsel for the CCC, appears to lay the blame for long building permitting processes squarely on the City, not the CCC.
"The portions of San Francisco that SB-951 would remove from the coastal zone, however, are areas where City Hall has neglected implementation of the Coastal Act for decades. Because of that, I have a hard time taking seriously protestations of alarm about what the effects of SB-951 would be in San Francisco itself," Pederson said.
"San Francisco's local coastal program (LCP) was fully certified by the Coastal Commission in 1986. San Francisco has amended its Planning Code many times since then, but hasn't submitted the amendments that affect coastal zone properties to the Coastal Commission as LCP amendments. Planning Code amendments that the Coastal Commission hasn't certified have not taken effect as amendments to San Francisco's LCP.
"San Francisco's decades-long failure to keep its LCP up to date is significant because the certified LCP is the legal standard of review for coastal development permits," Pederson said. "Although proposals for new development are few and far between in the small area of privately owned land that's located in the coastal zone, proper review of those proposals is unnecessarily complicated because of conflicts between the archaic standards that apply to coastal zone permits and the more recently adopted standards that apply to local permits for the same development. To the extent the Planning Department may disregard those conflicts by simply applying the current uncertified version of the Planning Code, that itself creates litigation vulnerabilities.
"For example, San Francisco has adopted voluntary local affordable housing incentive programs intended to encourage residential developments to provide affordable housing. Those programs allow exceptions to normally applicable Planning Code requirements. Any such project in the coastal zone would be vulnerable to litigation because San Francisco has not submitted those programs to the Coastal Commission as LCP amendments."
No comments:
Post a Comment