1918 University Ave, Suite 3C
Berkeley, CA 94704
Phone: (510) 868-0991
Web: www.thetwohundred.org
Email: info@ccbuilders.org

April 9, 2020
Kome Ajise
Executive Director
Southern California Association of Governments
900 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 1700
Los Angeles CA 90017
ajise@scag.ca.gov
URGENT: COVID-19 Pandemic, Connect SoCal Plan, and Public Records Act
Dear Mr. Ajise:
Our civil rights organization, which is dedicated to the restoration of attainable home ownership
and multi-generational economic stability with better educational and health outcomes for
California’s hard working minority families, timely submitted detailed comments on the draft
2020 Regional Transportation Plan/Sustainable Communities Strategy (Plan), and accompanying
Program Environmental Impact Report (PEIR).
We begin by expressing our dismay that SCAG would even consider approving on May 7 a
10,000+ page Plan and PEIR released during the height of the pandemic emergency on March
27. This schedule shows total disregard for the massive health, family welfare, and economic
consequences of the COVID emergency. Many minority households hold down three or more
jobs to make ends meet, and lost all or most of the jobs in their households. Families with
children were also expected to immediately assume responsibility for home schooling, as well as
full time childcare, placing even more extreme burdens on those lucky enough to be part of an
essential workforce and still have a job. The healthcare needs of immediate and extended family
members is yet another demand, along with navigating the red tape of assistance programs for
individuals and small businesses.
In short, the pandemic is a crisis in our community which has resulted in disproportionately high
death and hospitalization rates for California minorities. For SCAG, in the middle of this
pandemic, to decree that a 25-year housing and transportation plan for the entire region must be
summarily adopted, when every federal, state and local agency in the country is delaying
deadlines to prioritize urgent COVID needs, is both shocking and entirely unacceptable.
Instead of devoting its entire May 7 meeting to the COVID emergency, as the California
Transportation Commission has done in commanding all transportation agencies to report in on
the COVID issues affecting their operations and plans, SCAG staff demands that its Board
rubber stamp a Plan conceived in complete ignorance of COVID, which has already resulted in
massive illness and deaths in our region, as well as the indefinite shutdown of most of the

 economy and most public transit. This schedule displays a shocking disregard for our
communities, for the public, and for SCAG’s locally elected officials who must cope with scores
of COVID priorities in their own cities and counties.
And we note, as described in detail below, that the final Plan and PEIR summarily dismissed the
many detailed comments we raised on the draft Plan – and then made further changes to the final
Plan which were concealed from the public, and affirmatively worsen our housing crisis and
harm our communities. In the height of a housing emergency and a global pandemic, the
Plan/PEIR misrepresents its content and consequences.
•

Notwithstanding endless rhetoric about respecting “local input,” the SCAG modelling
staff revealed that Plan made undisclosed changes to approved General Plans – reducing
density below General Plan authorized levels in unknown locations, and increasing
density above General Plan authorized levels in other unknown locations. The PEIR
acknowledges that these General Plan inconsistencies are significant unavoidable CEQA
impacts, but SCAG staff has not even disclosed the Plan’s rejection of General Plans to
the public or the elected local officials who approved these General Plans - and are
accountable to their voters for General Plan implementation. The PEIR also completely
fails to identify, analyze or adopt feasible mitigation measures or alternatives to avoid
this significant adverse General Plan inconsistency CEQA impact – and it fails to
disclose the massive demolition, displacement and gentrification impacts of demanding
massive density increases that are inconsistent with General Plans. Housing projects that
comply with General Plans and other local, state and federal environmental requirements
are legally vulnerable to anti-housing CEQA lawsuits because of this Plan’s fundamental
rejection of “local input” General Plans. Even more significantly, neither the public nor
SCAG Board members can even discern what these rejected General Plans even are since
these details are buried in “Traffic Analysis Zone” maps that are not even included in the
10,000+ page Plan/PEIR package released on March 27!

•

Notwithstanding major controversies about Plan’s undercounting of existing housing
needs given widespread overcrowded housing especially in minority communities, and
the region’s overall failure to produce adequate housing supplies, both the Plan and PEIR
completely fail to acknowledge the region’s addition of about 800,000 more reasonably
foreseeable new housing units which SCAG is itself allocating to local governments on
May 7 as part of the Regional Housing Needs Allocations (RHNA) process. This failure
alone assures that the Plan absolutely does not meet the region’s housing needs, and also
guarantees that any local jurisdiction that does update its Housing Element to
accommodate its new RHNA allocation will be planning for housing and population
growth that is inconsistent with the SCAG Plan. Inconsistency with an SCS is identified
in the CEQA Guidelines as a threshold of significance, with inconsistencies required to
be avoided or mitigated unless infeasible. The PEIR includes as a mitigation measure
that local agencies modify their General Plan to comply with the SCAG Plan – the very
antithesis of the misleading statements SCAG staff has made about respecting “local
input.” In fact, this Plan creates a no-win “Catch-22” for new housing, where local
governments can be sued for not updating their Housing Element to comply with RHNA,
and can also be sued for a RHNA-compliant housing element that is inconsistent with the
SCS. With a planning horizon of 2045, the Plan’s failure to acknowledge and include the
2

 RHNA allocations for each jurisdiction is unconscionable as well as illegal, and
disparately victimizes (again) the region’s minority communities, residents, and
businesses.
We request that the Plan and PEIR be removed from the May 7th agenda, that a public workshop
on the final Plan occur where all changes from the draft Plan, as well as all deviations from
locally-approved General Plans, be fully and completely disclosed. We also request the final
TAZ maps be posted on the SCAG website, since only the now outdated in superseded draft
TAZ maps are available. And we request a full and complete accounting and Plan integration for
housing unit additions that must be added to comply with each jurisdiction’s reasonably
foreseeable RHNA allocations as determined by SCAG.
We anticipate that this will necessitate plan changes, including likely supplemental
environmental analysis of those plan changes, which can only be accomplished with the full,
immediate and complete cooperation of SCAG staff.
We further request that the Plan and EIR consider the immediate and drastic economic and
transportation consequences of the COVID emergency, which constitutes significant new
information of changed circumstances that must be fully analyzed before the Plan can be
finalized or approved. Remote work and reduced daily commutes are extremely feasible – and
even before COVID more people worked from home than used public transit in the SCAG
region. Remote work reduces emissions and traffic congestion to help the region
notwithstanding CARB’s dogmatic refusal to recognize the VMT reduction benefits of remote
work. Additionally, the science has confirmed that airborne concentrations of COVID virus are
higher in enclosed spaces with high occupancies – including subways and buses, as well as
elevators in high density buildings – and social distancing is required to reduce exposure risks,
but also further decreases ridership capacity. While we will all be learning COVID lessons for
many years, lessons already learned must be acknowledged and integrated into the Plan and
PEIR as significant new information.
Introduction and Summary
We begin by noting our profound disappointment with SCAG staff’s summary dismissal of
virtually all of our comments, although we note that civil rights has always fallen victim to the
preconceived prejudices of government bureaucrats who are endlessly creative in depriving
minority residents of homeownership and housing opportunities while pursuing a policy goal that
is shameful through the lens of history. Trying to cramming more than a million people into
elevators and buses while charging $3000 per month rents and depriving working families of
homeownership is the policy goal of this Plan – bureaucracy over democracy, and rejection of
the will of the people, or our locally-elected officials or locally-approved General Plans as well
as dozens of housing bills enacted by the Legislature to increase production of housing that
complies with General Plans.
We restate that SCAG has both the legal obligation and moral imperative to propose and approve
a Plan that actually meets the housing and transportation needs of our communities – for today’s
residents, and not just the hypothetical future envisioned by those with secure jobs in civil
service and academia focused on global climate change, where California contributes less than
3

 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) to the world and boasts per capita GHG
emissions that less than half or even a third of our competitor states like Texas, Arizona and
Nevada.
Today’s reality is that California and the SCAG region have the nation’s highest poverty rate,
highest homelessness rate, highest rent cost burdened household rate, most catastrophic housing
shortage, highest housing production costs, and longest/most unpredictable housing approval
regulatory gauntlet. Latino, African American, and Asian American families (along with
students and our young workforce) are disproportionately victimized by the confluence of
massively destructive state, regional and local housing policy choices. SCAG must be part of the
housing solution – but this Plan exacerbates all of these problems by acknowledging just one
policy goal – reducing Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT) and GHG under “guidance” enforced
with an iron fist from a distance by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) – while
throwing the housing and transportation needs of the region’s residents, especially its minority
residents, under the bus (literally).
Failed Housing “Solution”. As to the Plan’s housing program, we believe, and commented on,
the unconstitutional and unlawful disparate impacts of the Plan’s regional housing program, in
the context of an unprecedented housing crisis that already disproportionately harms members of
our communities. Specifically, we note that the although the Plan acknowledges the
“extraordinarily high cost” of infill housing, and recommends restoration of redevelopment tax
increment financing as a partial housing cost solution, this one line – in 10,000 pages of
Plan/PEIR text (!) – is the Plan’s only acknowledgement that the high density “elevator building”
TOD rental apartments proposed by the Plan is completely unaffordable to the majority of the
region’s residents. The Plan opens a shameful new chapter – the first in SCAG’s history – in an
ongoing saga of more than a century of discriminatory redlining policies adopted by government
agencies for all manner of self-serving or myopic policy goals to exclude minority families from
homeownership, as documented by The 200’s Redlined video, available at
http://www.thetwohundred.org/redlined/
It is no coincidence that the Plan’s insistence on unaffordable housing solutions, with a magic
lantern wish for state law redevelopment funding, does not work for the majority of the region’s
residents at precisely the same moment in history that the majority of the region’s residents are
now minority community members. SCAG rubbed the same magic lantern wishing for
redevelopment funding in 2012 and 2016, only to be summarily rebuffed every single year up to
and including in 2019 by the state’s prior and current Governors. And SCAG appears to have
conveniently forgotten that even at the height of redevelopment funding, taxpayer subsidized
housing comprised only about 5% of our housing supply – even before relentless increases in
housing production costs now routinely exceeds $500,000 for each and every small new
apartment unit.
It is also no coincidence that the Plan calls for the wholesale demolition of existing communities,
including the last remaining historically minority community residents and businesses, which are
located near transit stations and along transit corridors. “Urban renewal” and displacement also
have a long and sordid history, always pursued in furtherance of some policy objective
overwhelmingly advocated by white advocates at the expense of minority communities. As both
CARB and SCAG staff well know, in a gentrification and displacement report commissioned by
4

 CARB scholars at UC Berkeley acknowledged that “transit proximity has a significant impact on
the stability of the surrounding neighborhood, leading to increases in housing costs that change
the composition of the area, including the loss of low-income households” – a displacement
outcome confirmed by independent studies in New York and Chicago, and a central part of the
debate and ultimately rejection SB 50 by all of the SCAG region’s Senators earlier this year. Yet
the Plan, and the PEIR, fail to acknowledge the racial, economic, or physical impacts of the
massive displacement to the region of wiping out entire communities that have the misfortune of
having an underutilized existing or nonexistent planned future commuter bus service.
It is unconscionable for SCAG to approve an unaffordable housing plan for the region, and it is
illegal. As we pointed out in our detailed comment letter, and as we have identified in two
pending civil rights lawsuits against the California Air Resources Board and Office of Planning
and Research, an agency action that causes disparate harm to the housing needs of minority
communities violates the due process and equal protection clauses of the federal and state
constitution, violates federal and state fair housing act laws, and is unlawful under SB 375 itself
which requires that an SCS accommodate the housing, population, and economic development of
the state’s regions.
SCAG’s response to these civil rights and fair housing act comments was a dismissal of these as
a “policy” comment. Violation of civil rights is not a “policy choice” that SCAG can lawfully
make. We raised these comments not in the context of identifying a policy disagreement, or
merely an “environmental” impact under CEQA, but to put SCAG on notice (and to exhaust our
administrative remedies) that the time for civil rights leaders to tolerate bureaucratic policies that
continue to discriminate against minorities seeking homeownership has ended, and we will take
all actions to protect the civil rights of our communities to attainable housing and
homeownership.
We also take yet another opportunity to urge SCAG to avoid violating the civil rights of our
minority communities, and to comply with other laws including SB 375. Compliance requires
that the housing included in the Plan must be “affordable” to hard-working minority families
without reliance on nonexistent state funds and long-shot lotteries to occupy a taxpayer
subsidized rental in an affordable housing “project.” Leaders of The 200 fought for decades to
end discrimination by government agencies, for the right to own a home, and to assure that
minorities are no longer relegated to “the projects.” It is shocking – shocking – to have to remind
SCAG staff, and now SCAG Board’s directly, that discriminatory housing programs that make
homeownership unattainable for middle income minority families is illegal. The 200 wholly
supports taxpayer funded housing for homeless, special needs, and low income residents, but as
scores of non-partisan experts and agencies have opined taxpayer subsidized rental housing has
never been, and can never be, a housing solution for the vast majority of middle income
Californians.
Failed Transportation “Solution.” We are likewise deeply disappointed by SCAG staff’s
summary dismissal of our transportation comments. SCAG well knows, as is thoroughly
documented in The 200’s lawsuit against OPR that was attached and submitted as an integral
part of our comment letter, that VMT in the region (pre-COVID) has substantially and
consistently increased since the end of the Great Recession, and that the vast majority of that
VMT increase is attributable to commutes by Latino and African American workers who need to
5

 get to their job – and have been ruthlessly priced out of proximate coastal communities by no
growth NIMBY policies and the racist abuse of laws like the California Environmental Quality
Act (CEQA) to block even housing that is fully compliant with local General Plans and zoning
codes, and all of the state’s stringent environmental protection and conservation standards.
SCAG staff itself helped assemble the statistics showing that over a 3 year period, 14,000
housing units were challenged in CEQA lawsuits in the SCAG region - 98% of which were in
infill locations in existing communities, 70% of which were within ½ mile of high quality transit
corridors, and 78% of which were in the region’s whiter, wealthier and healthier neighborhoods
and not in environmental justice communities. Anti-housing CEQA lawsuits challenging
approved housing projects are today’s “citizen redlining” tool to block minorities from living in
their neighborhoods.
SCAG staff also knows, as documented by our comments, that we can reduce tailpipe emissions
– of criteria and toxic pollutants, as well as greenhouse gases – without depriving individuals
from their ability to get to work, take their kids to a soccer game, or get themselves and their
parents’ to the doctor. Under President Obama, the United States Environmental Protection
Agency proudly announced that more than 98% of criteria pollutants had been eliminated from
tailpipe emissions in the nation’s automobile and pickup truck fleet under the Clean Air Act.
Although greenhouse gas emission (GHG) reductions were not required, vehicular emissions of
GHG were also massively reduced from the nation’s pre-1972 vehicle fleet. We know how to
reduce tailpipe emissions – with electric vehicles and other technologies, but also with changed
work patterns such as telecommuting – but we do not know how to reduce VMT. It is
inconceivable that a white family in 1975 would be deprived of homeownership and told to
spend hours for hoped-for bus service: the Clean Air Act solution was to get rid of tailpipe
emissions, not to deprive families of their mobility. And in the welfare reforms enacted during
President Clinton’s tenure, it was former welfare recipients who had access to a personal vehicle
– reliable, timely transportation – that could get and keep a job longer, keep their kids on track in
school longer, and work their way out of poverty better – than those who had to ride the bus.
Decades of poverty studies confirm that personal vehicular mobility is critical, especially for
lower and middle wage workers – but unlike 1975, since the region’s population is now
majority-minority, technological changes like electric cars aren’t good enough and we need to
settle for small rental apartments and interminable or unreliable bus rides. This is the face of
transportation discrimination against minorities, and it like housing discrimination is illegal and
immoral – and SCAG has itself commissioned studies from UCLA and USC that confirm the
current truth of these facts as described in our 200 v OPR lawsuit.
SCAG also knows that transit ridership, notwithstanding billions of dollars of investment, has
actually declined – and the same UCLA and USC studies commissioned by SCAG have shown
that transit ridership loss has been most substantial for lower income minority riders, and that
there is no proposed fixed route transit service solution that would reverse this trend. The Plan
itself concedes that only about 2% of people in the LA MSA use transit, and about 1% of people
in the inland empire use transit, as shown in Table reproduced on the following page. And the
SCAG Plan itself admits:
The key challenge facing public transportation in Southern California is the recent rapid decline in the use of
public transportation. As documented in Falling Transit Ridership: California and Southern California,
habitual transit riders appear to be shifting away towards personal vehicles. If the ridership keeps dropping,
service cuts may occur, leading to a vicious cycle of further ridership decline.

6

 Many transit advocates would argue that new technologies and service patterns such as Transportation
Network Companies (TNCs), Mobility as a Service (MaaS) and automated vehicles present an opportunity for
transit agencies to move away from being service providers to become platform owners and mobility
managers. However, transit agencies, and public agencies in general, tend to be resistant to change. In
particular, as noted by transit consultant Jarret Walker in January 2018, transit agencies are subject to strict
regulatory oversight, rigid labor contracts, occasionally conflicting or confusing direction from elected
officials, and a focus on day–to–day operations. These conditions often cause transit agencies to focus on
stability and predictability.

SCAG’s Plan is a transportation solution for the 1% (or 2%) – and ignores the transportation
needs, and solutions, that work for everyone else.
SCAG is also legally responsible, under federal and state transportation and air quality laws – as
well as civil rights laws – to provide for effective and equitable transportation solutions for
communities as they exist, not for utterly unaffordable new housing types predicated on fixed
route public transit ridership that do not work to get people where they need to go reliably,
safely, or on time.
We assume many of SCAG’s leaders and staff have the luxury of working from home at a
keyboard or from a cell phone. We know that CARB disdainfully calls people who have to be
physically present to perform their job and be paid the “service population” – but federal and
state transportation and air quality law require the Plan to work even for minorities, not just
keyboarding bureaucrats with secure salaries and benefits. We are Californians and we are
equally entitled to pursue homeownership: we are not the “service population” for bureaucrats.
Detailed Comments
We first note the absence of legally adequate responses to our comments, as well the absence of
any substantive changes in the Plan/PEIR in response to our comments. We also note that many
other commenters raised overlapping concerns with the Plan/PEIR, from the massive
7

 displacement and gentrification consequences of destroying existing minority community
residents and small businesses in neighborhoods served by transit, to proposing housing and
transportation measures already shown to be wholly infeasible for the vast majority of the people
living in the region who work full time (and often at multiple jobs) but cannot afford housing and
suffer the longest commute distances in the nation.1
We also object to staff’s unprecedented proposal that the SCAG Regional Council hold a
“public” meeting telephonically to approve the Plan/PEIR in April, one month after the release
of the 10,000++ page Plan/PEIR. The SCAG Board is more than twice the size of the State
Senate, which has wisely postponed trying to meet to conduct the public’s business in the
COVID emergency. There is ZERO meaningful opportunity for public input and meaningful
dialogue with SCAG’s Board, given telephonic constraints that preclude both meaningful
interaction with the public and meaningful interaction among the diverse members of the
Regional Council itself. Any such proceeding would be unlawful, and a violation of the Brown
Act and Bagley-Keene Open Meeting laws even under the recent COVID-19 Executive Order.
The proposal also represents a shockingly tone-deaf bureaucratic expectation that the elected
members of the Council take time away from dealing with the COVID-19 emergency to absorb
10,000+ pages of text in a socially distanced vacuum. Members of our community – struggling
with staggering job losses, family care obligations, illness, unpaid debt, and a highly uncertain
recessionary future – are even less able to take the time to find broadband access and absorb
10,000 pages of a 30-year regional housing and transportation plan.
Even more urgently, the day after the Plan/EIR is adopted, anti-housing special interests can
immediately use the Plan/EIR in CEQA lawsuits – including but not limited to CEQA lawsuits
challenging approved projects that comply with all state and local requirements including the
prior SCAG Plan‼ In the midst of the state’s most severe housing crisis in history, handing a
new CEQA lawsuit claim to housing opponents is not just harmful public policy, it’s immoral –
and an unconstitutional and unlawful disparate impact caused by SCAG against minority
communities most victimized by the current housing crisis.

1

To pick just one of dozens of examples of unlawful responses to our comments, the PEIR
continues to ignore the CEQA mandate for considering the cumulative consequences of
implementing the reasonably foreseeable Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) final
state allocation demanding that the region plan to accommodate 1.3 million new homes. The
adoption of these RHNA targets is exempt from CEQA, but this exemption does not excuse
SCAG from considering the reasonably environmental consequences of the region’s legallymandated implementation of this final RHNA allocation. Other examples: the Plan and PEIR
fail to respond to comments regarding the civil rights and statutory violations of the Plan,
including each of the causes of action included in the 200 v CARB and 200 v OPR civil rights
lawsuits, which were submitted in their entirety as comments on the Plan and include detailed
factual and legal comments about the region’s housing and transportation, and the unlawful
discriminatory consequences of VMT reduction mandates through massive displacement of
existing communities and massive construction of rental “projects” with unknown funding or
unaffordable costs.

8

 California has a housing shortage of 3.5 million units. Adopting a Plan/PEIR that immediately
creates a new CEQA lawsuit claim against housing that complies with all city and county plans
and ordinances, and is built to the most exacting sustainability standards of any state in the
nation, by a 70-member board acting by telephone in the midst of a global health pandemic, is an
unconscionable. We need to collectively stay calm, and focused on solving the region’s housing
and transportation needs, and to do that we must pause and collaborate on revising the Plan/PEIR
– not rush to telephonic judgment on a 30-year plan.
COVID-19 Pandemic Requires Plan Revisions and Recirculation of the PEIR
COVID-19 requires a clear-eyed reassessment of the region’s transportation and housing needs,
and the feasible transportation and housing solutions that work for the people who live in the
region.
Instead of acknowledging the failure of past plans to provide effective housing and transportation
solution for the region, and instead of recognizing the massive changes already underway with
COVID-19, staff proposed that the Plan/PEIR be rubber stamped on a fast track telephonically.
This letter adds to our prior comments that the COVID-19 pandemic is significant new
information for purposes of CEQA. The region’s response to the pandemic has demonstrated the
feasibility of massively increasing remote work practices, which is a proven VMT reduction
measure that can be implemented without the massive demolition and replacement of existing
transit-served neighborhoods. Remote work is also a VMT reduction measure that is far less
costly, and hugely less regressive and racially discriminatory, than charging those forced by high
housing costs to live at greater distances from their jobs, and those forced to be physically
present at their job to perform their job duties (and get paid).
The COVID-19 pandemic also raises significant new information in the form of disparate health
hazards caused by lower income transit-dependent neighborhoods in higher density urban cities
such as Chicago and New York. As noted by the New York times on April 7:
At least 41 transit workers have died, and more than 6,000 more have fallen sick or selfquarantined. Crew shortages have caused over 800 subway delays and forced 40 percent of
train trips to be canceled in a single day. On one line the average wait time, usually a few
minutes, ballooned to as high as 40 minutes.
Since the coronavirus pandemic engulfed New York City, it has taken a staggering toll on
the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the agency that runs the subway, buses and
commuter rails and is charged with shuttling workers — like doctors, nurses and
emergency responders — who are essential to keeping the city functioning.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/nyregion/coronavirus-nyc-subway-federal-aid-.html
The contagion risks of transit is not confined to these legacy east coast cities. The San Francisco
Bay Area has nearly five times more commuters using public transit as San Francisco (about
10%, primarily commuting to downtown San Francisco) as contrasted with coastal LA’s 2% and
the Inland Empire’s 1% of transit users. Given transit workers and riders COVID risks, even in
the state’s most transit-dependent city - San Francisco serving its 49-square miles, as contrasted
9

 with LA’s nearly 700-square miles, transit officials first shut down all light rail lines, then cut
bus lines from 68 to 17 routes. Transit service, and transit agencies, remain critical – but the
fragility and adverse consequences of abrupt cessations of transit services in public health
hazards is a significant adverse environmental impact under CEQA that was unknown, and
unknowable, when the Draft Plan/PEIR was proposed.
COVID-19 has already proven the feasibility of the less economically regressive, racially
discriminatory, and environmental harmful VMT reduction option of increasing the region’s
remote workforce. COVID-19 has already proven the fragility, as well as the adverse health and
environmental consequences of reliance on fixed route public transportation 19th century bus and
train technology.
California Public Records Act Request
Instead of allowing either the public or the elected members of its Regional Council – all of
whom are coping with the daily emergencies of the pandemic - to conduct a meaningful public
review of the over 10,000 pages of text comprising the Plan/PEIR released March 29, just as the
full horror of the pandemic was becoming clear, SCAG staff has insisted that the Plan/PEIR
“must” be approved only one month later. SCAG staff has reported that the region is at risk of
losing billions in federal and state transportation funding unless its Plan/PEIR are approved in
April 2020.
This letter requests, pursuant to the California Public Records Act, the list of federal and state
funding programs which SCAG could no longer access if the Plan/PEIR are not approved in
April 2020, or as or before December 2020. The letter further requests copies of any
correspondence received by any third parties regarding SCAG’s loss of public funding if the
Plan/PEIR are not approved in April 2020, or as of December 2020.
This letter further requests copies of all documents, including emails, between SCAG staff, and
either CARB or OPR, between November 1, 2019 and April 27, 2020. CARB and OPR are
defendants in civil rights lawsuits filed by The 200 for housing discrimination undertaken under
the false flag of climate change which has the actual effect of destroying historic minority
neighborhoods, displacing minority residents to ever more distant locations where housing
remains affordable (including other states), and depriving minority residents of homeownership
with tactics like charging VMT “mitigation” fees for new housing while exempting majority
white existing homeowners from such fees. We fully anticipate ample documentary evidence of
collusion between SCAG staff, along with CARB and/or OPR staff, in furtherance of the
unlawful discriminatory housing actions included in the Plan, and anticipate fully protecting our
legal rights to
We request these records in electronic format, either in a Drop Box or with other remote access
technology, or on a memory stick. We respectfully request the opportunity to communicate with
your information technology staff to assure that the computers available to us can accommodate
the electronic information format.

10

 Comments on Plan/PEIR
We hereby restate all of our earlier comments and objections, as even a cursory skim of the final
Plan/PEIR demonstrates that staff wholly ignored our comments and most comments raised by
others.
The simple and unassailable truth, as documented in detail in the 250-page civil rights lawsuit
challenging VMT and other anti-housing measures in the CEQA Guidelines, and in the 150-page
civil rights lawsuit challenging four anti-housing measures (including VMT reduction mandates)
adopted by the California Air Resources Board in its Scoping Plan notwithstanding the
Legislature’s repeated express rejection of any legislative mandate to reduce VMT, is that our
housing, homelessness, and poverty crisis have all become much more severe over past eight
years under prior RTP/SCS plans that elevated one legal mandate – GHG reductions, as
interpreted by the unelected members of CARB’s board – above all civil rights, transportation,
air quality and, housing federal and state legal mandates applicable to the RTP/SCS PEIR.
Instead of heeding Albert Einstein’s advice that those who refuse to learn from history are
destined to repeat it, the Plan/PEIR double down on the same failed strategies with the inevitably
same failed result.
SCAG’s legal duty is to adopt a Plan that achieves multiple statutory objectives, including but
not limited to actually providing safe and accessible transportation and housing solutions that
work for the region’s people, and sustain and accommodate population and economic growth as
required even by the Legislature’s climate mandates set forth in SB 375.
Instead, as again summarized below, the Plan throws the region’s minorities under the bus - a
bus that is statistically almost certain to be nearly empty except (for some routes only) during the
morning and afternoon commutes.
•

SCAG Plan Fails at Housing. The SCAG plan expressly acknowledges that its desired
outcome of infill-only housing to meet one regulatory objective of one agency – CARB’s
19% GHG reduction mandate, for which CARB counts only VMT reductions from public
transit, bike and pedestrian modes as trip reductions and does not recognize telework or
other remote access learning, medical care, shopping, or other activities. The Plan
acknowledges that infill high density housing that wipes out existing neighborhood uses
in locations with transit – locations where the Plan already acknowledges that about 30%
of the region’s household already live –is extraordinarily expensive, and cannot work
without financing and regulatory reforms that SCAG has no legal authority to require or
enforce. SCAG’s prior leadership and Boards have repeatedly acknowledged that SB
375 cannot be achieved without re-instating and actually expanding redevelopment taxincrement financing tools and cannot be achieve without reforming CEQA to end
lawsuits and lawsuit threats against implementation of plan-conforming housing, transit
and infrastructure. The Legislature and two successive Governors have declined to
reinstate redevelopment, or reform CEQA. In the state’s most sustained period of
economic growth, now tragically ended with the pandemic, and with a housing supply
shortfall of 3.5 million units according to Governor Newsom, housing production
11

 actually fell for two successive years in a row. The SCAG Plan cannot be built on a
foundation of unicorns and gold pots at the end of rainbows: this Plan should be either
abandoned entirely, or conditioned to become effective only if a massively expanded
redevelopment program and equally fundamental changes to CEQA’s project-by-project,
duplicative and successive special interest leverage lawsuits.
•

SCAG Plan Fails at Transportation. The Plan expressly acknowledges that only 2% of
coastal residents use public transit, 1% of inland residents use public transit, and transit
use continues to fall (even before pandemic). The Plan further concludes that public
transit agencies are too bureaucratic and rigid to provide the types of platform-based
transportation solutions that have been proven successful in reducing car ownership, or
promoting the only successful congestion-relief (and VMT reduction) measures like
affirmatively promoting remote work solutions that have now been instantly adopted by
millions of SCAG residents in the COVID-19 emergency. Instead, the SCAG Plan again
yearns for another unicorn – the currently-unlawful imposition of fees to drive at some
times on some streets and highways, and more fees to drive even a mile in an electric car
– to impose massively regressive and racially discriminatory new cost burdens on
precisely the same people most harmed by the housing crisis. As vividly demonstrated
during the pandemic, “those people” – whom CARB calls its “service population” and
the rest of us call “Californians” – need to be able to get to work safely, and on time.
Instead of providing transportation solutions that work for people, as required by federal
and state transportation laws, the SCAG Plan proposes to impose massive new and
currently unlawful financial burdens on workers in the form of VMT and congestion
pricing fees on those who cannot work from home, to fund still more fixed route transit
projects, instead of including the suite of effective, safe, and efficient transportation
solutions that are lawful now – and urgently needed now – by what in the COVID-19
pandemic have been more appropriately referred to as our essential workforce and not
dismissed as the “service population.”

The SCAG plan is the housing equivalent of requiring everyone to live in million dollar
mansions (which in this Plan is a million-dollar 750-square foot high rise condo with $1000
monthly association fees in addition to mortgage payments), rely on magically more effective
19th century fixed route bus/train technologies, collect a ton of VMT and congestion fee money
from the nation’s most housing-burdened and poorest minority “service workers,” and then wave
a magic wand to restore redevelopment and reform CEQA, and then – voila! – the plan works‼
And if, when the magic again fails to appear, as it has for the last two rounds of plans, well . . .
that’s a problem for tomorrow.
And this is all before the COVID-19 pandemic, record unemployment claims, and heart-stopping
tax revenue declines predicted by the state’s reliance on boom time capital gains and top
incomes, and local government’s reliance on already-plunging declines in brick-and-mortar retail
sales.
Conclusion
The Plan/PEIR cannot lawfully be approved as proposed. The COVID-19 emergency is
significant new information requiring what should have occurred in response to comments, and
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 did not: the reworking of the Plan/PEIR to actually meet the transportation and housing needs of
the people in the region.
Nobody elected or appointed transit agency officials to adopt a plan – in the name of climate or
any other environmental value - to perpetuate a century of racially discriminatory redlining
actions to continue to deprive minority Californians from acquiring a home, safely and
efficiently getting to work, and attaining the California (and American) dream for themselves
and their children.
We urge you to withdraw and rework the Plan, recirculate an adequate revised draft PEIR, and
engage in a full and inclusive stakeholder engagement process. We know there are more
compact forms of housing – starter homes can include townhome and condo projects, flats and
small-lot homes – that can work. We know there is some transit that can work at least some of
the time. Given the scale and severity of the region’s housing, poverty and homeless crises,
however, and the disparate impact that these crises have on the region’s majority-minority
community, the revised plan should build on the far more constructive planning framework
provided in the geographic distribution of the region’s job centers, should endorse the “all of the
above” housing solutions needed to address the current crisis including the region’s need to
accommodate 1.3 million new housing units under the current Regional Housing Needs
Assessment cycle,
We welcome the opportunity to “meet” to address any questions you have regarding the
foregoing, and to collaborate with you and your staff as you revise the Plan, and revise and
recirculate the PEIR, to restore SCAG’s historic commitment to being integral to the region’s
success – and end this foray into creating massive and discriminatory new housing obstacles.
VTY,
200 Leadership Council Members
John Gamboa
Hyepin Im
Steven Figueroa
Joe Coto
Anna Solorio
Ortensia Lopez

CC: SCAG Officers and Board Members

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