Brown Seeks New Regional Agencies to Manage Growth

Rejecting Gov. Pete Wilson’s go-slow approach to growth management, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown says that he intends to move forward with his bill to create regional governments to oversee everything from air quality to transportation.

“I think there will be legislation moved in this session,” the San Francisco Democrat told reporters Tuesday. “I don’t think we’ll wait until Jan. 1, 1992, to achieve it.”

Wilson has said he wants to tackle the growth issue next year, after the Administration’s Growth Management Council studies the problem and reports to him. The Republican governor also has said he opposes proposals such as Brown’s that would create new government agencies with the power to overrule local land use decisions.

Brown hinted that he may seek to nudge Wilson into accelerating his timetable on growth by threatening to block action on another of the governor’s proposals.

“If you cannot educate him, you do what we do best in this business,” Brown said. “We find something he’s interested in, he finds something I’m interested in, and we mutually exchange resources to get there for both of us.”

Brown said there is no reason to delay action on a plan to handle the estimated 2,000 people added to California’s population each day. The state’s 5-year-old drought provides one more reason to move quickly, he said.

Brown said he believes government should consider requiring meters on private wells and should more closely regulate proposals to inject treated waste water into underground water tables. He said both issues would be ideal topics for the regional governments he wants to create.

The agencies would be placed atop the current system of city and county governments. Brown said they could save taxpayers money by eliminating the need for separate air quality, transportation and land use planning commissions.

Ideally, Brown said, local governments would draw their own plans, which would be melded into a coherent regional plan.

“The responsibility of the regional body will be to determine whether or not there is compliance with the regional plan,” he said. “It will not be day-to-day kind of land use management decisions that ought to be made at the local level.”

Brown introduced a similar measure last year but abandoned it in the face of widespread opposition from local governments. Unlike last year’s version, Brown’s proposal calls for direct elections of all members of the regional boards. Brown said he doubted that that change would remove the opposition.

He said he is eager to work on a compromise with Wilson and three other lawmakers who are carrying proposals less dramatic than his.

Assemblyman Sam Farr (D-Carmel) has a bill that would create a state planning office and require existing regional agencies to adopt more detailed and comprehensive plans than they do now.

Similar legislation by Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside) would require the regional agencies to coordinate their plans for housing, transportation and air quality into a single comprehensive plan.

Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) has proposed allowing local governments to voluntarily create regional bodies to finance public works projects by levying a property transfer tax not to exceed 27.5 cents per $1,000 of sales price.

BACKGROUND

State lawmakers have been struggling for several sessions to devise a way to deal with the problems created by California’s explosive growth. At issue is whether planning should be left to existing local governments, which would possibly be required to implement statewide standards, or handed to regional agencies with the power to veto local land use decisions. Two kinds of regional government already exist in California. There are single-issue agencies, such as the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which have wide latitude to regulate business and government activity in a specific area. There also are planning agencies such as the Southern California Assn. of Governments, which are mainly advisory.