BILL ANALYSIS Ó AB 779 Page 1 Date of Hearing: May 13, 2015 ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS Jimmy Gomez, Chair AB 779 (Cristina Garcia) - As Amended April 14, 2015 ----------------------------------------------------------------- |Policy |Transportation |Vote:|15 - 0 | |Committee: | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------------+-------------------------------+-----+-------------| | |Natural Resources | |9 - 0 | | | | | | | | | | | |-------------+-------------------------------+-----+-------------| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- Urgency: No State Mandated Local Program: NoReimbursable: No SUMMARY: This bill delays, until July 1, 2017, the effective date of revised CEQA guidelines establishing criteria for determining the significance of transportation impacts of projects within transit priority areas, i.e. within one-half mile of major AB 779 Page 2 transit stop. FISCAL EFFECT: The guidelines are to be finalized this year, thus the bill will delay their adoption by at least six months and likely longer. Two staff at OPR are currently working on the guidelines, and delaying implementation will extend this process and create uncertainty, resulting in over $150,000 of additional staff resources toward this effort. In addition, Caltrans, which is gearing up to implement the guidelines, will incur delay-related fiscal impacts. COMMENTS: 1)Background. SB 743 (Steinberg), Chapter 386, Statutes of 2013, among other things, directed OPR to propose revisions to the CEQA Guidelines to establish new criteria for determining the significance of transportation impacts of projects within transit priority areas that are not based on level-of-service (LOS). (LOS is a measure of vehicle delay at intersections and on roadway segments and is expressed with a letter grade ranging from A (free-flowing traffic) to F (congested conditions).) LOS has been criticized as an outdated metric because it does not consider person delay and neglects transit, pedestrians, and bicycles. Many believe that an over-reliance on LOS considerations by planners has led to widening intersections and roadways to move automobile traffic faster at the expense of other modes of transportation. LOS has also been criticized as a barrier to infill and transit-oriented development. In response to SB 743, OPR published a preliminary evaluation of potential alternatives to LOS in December, 2013. Based on AB 779 Page 3 comments received in response to that document, the office released draft revisions to the CEQA Guidelines in August, 2014, and accepted comments on the draft through November, 2014. The draft proposed to replace the LOS analysis with an analysis of the vehicle miles traveled (VMT) generated by a project as a measure of the significance of a project's transportation impacts. 2)Purpose. This bill delays any revisions to the CEQA Guidelines adopted pursuant to SB 743 from becoming effective prior to July 1, 2017. The sponsor, the Infill Builders Federation, is concerned that the revisions, as currently drafted, while intended to benefit infill development, may actually put infill at a greater disadvantage by requiring infill projects to undergo an untested VMT analysis that initially will not apply to development projects in non-transit-oriented areas. The sponsor is concerned that this places both an added analysis burden and potentially an added litigation burden on infill rather than making it easier to move these types of projects forward. OPR has indicated that it is likely to issue a revised draft of the guidelines, although the timing and extent of changes to the first draft are uncertain. It is also not clear when OPR expects that final revisions will be formally adopted. Analysis Prepared by:Chuck Nicol / APPR. / (916) 319-2081 AB 779 Page 4