Santa Barbara Newspress

JOIN TOGETHER
Regional action required to solve local problems
10/3/04

The Santa Barbara County Association of Governments has just released "Taking Action Regionally," a report that for the first time reviews the jobs, housing and congestion crisis emerging between Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, and how best to address these interconnected problems on both local and regional levels.

What "Taking Action Regionally" discovered that is unique is an overall lack of community ownership in addressing these large-scale problems, and without that ownership and cooperation, our quality of life will slowly erode.

As public policy consultants to the project, we facilitated discussions of a diverse two-county Blue Ribbon Committee of leading citizens, government staff and consultants who convened in good faith to address the problems that confront the region, review analysis and models to verify public perceptions, and prioritize specific action steps in terms of policy and politics.

Two obvious -- but overlooked -- premises were discovered that our communities have missed in their well-intended efforts to address such large-scale challenges:

1) They cannot be solved city by city, or by a county in isolation, and 2) communities are clearly not working together to make substantial progress in bettering our region.

Cities, by their nature, have historically acted unilaterally, without consideration of policy effects across jurisdictional boundaries. This was fine decades ago, when urban areas were naturally separated by open spaces.

Moreover, it has been well documented that state tax policies in recent decades have resulted in cities competing against -- rather than cooperating with -- each other for prime sources of sales tax revenue, like big box retail and auto malls.

Today, however, individual community actions are clearly having unintended and detrimental effects on our entire region. For example:

• North Santa Barbara County risks becoming predominantly a bedroom community due to no-growth policies in San Luis Obispo's five-cities area and Santa Barbara's South Coast.
• While Santa Barbara County's South Coast holds a prime job base and flat population growth, its dependence on more than 20,000 Ventura and North County commuters has spiked traffic congestion and housing prices to alarming levels.
• Pinched between the L.A. metropolitan area and affordable housing-starved Santa Barbarans, western Ventura County experiences massive transportation and housing infrastructure pressures.
• After poring over various data sources and modeling forecasts, the group leveraged its collective insights to identify a series of immediate, action-oriented steps that must be taken to build community momentum to change. (To review the report and its participants, go to www.SBCAG.org.)
• The group did not agree on everything, but in the end, it unanimously underscored that we are facing a crisis and that meaningful change will require the development of inter-regional alliances, which heretofore have not been nurtured.

The report's recommendations provide a road map to problem solving in the following seven policy areas:

1. Inter-regional communication and collaboration,
2. Advancing housing polices that reflect regional priorities,
3. Integrating regional thinking into job creation and economic development,
4. Streamlining local permit processing,
5. Support for ongoing programs to address congestion,
6. Public education and involvement opportunities,
7. Legislative advocacy for change.

First and foremost, the recommendations are built on the premise that communities must begin to communicate together before they can begin to address (let alone solve) large-scale societal problems.

Strategically, these efforts must begin slowly and build momentum over time.

In terms of first steps, the report recommends that:

1) SBCAG and the Ventura County Organization of Governments begin a dialogue (which, thanks to this report, they are commencing); 2) the counties and cities of Ventura and Santa Barbara, and ultimately San Luis Obispo, begin to talk about successes as well as challenges they collectively face; 3) key community organizations, such as the Ventura County Civic Alliance, Santa Barbara Economic Community Project and Improve North County, begin talking together about common interests and potential solutions; and 4) chambers of commerce and key economic associations engage amongst themselves and with government on issues of mutual concern.

Why haven't these discussions taken place before? Through our work, we discovered that the city-by-city and county-by-county approach that represents the status quo, by its very nature, disenfranchises the very people who feel the impacts the most -- those who commute have no vote and no clout. Addressing problems regionally requires elected officials to look beyond their borders to define community in a more regional sense.

We cannot continue to operate in isolation of each other, assuming that "local control" will determine our fate. We must start discussing these problems on a grander scale.

In our opinion, regional problems require regional solutions. Elected officials and community leaders have everything to gain by sitting down together and addressing these problems collectively, rather than in piecemeal fashion.

Our region must stay ahead of the curve by thinking together about the future. In "Taking Action Regionally," we call on local government and the private sector to join this effort and confront the worsening status quo. If not now, then when? If not us, then who?

Someone once said that leadership entails not only the capacity to have and maintain influence beyond your authority, but the ability to get people to face the gap between the values they stand for and the conditions in which they live.

It is that kind of leadership that is required if we are to meaningfully address the economic, housing and mobility conditions that confront Santa Barbara and western Ventura County.

John Jostes & Jim Youngson
John Jostes owns Interactive Planning & Management, and is a professional mediator; Jim Youngson is co-owner of Terrain Consulting, a public relations consulting firm.

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