San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
In climate crisis, city squabbles over fixes
The sky turned an apocalyptic orange on Wednesday, and the sun, for the first time in memory, was in quarantine, refusing to come out. Later in the week, the sun was back, sort of, mostly invisible behind a toxic haze of smoke and ash.
Fires raged throughout the Western United States, killing people and flattening neighborhoods. By Friday afternoon, more than 3.5 million acres of California — roughly the size of Connecticut — had burned so far this year, a recordshattering number climbing by the minute.
If ever there was a wakeup call that we’re in a climate emergency, this is it. All of us must act. Now.
And yet in supposedly environmentally conscious San Francisco, we’re fighting over bike lanes and prohibiting through traffic on a tiny percentage of our streets. Even though making it easier and more appealing for people to leave their cars at home to walk, bike, carpool or take public transit instead is one of the main ways cities can fight climate change.
Two San Franciscans seem to have made it their pandemic hobby to file appeals for just about every emergency action taken by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency in the past six months. They’re gadfly David Pil
pel and attorney Mary Miles, who says she represents the Coalition for Adequate Review. Yes, she’s sticking up for CAR. They’re both well known at City Hall for trying to thwart various projects over the years, and they’re at it again.
Pilpel could not be reached for comment. Miles did not return a call, but did email copies of her appeal letters.
Because of them, the next phase of the Slow Streets program is on hold. That program shuts some streets to through traffic so people can walk and bike safely while social distancing. Temporary emergency changes to streets to make way for coronavirus testing sites and popup food pantries are also on hold.
Emergency transit lanes for buses operating at reduced capacity for social distancing to whisk essential workers to their jobs without getting stuck in traffic are on hold. A protected bike lane on Fell Street to alleviate the crush of exercisers in the crowded Panhandle is also being fought over.
The crux of the argument from Pilpel and Miles comes down to whether these measures taken by the transit agency constitute actual emergencies or whether they deserve regular review under the California Environmental Quality Act. Pilpel and Miles argue that the city is trying to make these measures permanent, though the city has said that if it does move to keep them, it will follow the regular review process.
CEQA was signed in 1970 by thenGov. Ronald Reagan to require state and local agencies to disclose the environmental impacts of planned projects and try to mitigate them. It’s a great idea in theory, but it’s often used to fight transit and housing projects that actually help the environment. It’s become a cudgel used by NIMBYs to block any project they don’t like — such as housing in cities, even though thwarting urban housing contributes to suburban sprawl and long, emissionspewing commutes.
(State Sen. Scott Wiener has legislation awaiting the governor’s signature that would exempt some public transportation projects and bike and pedestrian safety improvements from CEQA review, but it won’t go into effect until Jan. 1.)
CEQA allows government agencies to bypass the regular review process in an emergency, and that’s how the Municipal Transportation Agency got so much done so quickly during the COVID19 pandemic.
But the problem isn’t Pilpel and Miles. It’s San Francisco’s appeals process, which lets just one person stop a project that might benefit many thousands.
Local governments set their own rules about whether and how people can file appeals to projects that were exempt from CEQA review, including those constructed during an emergency. San Francisco has set the bar very low, giving tremendous weight to anybody who doesn’t like something. The programs being appealed must remain frozen until the appeals are settled. This would be a good time for the Board of Supervisors to set the bar for appealing projects exempt under CEQA much higher, which could save the city tremendous amounts of staff time and money and encourage good projects.
The whole brouhaha has the transit agency’s staff fed up. To put it mildly.
According to Jeffrey Tumlin, Muni’s new director, each of the five appeals will cost about 100 hours of work by his staff. He said each hearing at the Board of Supervisors, which serves as the judge and jury in these cases, costs a combined $10,000 in city officials’ and attorneys’ time. In fact, Tumlin said each appeal is taking more time and money than it took to create the emergency programs in the first place.
All to protect popular measures that are clearly just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the ways San Francisco needs to change to ensure our environment remains habitable. Tumlin called CEQA “a blunt tool” that’s failing to protect the environment.
“We have to pick up the pace of change,” he said. “Humancreated climate change is exacerbating all of California’s underlying problems, whether it’s fires or water scarcity or housing scarcity. We need tools to allow government to get ahead of these problems rather than double down on the planning approaches that have been exacerbating our problems for the last 45 years.”
The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously on Sept. 1 to quash Miles’ first appeal — that of the first phase of the Slow Streets program. She’s also filed an appeal over the third phase, which hasn’t been heard yet. The hearing on the first phase took an hour and had people phoning in to rail at the fact that people were walking and biking in, gasp, the middle ... of ... the street!
Supervisor Aaron Peskin acknowledged that “due process is messy and timeconsuming,” but said it’s there for a reason and that he doesn’t have a big problem with the way CEQA works. He also said appeals of exempt projects are rare and don’t pose a major problem.
“It’s been a remarkably helpful law writ large,” he said of CEQA, adding that it’s helped protect the Sierra Nevada and kept some bad projects from being built in San Francisco.
But the appeals on the table now are clearly a waste of time and are preventing city officials from doing real work as our emergencies seem to increase by the day.
“The projects themselves are delayed, and it has a ripple effect on all of our other work,” said Sarah Jones, the transit agency’s planning director.
She’s in charge of figuring out the fate of the currently closedtocars JFK Drive, Twin Peaks Boulevard and Great Highway — but that’s all on the back burner now. Her staff also had to push off other important projects such as safety improvements on Powell Street to make it easier for pedestrians to get around and people to safely disembark cable cars.
Each of these projects is essential to making San Francisco a safe, efficient place to walk, bike and ride public transit, thereby making it easier to leave the car in the garage. And that’s the future we must pursue if we want to have any kind of future at all.