Quote:
Originally Posted by HurricaneHugo
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"Compromise" is a fun way to put it.
SANDAG is in a really bad state right now tbh. Ikahara has lost just about all his credibility with the Board of Directors. He's got a bit of a prickly personality and a tenancy avoid telling others what his plans are. That came back to bite him hard with this budget proposal, the details of which he didn't reveal until the last minute, meaning that it was too late to study any alternate proposals. When the Directors instead decided to sidestep SANDAG staff and come up with their own proposal, he could say he thought it would probably get thrown out by the state environmental board for increasing VMT, but without study there was no firm evidence either way. A good portion of the board perceived it as trying to force their hands, preventing study of concepts other than his own preferred option so that Ikahara could claim that "based on his experience" anything else would fail in Sacramento.
It's hard to evaluate if that's really true or not, but it's what a lot of the Directors seem to believe. The mayor of Chula Vista said when she walked into the meeting she was prepared to vote for Ikahara's budget, but when she heard that that his argument fell down entirely to his opinion on what Sacramento would support and appeals to his credentials, she abstained instead. The mayor of Escondido even went so far as to tell Ikahara "You're not mayor of San Diego County". For everyone else here, that's kinda like your boss telling you "You're not the owner of this company".
The real tragedy here is that now we have no idea if the proposal we're sending to Sacramento will be rejected, which has some serious implications for the proposed SD Grand Central at the NAVWAR site. The Navy was pretty clear when they started out the whole point of RFPing the site out to a private developer was to avoid getting funding entangled in politics, but SANDAG made an offer too juicy to ignore. So the Navy laid out an extremely tight 18 month timeline for SANDAG to get project approval, funding, development patners etc. For a project with this level of complexity that's pretty insane. For it to even have a chance in hell of succeeding it requires that all the state and federal approving bodies give their sign offs promptly and without dispute. If approval of the regional transportation plan is delayed by just three months, SANDAG's MOU with the Navy will collapse and the Navy will have the option of looking elsewhere to redevelop the site. But then there's certainly been a few implications that Ikahara was trying to ram through a budget he knew Sacramento would love, even if the Directors didn't, just to avoid that very outcome. But if that were true he certainly can't say it, because using that as a justification would acknowledgment that the NAVWAR site had already been selected without public meetings or an open vote by the elected officials of the board, in violation of the Brown Act...
Or maybe SANDAG staff is too busy to keep the Directors updated on every last thing they do. They certainly don't have a lot of free time to hang out anymore
Also the
SDSU Mission Valley EIR was released. Enjoy.