Publications

Summer 2003 Newsletter

Coordinated Regional Planning Needed To Enhance Urban Neighborhoods

By Peter Schrag

Nobody really knows how many elected entities run California's public business: 58 counties, some 475 cities, 986 school districts, 70 community college districts, plus several thousand independent districts-parks, fire, municipal utility, irrigation and community service districts.

Each of them has its own elected board-plus sheriffs, district attorneys and other elected local officials. Each has its own policy agenda. Few are geographically contiguous with any of the others. And few totally trust the others, even when they're not in combat.

And then of course there are the elected Legislature, governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, treasurer, controller, secretary of state, superintendent of public instruction, insurance commissioner and Board of Equalization. They, too, have their own agendas.

At the moment the state is being sued for its alleged failure to provide decent schools; the governor, in turn, is suing the local districts.

Now add in local and state voter initiatives on everything from tax limitations, criminal sentencing and state budget allocations to medical marijuana and land-use planning, and you have a perfect engine for inefficiency, confusion, buck-passing, interjurisdictional feuding and voter alienation.

Is there any way even a diligent citizen can keep track of all that stuff? All those separate public agendas, combined with what David Abel of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Forum calls our "separate silos of funding," make policy coordination and effective planning nearly impossible. Maybe we love democracy too much.

Now there are some hopeful signs, despite those governmental and fiscal structures that act as barriers rather than incentives to collaboration.

Recently, the Cities, Counties and Schools Partnership, a group of leaders from the League of California Cities and the California State Association of Counties, met in Sacramento to talk about better coordination and joint planning at the local level.

They called it a "historic meeting." And while it's far too early for that, something may be changing. The 50 or so local officials who attended seemed to understand that all those separate agendas-and the turf wars and distrust that came with them-were a slow road to nowhere.

They seemed to realize that good schools should be an integral part of every city plan, that schools should serve as neighborhood centers and places to locate other community facilities: recreational areas for both school and community, health clinics, police substations. That means joint planning in the design and location of those facilities.

And there are other, more concrete signs as well.

Last month, when the Legislature approved the new $25 billion school bond that will go on the ballot in roughly even parts this November and in 2004, former Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg included a $100 million item for design of joint-use facilities.

In San Jose, California State University and the city's redevelopment agency are building a joint 575,000-square-foot city/CSU library, a project that will not only save money and provide richer facilities, but also will serve as one of the anchors of a new civic center at the edge of the campus.

In San Diego, after the City Council declared "a state of emergency" in the blighted City Heights neighborhood, businessman Sol Price and his Price Charities leveraged its own funds and brought together a long list of public and nonprofit private agencies as well as the local community. The result is a 30-acre urban village that includes a new school, a library, police station, a community service center and recreational facilities as well as office space and, now, 116 units of affordable housing.

There are also a "joint venture" educational program with California State University, San Diego, a community policing program and a low-interest home loan program. Price knew the problems couldn't be addressed piecemeal-that the solutions required "holistic strategies." This one brought in almost everyone and everything.

In Ukiah, after the school district's decision to build a new school on agricultural land brought loud protests, local officials found an alternate location on the site of a failed shopping mall on the other side of town that is to include a sheriff's substation, a community center and playing fields. Equally important, it will bring a new school and other community facilities to a low-income Hispanic neighborhood that badly needs them and foster urban infill rather than more sprawl in an agricultural area.

None of these success stories suggests that the mess of dysfunctional government structures has been cleaned up. The bureaucratic jungle that faces school districts planning new facilities, for example, continues to make the process too slow and too expensive. The tax system still leads local agencies to favor shopping and auto malls over light industry offering good jobs, housing and coordinated community planning. Infrastructure plans are still collections of separate agency wish lists.

But there is a growing realization that without more coordination, without regional planning, without the understanding that good schools are inseparable from good communities, every problem in this rapidly growing state can only get worse. And that's encouraging.