Marin challenges outlined in long-term regional plan

Compared to the rest of the Bay Area, Marin County is set to play a smaller role under a proposed 30-year plan to increase housing in the region, expand transit capacity and contribute to the job market.

Released this month, the draft blueprint of the 30-year plan known as Plan Bay Area 2050 shows Marin providing about 2% of the region’s housing needs by 2050 and losing about 13,000 jobs.

“As the county with the highest share of retirees, Marin is actually projected to experience an overall reduction in jobs by 2050 as employment moves closer to places with significant growth in working-age households and as storefront retail jobs decline,” Metropolitan Transportation Commission planner Michael Germeraad said during a recent public workshop on the blueprint.

Most of the major housing growth, job growth and transportation projects in the plan are projected to occur in the South Bay, the East Bay and Silicon Valley.

Still, the vision laid out in the Plan Bay Area 2050 draft blueprint shows Marin faces significant challenges. Among the issues are sea-level rise inundating residential areas and highways, housing unaffordability and the construction of 33,000 new households by 2050.

The plan is not a funding or legislative package. Instead, it provides a map for the region’s patchwork of government agencies to use toward addressing shared issues and goals.

“I think some people get frustrated with Plan Bay Area because it’s not a funding allocation document,” said MTC planning director and Marin County resident Matt Maloney. “It’s called a blueprint for a reason. We haven’t necessarily built the house; we’re making the drawings and laying the foundation.”

Plan Bay Area 2050 lays out a framework for how the nine-county Bay Area will address the projected housing and transportation needs, economic growth and environmental issues it faces between 2021 and 2050. This is the third iteration of Plan Bay Area, which is updated every four years by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Association of Bay Area Governments.

The draft blueprint of the plan details 25 strategies to address these issues and will guide the formation of the final plan next year.

Some of the major goals include building 400,000 units of permanently affordable housing, focusing housing development near high-frequency transit services, instituting renter protections and low-income programs for transit and child care, funding major transit projects such as a Caltrain extension into downtown San Francisco and protecting homes and transportation routes from environmental hazards.

A public comment period for the blueprint is open through Aug. 10. More information on how to participate is online at bit.ly/2OVDZCy.

The MTC states that the strategies included in the draft blueprint were supported by 90% of public workshop participants in 2019, but the plan has its critics.

David Schonbrunn, president of the Transportation Solutions Defense and Education Fund, a San Rafael-based nonprofit, has been critical of the MTC’s approach to regional transportation planning. He said it has led to the transportation problems existing today and has failed to benefit the region after decades.

“I firmly believe that regional governance is both possible and both could be exactly what we need,” Schonbrunn said, “but MTC refuses to be a regional agency. All it is is a collection of local governments dividing up the take.”

The plan projects the region’s population will grow by 2.7 million people by 2050. About 1.4 million more homes will be needed to accommodate 1.4 million new jobs, according to the plan. Marin’s share of this would be about 33,000 homes, or 2% of the region’s housing growth by 2050.

Housing is targeted to be built in locally nominated priority areas, which for Marin include areas of San Rafael such as downtown, the Canal area and the Northgate area, as well as southern Marin near Marin City. The plan also focuses on areas close to high-frequency transit that aren’t always nominated, Maloney said.

“In the draft blueprint, you do see more growth in housing and jobs in areas like San Rafael and Novato, these central cities and employment centers in Marin that are adjacent to SMART and Marin Transit,” Maloney said.

The plan also seeks to meet the state-mandated 19% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from cars and light-duty trucks by 2035. So far, the plan only projects a 12% reduction.

Strategies being considered to reduce emissions and car commuting include reducing speed limits and implementing pay-by-mile highway tolls where commuters would pay 15 cents per mile, for example. Highway tolling is not being considered on major corridors through Marin, but rather on highways that run parallel to mass transit options such as BART or Caltrans, according to MTC project manager Dave Vautin.

The plan also prioritizes transportation projects the MTC would fund based on a projected 30-year budget and cost-benefit analysis. Among the projects included for Marin are the relocation of the San Rafael Transit Center, elevating sections of Highway 101 and Highway 37, constructing a parking garage at the Larkspur ferry terminal and completing the Highway 101 widening project north of Novato, among others.

Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit is noticeably missing from the list of projects. MTC transportation planner Adam Noelting  said in a July 18 workshop that the staff assessed several SMART-related projects, including extensions to Cloverdale and Solano County and a rebuilt Richmond-San Rafael Bridge crossing to connect to BART. The cost of these projects “often do exceed their forecasted benefits,” Noelting said.

“It may require some rethinking of ways to reduce costs, make the projects more equitable and ways to make these modes more attractive to existing residents such as eased access to these modes of transport,” Noelting said.

Maloney stressed that this is not to say SMART’s projects are unworthy or bad, but rather the budget constraints MTC would be working under would prioritize other projects.

More information on Plan Bay Area is online at planbayarea.org.