There has been a lot of talk about Highway 25. Much of it, unfortunately, driven more by political agendas than by community needs. A few weeks ago the highway had its say on the matter with two fatal accidents, one involving several vehicles, and more untold hours of delays. Make no mistake, even a redesigned and rebuilt Highway 25 will have accidents, but newer highways are safer in the long run and they provide the critical transportation arteries that are a community’s economic lifeblood.
If there is anything that San Benito County needs it is economic lifeblood. The county and its cities have very little control over the skyrocketing cost of government services. We can trim a little here, fudge a little there, but in the end, the federal and state laws, surrounding public service job market, and California’s near costal cost of living have us by the throat. Example, the CalPERS healthcare premiums for Northern California, excluding the Bay Area, are going up an average of 19 percent in 2016.
Maneuvering, by the anti-growth majority of the Board of Supervisors, — along with a vote from San Juan Bautista — the latter admitting “our voters to have no interest in Highway 25,” has kept the highway off the Caltrans priority list. There have been a litany of excuses, but the truth is that none of them are valid, it’s just politics plain and simple. Worse, it is misunderstood, misguided, and self-defeating.
Stifling Highway 25 will not prevent growth as the opponents hope, it will just force it into the wrong areas while putting the lives of today’s residents at unnecessary risk. Before I go into the details, you must understand some transportation planning realities; I wish I could skip this part, but I can’t.
The priority list
There are two lists of highway projects: I call them the priority list and the non-priority list. The official names are terrible and confusing so I’ll use these terms as my shorthand.
The non-priority list was recently compared to window shopping at Nordstrom; if money were no object we’d buy that, and that, and two of them. Truthfully, projects on the non-priority list are never going to happen because no work, not even planning, is being done and money is always an object.
The priority list are projects we intend to fund somewhere, sometime, somehow. Note the word intend; no funding need be in place to get on the priority list and it gets things moving even though it may be a snail’s pace. Since so many transportation projects take decades, even a snail’s pace is significant. To recap, non-priority list means no action at all; priority list means moving along – slowly. The key point is it’s almost impossible to make up the time lost spent on the non-priority list; it can take years to move something to the priority list and when you do you, typically, have to start at square one.
The politics
Highway 25 is on the non-priority list because of the last election and the no-growth lobby; not because of the highway condition or community needs.
Two Supervisors wanted Supervisor Muenzer reelected for philosophical and personal reasons. Supervisor Botelho wanted to keep the board on the no-growth path and Supervisor Rivas saw Muenzer’s former opponent, Hollister Councilmember Gomez, as a potential political rival. Both of them worked behind the scenes to help Muenzer get reelected. In exchange, Muenzer was expected to back Botelho’s agenda and embarrass Gomez by having Highway 25 taken off the county’s priority list where Gomez had put it and where it belongs.
That’s exactly what happened. In fact, they went so far as to have Supervisor De La Cruz removed from the Council of Governments (COG) board to change the vote.
The excuses
They are going to try and throw sand in your eyes over this purely political move, but that is the truth. They are going to say that the current proposal is too big and too expensive – all true – but that is not a reason to take it off the priority list that almost always marks time for at least a decade. Being on the priority list does not lock in the highway design or cost. We could easily take some of that time to come up with a smaller, less expensive proposal, but if the highway is not on the priority list absolutely nothing happens.
The same applies to funding. They will say we do not have a funding mechanism to have Highway 25 on the priority list, but the truth is that the funding mechanism does not have to be in place to get on the list, and they know that. We only need the intent to fund the project at some time in the future.
The bait and switch
All this will be obvious when the upcoming tax measure will claim that it is designed to fund Highway 25. The real money will go to other county roads. That split is mandatory politically.
It should be noted that San Juan Bautista, population less than 2,000, has a full COG vote, where each Hollister member represents about 18,000 local residents and Hollister provides the overwhelming tax-based funding stream for COG, more than the county and San Juan taxpayers put together on a sales tax basis, but the rural areas combined with San Juan Bautista (a captured vote) actually control the COG funds and they are dedicated to keeping Hollister’s growth potential and potential political power at bay.
More importantly, they are dedicated to keeping the Highway 25 commute unattractive; if this also makes it arduous and dangerous, so what?
So Hollister, with more than 60 percent of the county’s population and tax base, will pour in the vast majority of tax money and the COG board’s rural majority will actually control how the money is spent. Highway 25 will be brought forward as Judas goat to lead the city voters down a blind alley while the county politicians dole out the benefits to the rural voters who are the wealthiest and have the lowest sales tax rate.
The Red Herring
The major red herring in this argument has been the 2014 Regional Growth Forecast published by Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments (AMBAG). AMBAG is the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito County and the anti-growth lobby consistently uses AMBAG’s ridiculous forecasts as the boogeyman in the closet.
Caltrans, in cahoots with AMBAG, claims that only transportation planning based on AMBAG’s predictions can have a priority; it’s a system almost too stupid to comprehend. What it amounts to is that once a basic mistake is made everyone is forced to support that error though the system for decades because it becomes gospel; the facts don’t count, only the forecasts which are consistently very wrong.
Time and again the growth opponents talk about AMBAG’s 2014 projection of a 2035 San Benito County population of 81,332, a compound growth rate of 1.56 percent, but before we buy it, let’s look at the projection in more detail and let’s look at AMBAG’s previous projections for San Benito to see if they were accurate.
According to the 2014 AMBAG report, the population in unincorporated San Benito County was forecasted as growing from 18,479 in 2010 to 31,135 in 2020, a whopping increase of 12,656, or 68.5 percent in only 10 years.
By the calendar, it’s now 2015 and we are halfway there chronologically, but according to the State of California the population in the unincorporated area of the county is 19,109. Which means that the increase from 2010, 5 years, was only 630 persons or 3.4 percent over that half decade..
Let me make a wild prediction: the population of the unincorporated area of San Benito County is not going to grow by more than 12,000 over the next 5 years. There is no development proposal that would do that and even if there were and it went in today, it would take more than 5 years to navigate the waters of the development process and it would still have to be built. It is not going to happen, but we are told we can’t fix the forecast because AMBAG predicted it.
The predictions of the local job market are just as specious, perhaps more so. What are you going to believe, the forecast or your own eyes as San Benito Street continues to close up? If you believe the AMBAG predictions were more accurate in the past, think again. Overall, they were actually worse; in 2008 they predicted a San Benito County 2035 population of 94,731 in 2035.
More puzzling still is the 2014 forecasted shift away from Hollister and into the unincorporated area. In the 2008 forecast Hollister’s population would reach 62,756 and the unincorporated area 29,068 in 2035. In the 2014 forecast Hollister’s population would reach only 45,397 in 2015, a forecast reduction of more than 17,000 while the unincorporated area went to 33,843 a forecast increase of 4,700.
That is one more reason that it makes no sense for those who want to keep growth out of the unincorporated areas to support the AMBAG forecasts: Overall, the forecast does exactly the opposite of what they want, but all thy can see is the short-term gain of stifling the highway expansion.
Holding back the ocean
The Dutch are famous for reclaiming land from the sea; unfortunately, they were also famous for periodic massive flooding that took place when the levees gave way – as they always did – and the sea water went where it wanted to go.
Some time ago they got fed up with this cycle of build and destruction and decided to build smarter. What they did is designed the system so the sea had somewhere to go, a series of canals and streams and designated flood plains and that solved the problem.
The anti-growth interests are playing the same game the Dutch used to play, they want to hold everything back as long as possible; that lack of economic opportunity damages the county daily. When something does break through it will be the wrong place and the wrong size and it will do a lot more damage to the county.
The right answer is to control development by giving it somewhere to go; somewhere that works best for the city and county and the old and new residents economically, environmentally, and for quality of life.
Fix it
Strangling a main transportation artery is not a viable solution, it’s an invitation to a disaster that takes place daily. The fact that is it incremental does not make it acceptable, the overall impact is the same.
Move Highway 25 to the priority list and do is as quickly as humanly possible, these petty political arguments are killing the county and the residents. We deserve better from our elected officials.