W. Sacramento Mayor Cabaldon Articulates Case For State Infrastructure Bonds & Regionalism

You've helped turn West Sacramento into a vibrant, healthy community through strategic investment and revenues. What are your thoughts on the value of next month's bond measures and how they might benefit your community and other cities across the state?

They're essential for maintaining the California economic engine. We have under-invested in infrastructure, and the bonds help us to catch up on those deficiencies.

They will help us not only to make better infrastructure investments but also to move towards larger goals about environmental sustainability, economic competitiveness, and even towards concepts that don't sound like infrastructure, like building regional capacity for better decision-making. We've learned in the last several years that money for infrastructure can be powerful grease for efforts that may already be underway but that need some lubricant to move towards regional action.

Talk about the housing and water bonds as well. What is the significance of those measures from West Sacramento's perspective?

Even with the real estate market experiencing its natural ebbs and flows, we still have to provide housing for many, many more Californians with a variety of housing types and levels of affordability, and the housing bond is essential for that. No one has figured out how to provide affordable housing in competitive markets without public subsidy or public involvement.

The advantage this time is that we're looking at these bonds as a package. We have a unique opportunity-which was lacking even in the Pat Brown era-to integrate the bonds in a way that was never possible before. I think, frankly, the Legislature missed an opportunity to draw stronger strategic connections between the bonds.

But the housing bond, for example, includes provisions that promote housing for transit-oriented development, which matches the substantial increase in transit investment in the transportation bond. Several of the other bonds hint at that kind of integration, but I wish it had been done more effectively. Once the bonds pass, the next focus will have to be on making sure we do that strategic integration so that we get more than a dollar's worth of value out of each dollar in the bond.

Same thing on water quality and water supply. We've just in the last few years moved beyond the CEQA analysis of water issues to start integrating water supply with land-use choices, and then, ultimately, with transportation and housing. Water quality, with the new regulations that are coming down on storm water in particular, is going to be just as essential. I think we have done a good job in the last decade or so in starting to consider air quality and air pollution and their implications with transportation and land use; water quality will be the next environmental area that will have to be brought into the mix.

There is also a $10 billion school facilities bond that has a small sum for joint use. What sort of opportunity does this bond miss?

Thanks to the work of New Schools, Better Neighborhoods and others, the school bond has been the pioneering infrastructure investment over the last several elections in thinking beyond just the narrow confines of the traditional infrastructure investment approach.

Even the small amount of money allocated to joint use for the development of schools with libraries, commercial centers, or parks in the prior bonds has been a powerful lever for change in many communities. I wish that we put more into that pot in the current bond, but a lot of institutional interests don't play well with that issue and aren't ready to do it. But, we have to keep demonstrating the successes.

Joint-use options need to be in each of the bond packages. It's not there in many of them-in the language that the Legislature adopted, but that doesn't mean that the California Transportation Commission, the Housing and Community Development Department, or the Department of Water Resources-the agencies charged with implementing many of the key decisions in the bonds-can't fix that.

They will have the opportunity to integrate the bonds in a ways that treat communities and places as whole opportunities and not along the narrow silos of water quality, water supply, levees, housing, transit, transportation, and goods movement, and continue to separate these aspects of infrastructure into false distinctions.

Three years ago, TPR asked you about the importance of aligning the state's fiscal incentives and disincentives with your city's goals. You answered that the incentives haven't been that important, but the disincentives are the real kicker. Can you elaborate, especially in light of these bonds and other acts by the state in the last several years?

Since passage of Prop 1A we haven't had very intense discussions about state/local fiscal reform, which was the promise of Prop 1A, i.e., that we were going to protect some of the base sales tax distributions, for example, for cities that were highly dependent on the sales tax, including West Sacramento. We hoped for a safe conversation around the broader topic of the state/local fiscal relationship and what the set of incentives and disincentives are used when they are making their day-to-day land use and other policy decisions. That never happened. Folks say they want to keep talking about it, but there has been no substance to the conversation.

I think Prop 1A has at least settled that aspect of the war so that communities and cities can make decisions and move forward. Now we don't have to worry that at any moment the Legislature might swoop in and steal all of our sales tax revenues or transfer all of our property tax revenue somewhere else.

But now that we are safe, it is incumbent on us to engage regionally and across the municipal/school divide and the municipal/civil engineering divide, to design a fiscal system that doesn't stop the good things from happening. We are not going to get a perfect fiscal system, but we can cure some of the severe distortions.

Having said that, in most places that are fostering good regional collaboration and real regional governance, people are finding ways around the structural distortions in the economic incentives that are created by the state/local fiscal relationship. Negotiations over regional land-use plans and regional transportation infrastructure investment strategies are enabling jurisdictions, either on a bilateral basis or, in some cases, on a regional basis, to address fiscal issues in a more collaborative way. Folks are finding ways around some of the distortions, but they still exist and drive decision-making in the wrong direction for the vast majority.

When we did our interview three years ago the hottest topic was Senator Steinberg's AB 680, a regional tax-sharing plan that went down in flames. Senator Steinberg is probably coming back as a state senator to the Legislature, and probably in its leadership. Can any legislative action make it easier for regions to share their revenues within the region?

Yes, but I don't know what it is. At the time of our earlier interview I thought more action would be happening following the failure of 680 and the passage of 1A, but it just hasn't. The opportunity persists; in fact, I think it is stronger than ever, in part because we have built the capacity and the trust in some regions to start tackling this in a more direct way.

Certainly having Darrell Steinberg in the Senate will help to start that conversation again. It wasn't just him; there were others in the Legislature that were supportive, some of them are still there, like Tom Torlakson and others who can provide some wind behind Darrrell Steinberg's wings.

I think he has learned a lot about how to move this issue, but also when he did this there were no integrated regional land-use and transportation plans. We were basically trying to go from zero to regional tax sharing in 60 seconds. And we're progressing now on these regional blueprints, and I hope that that will help us look at tax sharing or other kind of regional tax sharing issues on a more rational basis.

Speaking of disincentives for smart policy, let's turn to Prop 90 on the November ballot. Prop 90 would have significant affect on the ability of local of local agencies to plan for their future, would drastically change the practice not only of eminent domain, and also impose huge costs on local agencies in changing, adopting, and planning local land-use regulations. How would Prop 90 affect your work in West Sacramento?

It would be devastating. Our logical response would be to shut down new development almost entirely. All of the planning and zoning decisions, for example, would be driven towards the worst possible outcomes. Cities wouldn't be able to have height restrictions; from a smart density perspective that's not necessarily a horrible thing, but you wouldn't be able to use them even when they were necessary.

Cities would end up zoning everything to its lowest possible value. You would essentially use zoning as a way to keep values down, and then zone on the fly when someone came forward with a development proposal. That would be the only way to do it, because for any other zoning changes, height limitations, or density changes the public would have to foot the bill. Integrated planning and zoning would become almost totally project-by-project, which is a stupid way to go about land use.

It is also encourages all the wrong outcomes. The idea that you shouldn't be able to condemn property for private use is intuitively attractive. Some of the issues that were raised in other states with less restrictive eminent domain rules will scare some folks and rightly so. For example, my city doesn't have a hospital or a trauma center.

Under Prop 90 we could condemn property in order to build a public hospital, but we couldn't use eminent domain to aggregate a series of irregular parcels in our industrial zone in order to open up a non-profit hospital because they wouldn't qualify under the terms of the initiative.

That kind of stuff would devastate our ability to make basic improvements. There are some challenges with eminent domain and the way it is implemented, but much less so in California than in a lot of other states. In California the range of reforms that need to happen need to be a lot more surgical than the sweeping changes that Prop 90 proposes.

How difficult is it to govern at the local level when in the digital age of MySpace a libertarian developer in New York can give 90 percent of the cash to fund an initiative that can change the way you govern your city?

First of all, the voters in California have wised up to this. There hasn't been a ballot initiative that has passed in the last three elections. Although it is frustrating because it requires so much energy and distracts from the many positive opportunities, California voters have been smart about rejecting these loony ideas.

On the other hand, the era of MySpace and technologically mediated networking should be offering a whole new range of opportunities to improve the health of our democracy and engage communities that are disenfranchised or engage people in different ways to connect with one another in ways that we haven't exploited before. So, I hope that the short-run challenges with the new era are going to be followed with more promising opportunities.