Wilson Proposes Easing Curbs on Building Projects : Development: Some environmental reviews would be bypassed to speed infrastructure construction.

Concluding that California’s building industry needs a boost more than a bridle, Gov. Pete Wilson proposed a series of measures Monday to ease environmental restrictions and speed the construction of roads, sewers and other public works projects to serve new development.

The Republican governor, in a long-awaited plan, said he wants to allow builders in some cases to bypass review under the California Environmental Quality Act, and he proposed limiting the opportunity for opponents to stop controversial projects.

Wilson also called for the creation of a state-funded “infrastructure bank” to help local governments pay for public works projects--provided that they first adopt growth management plans of their own.

Many of Wilson’s ideas were culled from bills in the legislative hopper, and Wilson sought to minimize his differences with state lawmakers on the subject. He called for cooperation between his office and legislators from both parties to build consensus for a program that can get through the Legislature.

The governor, after two years of study during which he blocked legislative efforts on growth policy, rejected ideas advocated by some environmentalists to control development around the state’s fastest-growing cities.

“California is destined to grow,” Wilson said. “Our task is not to prevent growth, but to prepare for it, capitalize on its opportunities, and manage it intelligently and responsibly.”

Wilson’s proposal drew mixed reaction in the Legislature, where members who have specialized in growth management issues were, more than anything, pleased that the governor had at last entered the fray.

“This is a very ambitious plan,” said Sen. Marian Bergeson, a Newport Beach Republican and chairwoman of the Senate Local Government Committee. “Right now growth is (overburdening) the infrastructure and creating a backlash. Many communities are turned off or hostile to the kind of development that’s essential to maintain the state’s economic climate.”

But Bergeson’s counterpart in the Assembly suggested Monday that Wilson’s plan is insufficient to protect the state’s air, water and other resources from residential, commercial and industrial development.

“There has to be some limit to urban expansion,” said Assemblyman Sam Farr (D-Carmel), chairman of the Assembly Local Government Committee. “In order for Californians to accept a plan like this we have to ensure we’re not spurring the economy by paving over the state. I thought there was an overemphasis on the green light for development and not enough on the red light of where development should not go.”

Although California’s stubborn recession has slowed residential construction, the boom years of the 1980s brought with them fierce battles over development and repeated lawsuits and local ballot measures aimed at slowing growth. That political warfare is expected to resume when the economy recovers and building begins anew.

Wilson’s proposals are aimed at preventing those fights, not by imposing restrictions on local growth but by overhauling the planning process so that the controversy will take place during the formation of detailed community-wide plans rather than as each project comes up for review.

The first step, Wilson said, will be for the state to crystallize more than 40 plans it has devised into a single document that is free of conflict and duplication.

“The state should get its act together before we start advising the locals,” he said.

At the same time, Wilson said, the state should develop “clear, voluntary, statewide growth guidelines” for local governments to follow. For example, he said, the state should encourage local governments to set aside enough land for housing to serve the people expected to come to work in their communities.

Because the standards would be voluntary, Wilson proposes incentives to get local governments to obey them.

Among the incentives would be a state fund to share as much as half the cost of new infrastructure. The fund would be established by floating a statewide bond measure, which would require voter approval, and the money would be distributed to cities and counties that adopted growth management plans consistent with the statewide standards.

To encourage local governments to allow their “fair share” of housing, Wilson suggested distributing the growth in sales tax revenues based on population or on each community’s compliance with housing goals. Now, sales tax revenues go to the cities and counties where the transactions occur, giving local governments an incentive to approve commercial development, such as shopping malls and car lots, but not housing, which generates only property tax revenue.

Perhaps the key to Wilson’s growth proposal would be an overhaul of the California Environmental Quality Act and the local planning process that it has spawned.

The governor said each community should write its own comprehensive plan spelling out where development will occur and how it will be accommodated, and where it will be prohibited. Wilson said the environmental implications of that plan should be studied and debated and then, once it is adopted, any project that fits within its framework should be speedily approved with little opportunity for opponents to object.

Unlike the current “general plan” that every city and county adopts, which can be amended up to four times each year, this “comprehensive plan” would be more reliable because it could be changed only once each year and any changes would still have to be consistent with the statewide objectives.

V. John White, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club, said his group welcomes Wilson’s suggestion to shift the bulk of the environmental review to a big picture and away from each project. But to make that system work, he said the new comprehensive plans would have to be protected from the whim of local politicians.

“If you don’t have a much more vigorous and defensible planning process that means something, it’s hard to reduce the level of environmental review at the project level,” White said.

The Governor’s Growth Plan

Highlights of Gov. Pete Wilson’s proposal to encourage and manage growth in California:

Growth guidelines. Draft state standards on issues such as the integration of housing and transit, the conservation of natural resources and the construction of public works projects.

Incentives for local government. Offer financial assistance to local governments that adopt growth management plans consistent with state standards and deny assistance to communities that do not.

Local land-use process. Require every city and county to develop a comprehensive plan to guide future development and then exempt from detailed environmental review any project that is determined to be consistent with that plan.

State Environmental Protection Act. Reduce the opportunity for opponents to challenge a project. Require one environmental review for an entire jurisdiction and then require that opponents, to stop a particular project, produce “substantial evidence” to show that it would have adverse environmental impacts.

State plans. Take more than 40 statewide plans--on air and water quality, the delivery of government services and other issues--and coordinate them in one place to identify and eliminate conflicts.

Streamlined permit process. Require only a single permit for each project, which would be issued by local government and would be consistent with state or regional plans on air and water quality and other issues.

New councils of government. Replace the current system of regional planning bodies with new agencies to simplify and better coordinate the level of government regulation. The new councils would have no taxing authority and no general land-use powers.

Agricultural land. Encourage development on farmland in some areas by ending favored property tax treatment. Focus state resources instead on saving agricultural land that lies farther from the urban cores.

Key elements recommended by others but rejected by Wilson:

Regional government. The governor opposed the creation of new regional bodies to control or review land-use decisions made by local government.

Urban limit lines. Wilson said each city or county should decide for itself how to phase in its growth rather than having the state or regional government draw lines outside of which no development could occur.