Combing through email after a week off, one subject line from San Diego County caught my eye: Update on … Exemption Process After Adoption of Vehicle Miles Traveled.
To a trained climate policy nerd, anything relating the terms “exemption” with “vehicle miles traveled” should trigger alarm bells.
Vehicle miles traveled, or VMT, is how the state of California now requires local governments to measure how much people drive so we can design cities that encourage less of it in the name of climate change. California used to measure congestion – travel speeds, travel times, etc. – until in 2018 state lawmakers determined that method was only measuring the symptom of the core problem: People live far from their jobs, schools and grocery stores and driving is the easy way to get there.
But the problem for much of rural, unincorporated San Diego County following this shift was that most of its land was now designated as a place that requires lots of driving to get there – or high VMT. The new VMT law required tougher hurdles for developers to get their projects built under these more stringent environmental guidelines.
And yet, this email announced that San Diego County somehow found a way to exempt development from that new VMT law. That didn’t make sense.
The county’s had a spotty climate record to date. The courts repeatedly slapped its wrist for writing climate action plans that still allowed developers to build sprawling subdivisions. Yet the recent Democratic majority takeover of the Board of Supervisors promised to point the county down a path of swift and far-reaching climate progress.
Well, one doesn’t crack the code on climate change without tackling fossil fuels spewing from cars and trucks. So how did we get to a point where the county is broad-brush exempting projects from state policy championed by Democrats?
This is how: At a May 22 meeting, county staff presented ways the board could reduce cars on the road – via a so-called VMT mitigation program. They offered options such as creating a mitigation bank where developers could pay fees for building in far-reaching places to pay for bike and bus lanes elsewhere.
Then came the hold up. Republican Supervisor Joel Anderson, not a big proponent of VMT, pointed to legal cases in San Diego and Newport Beach where the courts said a VMT analysis wasn’t needed. He told staff to go back and look at the case law and come back with more information on how it might apply in San Diego.
By last Friday, the county sent that email blast notifying everyone that as long as a development met all the requirements of the county’s general plan – drafted in 2011, well before the county was thinking about climate policy – it wouldn’t have to study and be judged by an analysis of how many driving miles it creates. It’s counting on an exemption under the state’s premier Environmental Quality Act, which the county said helps streamline the lengthy environmental review process — aka get things built faster.
“In the county, you have to drive so far to most places that this was a big hurdle for almost all development projects. They couldn’t prove it. It would be a big cost,” Dahvia Lynch, the county’s director of planning and development services, told me. “These new cases are suggesting at this moment in time, based on this evolving policy, (that) if the project is consistent with the general plan no matter where it is – you actually do have a pathway … you don’t have to apply this new VMT law.”
Enviros are spooked.
“Using this exemption is just another way to sprawl out in the county, and it’s becoming more and more dangerous to do business as usual,” said Corinna Contreras of the advocacy group, Climate Action Campaign. Contreras is also a Vista city councilmember.
Contreras worries the exemption could be used broadly and undermine the VMT law.
Coast Law Group attorney Livia Borak Beaudin, whose firm has sued the city of San Diego over its Climate Action Plan, said this exemption could “potentially open the floodgates to development.”
“We cannot meet climate goals without reducing VMT,” Beaudin said.
In Other News:
- Earth hit its 12th consecutive month of record-breaking temperatures. (Los Angeles Times)
- Extreme heat has already strained California’s electric grid, but no calls for voluntary energy reductions or blackouts yet. (Union-Tribune)
- Last month’s fire at the endangered Torrey Pine reserve stoked fear in the heart of San Diego’s top botanist about what other plants might be maladapted to fire and potentially lost. (Voice of San Diego)
- San Diego faces some doomsday water price increases that the San Diego County Water Authority board staved off at least another month after it couldn’t come to agreement on the total increase. (Voice of San Diego)
- San Diego County and the state of California asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to investigate reported health symptoms residents say stem from pollution in the cross-border Tijuana River. (Union-Tribune)
God forbid we build one house in this country without someone crying. Meanwhile, people poop all over the river banks and streets.
Yeah. This article is not in touch with today’s issues. We actually need to build our way out of the problem. If cars and traffic are problems, building new homes and “sprawl” might actually allow new city designs. Designing on our existing cities is a bit more difficult with structures already in the way. Now, we SHOULD build up! It makes no sense that we don’t have more high-rises like New York. It’s also silly that we don’t build elevated trains, monorails, possibly even tubes for magnet trains. We should have much better public transportation connecting more locations. We should build land bridges to protect wildlife and farming, and we should build homes on the land bridges. It’s absurd that we keep blocking ourselves from solving any problems.
This is a really silly thing to track and form policy out of, but typical of leftist authoritarians with visions of fantasy utopian futures. Like EV mandates, they think if they throw enough laws at something their dream will become reality no matter if it makes sense or not.
Its as if they dont realize people change jobs and living situations frequently. Their “15 minute city” plans are just useless if I change jobs and have to commute an hour to my new one in the opposite direction. They cant possibly factor in any of these changes into meaningful data yet want to implement heavy handed regulations governing the type of housing that gets built. All this does is add layer upon layer of red tape and hoops for developers to jump through making housing less affordable and reducing supply.
They aren’t concerned about people changing jobs because no one will have a job when this is done.
AI will take over 99% of our jobs we’ll be forced into a ’15’ minute city where a permit will be required to leave- you won’t own a car. This is already started in Europe. People need to WAKE UP. The crazy part
that no one’s talking about – The amount of water and electricity needed to run these Super Computers. Please Look it up yourselves, It blows my mind … Look it up !
Not sure what ai job loss has to do with needing new homes. We need homes because we have more people than before. Even if those people lose jobs, people will continue to need homes, and eventually we should solve job loss with either UBI, or the creation of new jobs that actually make sense. For example, we could pay a lot more child care workers and teachers. There’s a shortage! There’s a shortage of doctors and pilots and nurses, too. There’s definitely a shortage of restaurants as a bunch closed during the pandemic and did not reopen. We need better support for small businesses. And you’re right about computer servers. We need better solutions for mitigating the climate impacts. We CAN work toward sustainable tech and building, but we need to keep innovating and trying to solve problems. And 15 minute cities wouldn’t hurt either! We could have BOTH 15 minute cities AND new suburbs! There’s plenty of space. We could maintain and create more green spaces, too. It’s not impossible. 15 minute cities work great in Japan. A lot of houses are attached to cafes and shops. Think how nice it might be to wake up and walk down the hall to your job instead of commuting! We should be trying to make our world work for everyone. Why the heck not?
This story reeks far more of advocacy than it does what used to be called “journalism.” Unfortunately that what we’ve come to expect from VOSD over the years. If you’re going to continue hiring shrill activists to write stories, please stop calling them “reporters.”
Here here. Totally agree that most journalists are propagandists and activists now. Want to see something cool? Go watch an old Walter Cronkite newscast. Zero partisan BS in it at all, just the facts.
Vehicle miles traveled, or VMT, is how the state of California now requires local governments to measure how much people drive so we can design cities that encourage less of it in the name of climate change.
Design a city? The cake is already baked. How much people drive isn’t measured by how long people sit in traffic idling in their cars while sandag cuts driving lanes to make bike lanes as the state wants to have a building spree and cram more people in reducing greenery.
Yeah. This article is not in touch with today’s issues. We actually need to build our way out of the problem. If cars and traffic are problems, building new homes and “sprawl” might actually allow new city designs. Designing on our existing cities is a bit more difficult with structures already in the way. Now, we SHOULD build up! It makes no sense that we don’t have more high-rises like New York. It’s also silly that we don’t build elevated trains, monorails, possibly even tubes for magnet trains. We should have much better public transportation connecting more locations. We should build land bridges to protect wildlife and farming, and we should build homes on the land bridges. It’s absurd that we keep blocking ourselves from solving any problems.
First, VMT is a draconian measure that doesn’t help the environment and goes against the people’s essential right to choose where they live. According to VMT (and all those environmentalist Nazis), San Diegans would be better off living in a 50-story building in Mira Mesa with no greenery, no place to walk the dogs (or better yet, no pets at all), and no place for kids to ride the bike than living in Bonsall on a 1-acre lot with room for a pool, playground and a garden, as long as their commute to work is less than 16 miles.
Secondly, VMT uses SANDAG maps from 2016 that don’t reflect traffic pattern changes from the last 8 years, such as a sharp increase in electric vehicles (no emissions) and a sharp increase in the number of people working from home post-COVID, by some estimates 30% increase in work-from-home employees.
Thirdly, the threshold number for VMT exemption is completely arbitrary, which means it was not based on science (but when did it ever stop the NIMBYs and environmentalist Nazis), but on the whim of Nathan Fletcher and his liberal cronies. In San Diego, the VMT exemption threshold is 11 detached units or 15 attached, while in Riverside County it’s 110 and 150. Is the air different in Riverside? Is the environment less sensitive to commuters? Or do they just have a higher IQ and more common sense, and more desire to actually do something about the housing shortage in California?
San Diego has done absolutely nothing to combat our affordability and quality housing supply. There is so much land that you can build on in Fallbrook, Ramona, Bonsall, and Alpine, but none will develop because of this VMT nonsense. ADUs won’t get us out of this crisis, microunits with no parking that flooded the city of San Diego are not the solution either. San Diego needs housing for people to live and raise families, to plant roots here! we need positive reproduction numbers, and renters of tiny microunits and ADUs are normally not families with children, they don’t add anything to the future of San Diego, they will move as soon as they reach the maximum they can afford to pay or get a better job offer somewhere else. Wake up already. Let’s put some common sense supervisors on our board, enough of these liberals who only care about their climate agenda and could care less about actual people
Please don’t blame leftists and liberals for this person’s article. A lot of people on the left AND right want more homes! We want new homes! We want beautification and updates to our infrastructure! We want to modernize using sustainable materials and cooling technology we have, but haven’t gotten to use yet! And I think if we build homes and it does create traffic issues, that might prompt us to start solving those, too! To build more pedestrian friendly towns and promenades and land bridges that won’t harm nature. To build tunnels for high speed trains, or elevated transport like new solar powered monorails. There are all sorts of ways we can make this work, but we need to get creative. Conservatives, the left is on your side on this one!!!
Wait, don’t blame leftists and liberals? It’s your leaders that are doing this, 100% you’re going to get a finger pointed at you until the majority of you figure it out.
So-called “leftist” here. We need more homes! Desperately! Climate change can be fought in other ways and should be, as soon as possible. Simply building more homes to house our homeless is not going to destroy the climate and it doesn’t automatically mean a lot more cars in the area. Did you know homelessness and old decaying homes and stagnation and decay ALSO contribute to climate change? We need to build using sustainable materials and new methods that have a lower carbon footprint and we DO have the ability to do that. Stop blocking new homes, nimbys. We know it’s more about property values than it is about climate change and that just stinks! Let people have homes! Let us modernize our infrastructure! We should build cooling structures that provide shade and redirect and amplify wind cooling. That can be done using almost zero power, and then the structures don’t need power to function. Plant more shade trees! Build decorative shades as well. Get creative! Doing nothing does nothing. It’s past time to get people off the streets!!!
Buildings contribute to carbon emissions on several levels—how they are built, how they are used, and where they are located. The US Energy Information Administration, in 2020, published that the residential and commercial sectors accounted for about 22% and 18%, totaling 40% of total U.S. energy consumption.
It’s way higher than 40%.
Good. There is no climate crisis, we need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot over something that isn’t a problem.