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MTC Director Hemminger Advocates “Bare Knuckled” Approach To High Density Resistors
Want more WinCups in Marin?
MTC Director Steve Heminger is on a mission to bring them to you and yours.
“Engage the adversaries,” he advises executive committee members in this 51 second video clip “Don ‘t try to win the argument with those who don’t want housing in their neighborhoods. Take away their tools.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG9W5_FAjls&feature=youtu.be
He’s talking about “tools” such as CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) and about local control of zoning . Take those away, Heminger suggests, and his vision of a dense, urban California will prevail, engulfing the suburbs.
Mandatory densification is all part of Plan Bay Area 2040, which requires local jurisdictions to create the zoning for 2.3 million more residents in the Bay Area by 2040. And increasingly it's Heminger and his staff of 200, operating out of a new eight-story headquarters in downtown San Francisco, who are driving the implementation of PBA 2040. Heminger's personal power is on the rise after the Metropolitan Transportation Commission merged with the smaller Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and absorbed ABAG's staff..
Now it's ABAG-MTC, under Hemminger, which will assign Regional Housing Allocation Numbers (RHNA) to local jurisditions in eight year implementation cycles.
Heminger's bare knuckled "streets of Chicago" approach just may be gaining more traction with 130 bills now before the state legislature to streamline approval for local projects by lessening or taking away the ability of local jurisdictions to review the projects at a local level. The legislature will be considering them in a few weeks when it returns from summer break.
Need I add that it's imperative that readers of this article follow the process of what appears to be a housing bill blitzkreig and voice your opinions to Assemblyman Marc Levine and Senator Mark McGuire?. And of course you should also email Governor Jerry Brown about the importance of keeping the cherished environmental protections of CEQA in place.
Who Is Heminger, whose increasingly aggressive public statements qualify him as our regional planning Baron of Braggadocio?
He’s the unelected bureaucrat-exec who runs the regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission. In 2012, his compensation ----paid for by taxpayers--- was “only” $360,000 per year with five weeks vacation.
The MTC website says he’s the wheel who manages Bay Area transportation planning through allocation of a whopping amount of federal and state taxpayer dollars. “Steve Heminger is Executive Director of MTC and responsible for the administration of more than $2 billion per year in funding for the operation, maintenance and expansion of the Bay Area’s surface transportation network.
Wikipedia is not slow to note that that Heminger’s long run at the MTC helm has been rife with controversy. The question then arises: Why is this guy--- with a “take no prisoners” attitude toward local control advocates in county and local governments in the nine county Bay Area---still in charge and issuing unpopular directives?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Heminger
“Heminger was appointed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi of California to serve on the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission.[4]
Heminger, a Democrat, has been active in transportation politics, and he has recommended that the federal gasoline tax be raised by forty cents per gallon. He was also a possible candidate to be President Barack Obama's nominee as Secretary of Transportation.[5] Obama would ultimately choose Ray LaHood and not Heminger to fill the Transportation post.[6]
Heminger's leadership of the MTC has been controversial, with concerns over the lengthy span of his MTC employment , budgetary expenditures related to new MTC headquarters in San Francisco and the lack of collaboration displayed when working with local government agencies in the 9 County area represented. Heminger's signature Plan Bay Area strategy was controversially approved, despite widely voiced concern from local and municipal stakeholders during public outreach stages.