The following comment letter has been sent to ABAG / MTC and copied to Marc Levine and Senator McGuire, regarding Plan Bay Area 2040.
Why do you continue to bully small town Corte Madera with inflated growth numbers in your latest iteration of Plan Bay Area?
You assign Corte Madera 500 new household units by 2040. Yet, we are a built out small town (population 9,500) of only three square miles with no commuter rail system as they have in the East Bay.
Haven’t you studied the data?
Our Highway 101 is already clogged with commute traffic. Bus ridership has been declining in Marin over the last few years.
http://www.marinij.com/general-news/20170425/new-m...
And the Larkspur Landing ferry, managed by the Golden Gate Bridge District, is already at capacity. Your planning update---a new “Transit Corridor” for Corte Madera--- is a joke.
It won’t reduce either traffic or greenhouse gases. How could it? It will only put more cars on the road!
ABAG/MTC-mandated high density growth for Corte Madera will only worsen these problems, lead to urban congestion and a decline in lifestyle for all who pay big bucks to live in Marin.
ABAG-MTC planners, you above all were responsible for the ugly “Tam Ridge Residences” AKA WinCup style development which will always blight Highway 101 next to Corte Madera’s precious bay front.
And now you want to replicate more architectural abominations in Marin?
Insane!
Have you forgotten the admitted ABAG “mistake” ---the over allocation to Corte Madera of 244 units in the 2017-2014 RHNA cycle which caused Corte Madera planners to kowtow to ugly “WinCup-style” development that would be a rejected in Daly City or South Francisco?
We in Corte Madera haven’t. We have to live forever with your bad regionalist planning
ABAG-MTC, you are bullies. And you are terrible planners.
Orinda---a city in the East Bay with an area of 12 square miles, 17,000 in population AND a BART Station—is assigned just 200 new households by 2040 in the appendix of your nonsensical EIR. Versus tiny Corte Madera’s assigned 500 units.
Are you blind to this disparity?
RECALIBRATE, PROVIDE CORTE MADERA WITH A REASONABLE GROWTH PROJECTION---200 HOUSEHOLD UNITS OR LESS, IF YOU WANT TO BE FAIR. Corte Madera after all is half the size of Orinda.
Five hundred allocated units appears to be another whopper of an ABAG “mistake” ---directed at Corte Madera. Why? Why has your regionalist planning, ONLY OF BENEFIT TO DEVELOPERS, again gone off the rails?
It’s abundant natural resources, especially water supply to grow the state’s food, that should legitimize the kind of ambitious growth you are projecting---2.3 new resident s in the Bay Area by 2040. But we don’t have those water resources to support such growth. Supplies are limited. Our farmers are not getting from the state the water allocations they need even now. They are having to tap the dwindling, sagging aquifer. They are fallowing their fields.
Climate change and seasonal variations in rainfall make the future water supply impossible to predict. Your assurances of adequate “dry year” and “multiple dry year” supplies trip blithely into the realm of fantasy. All are premised on future draconian state-mandated conservation quotas which will be highly unpopular with the populace. And where do further “conservation measures” leave our farmers and our food supply? In no man’s land.
In the end, Plan Bay Area 2040 does nothing but provide a green screen for big development.
It is a perversion of the noble purpose of the Sustainable Communities Act, which purports to control the proliferation of greenhouse gases by cutting down on motor vehicle traffic. Give it up. Mandated growth without the public’s commitment to public transit only puts money in big developers’ pockets.
ABAG-MTC planners, if you really cared about the future of California and the planet, you’d resign your cushy high-salaried jobs and put up for lease your eight-story HQ in downtown SF---which resembles Orwell’s satirized Ministry of Truth, Justice and Love--- so as to truly benefit taxpayers.
And you’d join the local voices for local control of land use planning which, increasingly, are rising in protest.
Your caffeine-rush growth planning, with no sober catalogue of state water supply to support it, reminds me of the “Drag Race To The Cliff” in the classic movie “Rebel Without A Cause”. Remember?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7hZ9jKrwvo
The teenage bad-ass boys commandeer two junker cars which they don’t mind sacrificing to the rocks and boulders at ocean’s edge. “Buzz” challenges rival “Jim” to a race. They gun their engines andpeel out. And, as the cliff edge rapidly approaches, the first bad ass to dive out the door to safety will be deemed a “chickie”.
ABAG-MTC, which one of you will bail first? Or do propose to take all of us with you, over the resource planning cliff edge?
Sincerely,
Peter Hensel, Corte Madera