Assembly Select Committee on Select Committee on Reconnecting Communities

Hello, everybody. Good afternoon. All right. Just want to make sure we are good to go. As this is a public meeting and we are being broadcast guest online. I want to first of all, thank you all for being here. It is wonderful to see the turnout, and it is really great for you all to be part of this first hearing of this Select Committee that was established this year in the State Assembly. I am proud to be the chair of this Committee.

I'll share a little bit more about my history with the work as it relates to this Committee and why I'm so excited to be here as I've had a chance to talk to some of you and certainly the folks who you will hear from here today.

This is really, I would call the who's who of people doing the work around reconnecting communities, certainly in California, from an academic research standpoint to an implementation standpoint, and then also from other experiences in other places that we'll hear about today. This is the first of a series of hearings that we will be hosting. My intent with this Committee hearing is to, at the end, we don't just meet to meet, we meet to create solutions. That's what our role is in the Legislature.

And I hope that at the end of our series of committees over the next couple of months, we will have some policy decisions to make and some introduction of policy to make to the Legislature and go through that legislative process with hearings and with more public testimony to make those policies, hopefully into reality. So, again, welcome to all of you and thank you very much. Should have introduced myself. David Alvarez.

I am the chair of the Select Committee for Reconnecting Communities, and I want to first start off by thanking our hosts. We would not be in this fantastic space, which I love because I get to see all the time as I live in this community and really don't make enough good use, I know myself, to utilize this wonderful public space. And I'm so glad that we are being hosted by Dr. Keena King, who has allowed us to be in this space.

And I want to give Dr. King the opportunity to say a few words if you're here. Thank you so much.

Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to San Diego College of Continuing Education. This is one of seven of our campuses, the Savior Beach Chavez campus. We are very know San Diego College of Continuing Education has always been about reconnecting individuals and community Members, individuals and our students to the community. So we are very honored to have this community here today. And so we want to welcome you to our space and we hope that you can in some way, shape, or form.

Check out all the amazing programs that we offer at San Diego College of Continuing Education. Just a little bit to know about our college. We specialize in focusing on individuals that are undocumented immigrants, refugees, those that are seeking asylum.

Can you hear me now?

Yes.

All right. So we have many programs that are 100% free to focus on undocumented immigrants, refugees, and those that are seeking asylum. So there's no better place than to have this conversation right here today. And so I want to thank the Assembly Member, our chair of, and you know what? I was trying to remember this very amazing long title, the Assembly Select Committee on Reconnecting Communities.

Just thank you for continuing to be grounded in the community and being right here at San Diego College of Continuing Education. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Dr. King, you and your team has been fantastic. I want to thank you, especially Anthony and Jasmine, for helping us make sure the logistics for today worked out. And again, thank you for your leadership here. And there are many ways to reconnect our community, and much work that needs to be done in many spaces, and education is certainly one of them. So thank you again.

I also want to thank the Members of my team who worked on this, Maya Hernandez and Chris Jonesmeyer and Lisa Schmidt, who's our district Director. I want to thank them for the work and certainly want to thank the support staff, who's here in the back for making sure that the public has full access to this conversation, not just here today, but will forever live on the net, somewhere available to anybody.

I want to now give the opportunity to, if my colleague, Assembly Member Berner, who's also one of our San Diego representatives in the state Capitol, she is quickly becoming one of our senior Members of the San Diego delegation. And I have the tremendous honor of being with her on a very regular basis, obviously, on the Assembly floor when we're working together to pass legislation, but we even get to almost all the time fly up together every single week.

And her dedication to this community and the partnership that she's demonstrated to me as I've entered the Assembly and gotten to work and with this Committee today, which she actually is not officially a Member of, but she is here to listen to this conversation because it matters to her. Please join me in welcoming Assembly Member Boerner.

Thank you, David. I really appreciate being here. I'm not on the Select Committee, and I actually chair the Select Committee on Sea Level Rise in the California economy. So my title is longer, but I know how much effort, what you see here is seamless for you guys. But finding the right panels, putting together right programming, it's actually a lot of effort. So thank you, David, for convening us today and everybody who's here to make it happen. My name is Tasha Berner.

I represent kind of the San Diego coast from Carlsbad to downtown, including East Village and Coronado. And then he has Imperial Beach. And then they gave me the water off Imperial beach so that we could share the Tijuana river sewage problem, which you're also a huge champion on. And so my family has lived on the San Diego coast since 1924. So we remember before the railroad came in, before the. If five came through and decimated our communities, divided them in a way that previously hadn't happened.

And you see that most acutely here with Little Italy and Barrio Logan and Golden Hill all being divided. And it's a testament to the community here that you've changed and you've taken back that division with art and culture and the amazing Chicano Park. And last year I chaired the arts, entertainment, sports, Tourism and Internet media Committee because they wanted to give me another long title. And we came to Bario Logan because it's one of our state designated cultural arts districts.

And that inspired me largely the work here to reconnect these communities inspired me to write AB 812, which was signed by the Governor, which allows cities to designate up to 10% of their deed restricted housing for cultural arts district workers because there's no way we reconnect our communities without art and without culture acknowledging where we came from. So that was very inspirational for me and David and I work closely on all of this together. I look forward to hearing the Committee.

I have two kids and I haven't seen them most of this week because of my schedule. So I will have to leave it about an hour, hour and a half. But I will appreciate finding the rest of the hearing on the internet somewhere and watch that and appreciate everybody who's come out today.

Thank you. Thank you summary Member for your presence. Really appreciate you taking the time to be here. I think in the first hour and a half our intent is to certainly get through the panels because they are phenomenal and I am really, truly looking forward to what they have to share with us today. So I won't go too much into an introduction. Typically Members of committees and particularly chairs like to talk quite a bit.

I have a lot that I could say about growing up in this community divided by the five freeway. My entire life now happen to live on the other side of the five. But growing up on this side of the five, and I've shared it with a lot of Members of the know. My church was on the other side of the freeway. My middle school was on the other side of the freeway.

Growing up, if you know a little bit of San Diego's history, there were some gang turfs that were created as a result of this freeway division. A lot of social impacts that go beyond, clearly, the health impacts. I suffer from asthma, as do the majority of many kids, I should say, in this community, as a result of emissions and pollution, largely due to the highway system. And so social impacts well beyond the ones I just described that have impacted this community.

Lack of green space, that things like freeway lids and connecting communities in different ways could help heal some of those divisions that have happened as a result of this major investment, which has been important in terms of driving our economy, but has had some repercussions, and we're now coming to terms with that.

And again, this Committee intends to acknowledge all that, assess all that, and identify solutions going forward for those that do the work primarily, certainly the men and women who do the labor and the work, and then those who do the planning at the professional level through mainly Caltrans and our public institutions. With that, that's all I'll leave it at.

I can talk to anybody about much more about the history and certainly the impact here, but I think we have a short video we wanted to share with you of something that was captured here in this particular Committee community as a result of the division caused by Highway Five.

We are standing at the local community church and at the footsteps of the church. We have the highway five Freeway. It was really devastating for the people that lived here in the 1940s and 50s who had to pick up and go somewhere else. And we saw the impacts of those.

Long term, it devastated the businesses. We, a lot of mom and pop stores here. All of that went away. It was hard. It was very hard.

And we think that by talking about reconnecting communities, either with freeway lids or connecting communities in other ways, we can start to do right by these injustices.

We're here today talking to you from Toralta park, which is in the community of city Heights. It actually was built in the early 2000s, actually resulted in a one block community park over Interstate 15 through the community of City Heights.

One example here in San Diego, in our own backyard in City Heights, where the community fought and fought and fought for many, many decades so that there could be some space connecting the two communities. And they took about a couple of blocks worth of land, and there's a park there, and it's great.

So this lid here is now reconnecting these two communities and bringing everyone together here at this beautiful park. Instead of having ugly sound walls, now we have this beautiful park that we're here to be able to come enjoy, bring our kids, play a little catch, and some basketball.

Reconnecting communities is about creating new opportunities, because when you talk about lids or caps, you create new opportunities for green space, for public space, and potentially for housing that's so important in communities like this one.

In terms of equity. Our kids deserve to have a clean space to play in, clean playgrounds, a lot more grass to play in. And I believe that Bario Logan deserves that neighborhood.

And this community is on its way back. And you'll see it's a vibrant area, which it wasn't 2025 years ago.

At any given day, you can see Members of the community using this park, coming together, exercising, playing basketball, and really bringing a warmth to this Community.

Big corporate businesses don't really exist in this Neighborhood. We have a Community Space with art space, with a brewery, coffee shop. And all of those Spaces Feel really safe for all of us. They feel like those are places where we can really belong.

To make a Community strong, we need schools, we need churches, we need libraries, we need parks, we need safe places where the children can pay. And all of that comes together and forms A Community that serves everyone, not only just children.

So, really, in California, we're going to have to really ride this next wave, which is A wave of infrastructure that does Take Changing the Mindset of the prior or the infrastructure mentality. How do we get creative with that? Highway lids, freeway caps, underpasses and public Spaces that are safe for everybody. That's where we need to FoCUs on it.

We have many Members that live here in Barrio Logan, in this community. So this type of project is going to be so beneficial for our Members who live in this community and the surrounding communities in the area.

What's really great is that the community Members that live here are going to have an opportunity to build these parks. We live by the slogan we live here, we build here.

We currently have a Proposal in the Natural Resources Bond for half $1.0 billion for Reconnecting types of ProGraMs here in the State of California. But certainly freeway lids, the captioning of emissions and the greening and opportunities for public space with parks is something that is included in this bond proposal that the Legislature is currently drafted.

Mexican people have a tendency to be very close to their neighbors and friends, even when they move away, and it's something that can happen again. So it's going to happen. Without a doubt it's going to HAppen.

So our whole point is to let the communities take the lead. It's just important that the local people in the communities have the say so on how it develops.

I'm a Proud advocate for reconnecting communities across America. That's why I worked hard to help create the first program to reconnect communities divided by transportation infrastructure that was included in the bipartisan infrastructure law. But that has to be the start, not the end, of our efforts, because the vibrancy of our communities will depend on our ability to come together.

Whether you're talking about people like Connie Zuniga, who has really given her life to this community, or our business, people like Hector who want to make the community more successful, or our young people like Ashley and others who are envisioning a much brighter future, or about our men and women who work in the trades, who build this, who make sure that we build safely, that we build projects that are going to be a benefit to the public.

All of these individuals, all of this group of people is really critical for us to be successful.

We look forward to working with Assembly Member Alvarez to bring his vision to fruition.

We're excited to work with Assembly Member David Alvarez. He's a champion for the working class.

When we connect communities, we create opportunities. How we create change in California is our community, our stakeholders, the men and women who power California, who make California work, and obviously legislative leaders, this powerful partnership can get it done. Thank you for rebuild SoCal, who helped do all the work, really to interview individuals, as you saw, people from all walks of life in the community who've done a lot of work here. So that'll be it for the introductions.

I hope it gets you a little bit excited about what's going to come next with the presentations. These individuals, again, are working in this on a regular basis and are the leading experts, and we're really, really proud to have them here. So our first panel, and if you haven't had a chance to get an agenda, we're going to have a couple of panels come and present.

But our first panel is on the impacts of freeways on communities of color and ethnic minorities, research that was done by Dr. Paul Ong, Director of the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, who's here to present. And so I'll ask Dr. Ong to please come forward. And Shandara is also going to be presenting, I believe, Chandara Peck, is that correct? All right. Who is also from the UCLA center of Neighborhood Knowledge.

But I just learned he is also from city heights, so he knows the city heights experience quite well. So turn it over to both of you. Thank you very much for being here. I'm looking forward to hearing your testimony. Thank you very much.

Thank you. I'm not very technologically. Yes. Thank you for the Select Committee, for inviting us. It's our privilege. And hopefully we could provide some information, background on the history of freeway development and communities of color. Can we have our slide, please?

It's coming right up. We have the other slide. Okay. Welcome, Dr. Ong, if you want to get started, and then we'll catch up with the slides.

I want to first acknowledge our many sponsors who helped us in terms of supporting this research project, including our colleagues at Caltrans. It's inspiring that they are very supportive of the effort in terms of rethinking what the history means in terms of our current obligation. And so there has been, if we could go to the third slide. I think that's the last slide. Keep going backwards. Okay. So while they're catching up, why don't I just continue on?

So there's been, fortunately, a local reckoning with our history, our construction of the freeway network throughout the country. And as mentioned, it produced many benefits. It did help commerce. It did help in terms of connecting the developing suburbs with older urban core. All those things are benefits that helped our society. But at the same time, it was done in a way that was extremely systematically biased, particularly its impact on poor neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color. And we have come to begin to understand that.

And so what you see is article in the LA Times referring to that history. So certainly we're seeing that here in this region and in the state, the acknowledgment of that. Next slide, please. And it's not just a local understanding. It has become a national discussion about both the history and what do we do in terms of both acknowledging that history and as well as how do we begin rectifying some of the damages done in the past. Next slide, please.

So as part of that broader effort, we've been privileged to conduct a series of research projects using both quantitative and qualitative methods to better understand how freeway development and its impact on communities of color. And it's to document, first of all, the larger social, economic and political dynamics behind freeway development. It's not just freeway development. It is a period, particularly after World War II, the quarter century, the three decades after World War II, that we fundamentally transformed our cities, our regions, our nation.

And so freeway is very much a part of that, but it's also a part of a much larger struggle, for example, the civil rights movement that we see in the 50s accelerating to the demand for fairness and justice. Ours is also to look at deeply the documentation of the planning and decision making process. To have a vibrant democracy, we must have a process, a decision making process, a citizen participation process that's democratic. And that means that we have to have the different stakeholders at the table.

And part of it is the question, did we see that during the development of the freeway system? We want to quantify. Again, deep and digger is through case studies how those decisions are made, what alternatives were possible? Could there have been ways of avoiding the damages? And after we make decisions, what were the damages and what were the direct damages, the households that were displaced, the buildings that were destroyed, the stores that were closed, but also the indirect damages.

It's not that you just put a freeway in and you take out housing. It's that you dissemble communities, divide communities, you take the vibrance away from that community. And we also want to explore some of the long term consequences, because infrastructures are there for decades, if not a century. Next slide, please.

So to understand some of that history, we've been conducting a series of deep case studies throughout the state, and we have six sites that we have examined, and they're a mixture of both part of the interstate system that was developed as part of the federal effort, as well as the state freeway system that was developed in complement to the interstate system. And you see on the map the distribution of our sites. And we're very fortunate to also include San Diego as one of the sites.

Next slide, please. And the communities that we look at, the population in particular, that we wanted to look at, is very diverse, not only within each site, in some of these sites, but across our six sites. So we are very fortunate to look at communities that were predominantly African Americans, communities that were predominantly Latinos, communities that were predominantly Asian Americans, but also communities that were mean.

One of the remarkable thing is today, this morning, before we came here, I had the chance, with chance guidance, to go through city Heights. It's an incredibly diverse community, one of the most diverse in the country. And so we also have sites that are very diverse. So we have a mixture of different regions as well as different populations affected. Next slide, please.

So one of the things is not just to look at the freeway that was constructed, one has to go back farther, because in developing freeways, as well as developing any infrastructure project, there's a planning stage, there's a decision making stage, and it's there, at that stage that we lay the history and the trajectory in the future. And so one of the things we wanted to do is go farther back before the actual decision was made. What were the alternatives?

And in our case studies, what we see is that there were always alternatives. Not all the plans ran through the communities of color. And a good example, one example is, take Stockton, up in the Central Valley. And so during the planning stage, there were about half dozen or more alternatives. We just selected two to look at and compare to. And what you see up there are the two. One represented a little bit farther north of downtown, one through slightly south of downtown.

And what you see in terms of the colors of the block group data is the percentage people of color. And what you see, remarkably, that alternative paths, what you choose makes a difference. It makes a difference who bears the cost, who benefits. And unfortunately, in Stockton, it's that brown gold path that was chosen in part because those communities did not have the equal political voice in the process. At the very beginning, they did not have the connections. They were economically marginalized.

And so the consequences is that they ran the crosstown Freeway through essentially three of the most vibrant Asian American enclaves that we had in the state, as well as for other communities to the east. There was African American community and a Latino community. And so it's really important. And that's why I'm so happy that you guys are starting that at the very beginning, it makes a difference how we conceive, how we plan, how we decide, determines who's going to benefit, who's going to be hurt.

So next slide, please. This is just a quick summary of an overview of our findings in our six sites. And a number of the sites are what we call classical examples of freeways bulldozing through communities of color. And we again document the alternative choices that were possible, that avoided that damage, as well as the decision making process or the unequal decision making process that occurred. And we were fortunate again to have San Diego. San Diego Sea Heights is unique among our six studies.

It's unique because of the way it happened. Whereas the other six sites were communities already of color. City Heights actually started after World War II as being overwhelmingly non Hispanic white. Matter of fact, it had fewer minorities in city Heights than it had throughout San Diego City or San Diego. County. So this is a site where we understand how freeways transform the racial composition of a community. And. Next slide, please. So one of it is, again, contextualizing why this happened.

Partly is because San Diego grew in a remarkable fashion in terms of the decades after World War II. This was a town that essentially double, quadruple its population over decades. And that population. Next slide, please. Moved from the core of the urban area, which you could see on the left, that's 1950, and you could see by 192000 that it spread out. Matter of fact, the fastest growth is occurring outside the city.

The fastest growth was occurring in the more distant area, something we call suburbanization or something we call urban sprawl. It was happening, and in many ways, urban sprawl, just like freeways are good and bad, it offer opportunity for housing for people, people who wanted the single family home with their own yard and so forth. But to do that, we also had to develop a freeway system, road system, to facilitate that. So they came hand in hand. Next slide, please.

And it was during this period of freeway construction and the transformation of San Diego that we saw a remarkable racial recomposition of this area. So on the left again, you see what San Diego was like just after World War II. Overwhelmingly 90, some percent non Hispanic white. But in the decades afterwards, like many parts of California, it became transformed in many ways a very positive thing. We got labor, we got expertise. We stole from countries the brightest to help us.

But with it is this remarkable transformation of the population. And you could see that. And that transformation also occurred geographically. You could see on the map on the right, the darker the blue, the higher percentage non Hispanic white. And you could clearly see the patterns about how the racial settlements are very systematic here in not. I don't want to point finger at San Diego, but it is a pattern we see throughout California and throughout the country. Next slide, please.

So to understand the interaction between freeway construction and what happened in terms of this transformation and its impact on the neighborhood, we're looking at city Heights. So that's an example. That map is our case study area. And one of the most important things besides the racial transformation of this area is also how it was built. It took nearly a half century to complete. It was done in two parts, the lower part, what we call the spur. And that occurred in the.

They stopped for a decade, decade and a half. And one of the biggest complaint is that it created traffic and led to a deterioration of the neighborhood. And it wasn't later until in the 70s that construction, late 70s, early 80s, that they restarted the effort. Part of it is funding. It's not sort of by choice itself. In the California hit a funding crisis in terms of freeway construction. But even the second stage took a long period of time in terms of it occurring.

And you could hear from the community groups about how damaging that was in terms of its effect on the community. Next slide, please. And what happened in city Heights is. zero, we have a time period. zero, sorry, I got lost. Thank you, Jack. So this is sort of the major time period in terms of city Heights, in terms of the key landmarks. So we think about it as the spur that comes off the 805 and dumps it off just before 40th Street.

The second last met was along 40th Street. Again, this is a process of about a half century. Imagine what it is to live in a community for a half century where you have vacant lots and so forth. Again, there are larger structural issues that created it, but nonetheless, the people who lived there had to live through that impact. Next slide, please. And so, like San Diego, there was a remarkable transformation of city Heights, but it transformed even more radically than the rest of the city.

And you can see that in the graph. It started off actually less in terms of having people of color at the beginning, and it turned into a place that overwhelmingly is people of color, and that's still true today. Next slide, please. Again, this gets played out geographically, spatially. When the spur was first developed, it was an area that started transforming. It was an area, and you can see down the left that already had minorities moving in, Hispanics, African Americans mainly.

But by the end of this half century, the whole area becomes transformed to what it is today. Next slide, please. So part of us understand that historical process, the decision making, the impacts, who was impacted, but also the current consequences of that impact. And part of the problem really is around health. And you could see the multiple Ways that we create pollution that impacts the health of babies, young children, adults and elderly. This work is really with my colleague Doug Hausner at UC Irvine.

I understand he will also be presenting later on, but we're living with the consequences of freeway in terms of health as well as other sort of impacts. Next slide, please. So here is another illustration of how freeways Are Related to environmental impacts. This is from the cow virus screen data set. This is another One of our study area in West Pasadena. And the 201, the one that goes north south, is the one we study. And this is the consequences in terms of pollution today.

Next slide, please. And we see something similar when we look at city Heights in terms of the freeway construction. Again, the Assembly Member have already talked about it. This reinforces the point by understanding the Association between the freeways and today's problems. Next slide, please. So I talked a little bit about the health consequences, but there are other Consequences that we ought to think about as potential impact. There is, as Mentioned, the physical disruption, fragmentation of neighborhoods.

Imagine a world where you didn't have the freeway and you want to get to your neighbor two blocks away. Imagine if you put a freeway there and the only tunnel is 34 blocks down. You have to add six more blocks to your travel. It fragments communities. It disassembles the social network of that community. Certainly it devalues home values, particularly those close by that's exposed to the pollution.

We also know it weakens the community economic base and its commercial activities in terms of how viable it is or not viable. So those are consequences we need to understand beyond just air pollution. Next slide, please. And I'm being a little repetitive now, so I apologize. So there is this new effort to, in the spirit of restorative justice, in a sense, how do we acknowledge the damage, but how do we also redress it?

And so at the federal level, there is a massive program also called reconnecting communities and. Next slide, please. And I am very proud that our state has something in parallel in terms of efforts to think about. How do we redress the harms that we did historically. Next slide, please. So I'm getting close to finalizing. Why do we study history?

Partly is because, well, partly because I'm an academic and I'm a researcher and I like to do this stuff, but the real reason is that it really gives us some precision about understanding the types of impacts that occurred, types of damage that occurs.

It also allows us a glance about how we do better procedurally when we make infrastructure investments, that we need to think about alternatives, thinking ahead, and also by understanding the history and in some ways a little more precisely, the impacts and the types of impacts. How do we think about what actions we take? What do we prioritize in terms of which communities, what do we think about the different alternative strategies and so forth? And I think history provides that.

I have one additional note that came up to me when I was hearing the Assembly Members speak, after I speak, that it's fantastic that the Select Committee is focusing on that. And I would encourage it also to think forward. That part of what we do as city planners, urban planners, is that we think about the future. And one of the things is that we always think about all the positive things, the great things, which is what we ought to be doing.

But we also have to have a word of caution. That is, we have done projects, for example, looking at massive investment in mass transit and how that led to gentrification. And so it's not enough just to say that we're going to put funds into disadvantaged communities that have been impacted. We need to be responsible because it could trip other actions that we didn't anticipate.

And so how do we essentially improve neighborhoods and make sure that the business flows to those who most need it, rather than tripping changes that we don't want to have? And I would encourage the legislation that was passed after the research that was done on gentrification and transit investment is a guideline. It's legislation about how development should occur, affordable housing, access and so forth. Those are things that are not directly the investment, but they're the consequences of investment.

Just same way historically, freeways, direct investments, but there were consequences. So part of what we do in city and urban planning is to think forward. But I encourage us to think forward, to look at all the possible outcome, including some of the negative ones, as a way of avoiding them. So that's next slide. If you curious, you could look at some of our very reports, most of the parts I wrote, I have to admit it's very dry, and I apologize for that.

But there are little gems written by my colleagues. So, next slide. That concludes my presentation. Again, it's been our privilege to present that. I just want to ask Chan, since he's a homeboy, if he wants to say anything.

No, thank you, Paul. And also thank the Select Committee for inviting us. Know, growing up in city Heights, we don't really think about these. Know, our parents work hard, they trying to get by, but going to school and learning more about these, that's when we start understanding the impacts that are affecting our community and our parents and the people that live around us. So I really believe that these are important work that we're doing in terms of looking at the research. So.

Thank you both. Really a tremendous honor to have you, Dr. Ong, to hear the factual academic perspective on this issue that I've lived with my entire life living in this community: people who lived in City Heights, people who lived in San Diego, Little Italy and many other places in San Diego and California. To hear that there's evidence-based learnings that we can take and hopefully do something with it, because it's not just about wanting to do something to beautify.

It will beautify neighborhoods if we talk about reconnecting communities in the way that this committee has thought about doing. But there are other implications that are real to people's lives, and that's really important to have the research, to have the academic background that demonstrates what those positive impacts could be as a result of these investments. So thank you.

I think one of the things that I take away, and if you have not read the report, is lengthy for sure. I've read it, but it's incredibly useful. And it's based on data that was so succinctly presented here, which is that in communities where decisions were made to put highways in, clearly, data shows there were specific communities, and it was primarily lower-income communities of color.

And in the case of City Heights and other communities, clearly, the construction of highway systems perhaps weren't in communities of color, but it certainly led to other ramifications primarily, then further at the other end of it, impacting communities of color there today. So thank you so much for that. Again, my takeaway is looking forward and looking toward the future because you don't want to have unintended consequences. So I wrote down the note on the gentrification climate investments. We'll definitely want to take a look at that.

As we provide incentives, write policies that help reconnect communities, how are we not creating other impacts? And then also for all of us who are involved in decision making, who attend your local city council meetings talking about the impacts of the decisions in the planning process and what those could be are also critical takeaways for me. So thank you very much. I don't know if Ms. Boerner, do you want to have comments or questions?

No. I really appreciate this and going and looking at the data. I was a trained political scientist, but discovered an untapped level of land use at 42 years old. So I really appreciate the studies that you give, that give the stark contrast of how this happened. And maybe we talked about how this happened, I don't know if you've done studies on what are the best practices in correcting that historic redlining and racial covenants.

So I don't know if you have some thoughts on that or that might be a future panel, but if you have any thoughts?

I think there are two things I take away from it. One is, as I mentioned, we need to have fair, unbiased processes in the decision making process. That means that all stakeholders have an equal chance to participate in the discussion. And that is very important for not just the infrastructure project, but for our democracy. And so I think not surprising in the, there was a real imbalance in terms of who had political voice.

I think we're in a much better position, but we're not perfect yet. And so part of it is how do we ensure that everyone who is a stakeholder is at the table. The second one is that I think we need to expand the way we think about how we analyze alternatives. By and large, the way we analyze alternatives is in a cost benefit, narrow cost benefit approach. Nothing wrong with that. I'm an economist by training, so that's a go to tool.

But it's those ones that we don't measure that's important. Minority communities, by the mere fact that they're minority and disadvantaged, tend to be much more fragile. So the impact on its social system, social network, its commercial districts, they're much worse in position to absorb any changes. How do we understand that? How do we sort of measure those sort of things? And I think the third one is that keep pushing ways to improve.

If we have to put massive infrastructure in it, how do we improve our practices to minimize those impacts into the future? And then finally, I think it is important that we rethink about after we make the investment, how do we sort of direct the flows of benefits to the population that most need it? The federal government has the Justive40, which argues that 40% of the benefits of any major infrastructure project ought to go to disadvantaged communities.

And they're still struggling to figure out how to do that. But it's a good starting point. And maybe that's also a principle that we ought to really think about here in California as well as locally. And it's really hard to figure out how things flow, benefits flow. And I guess the final one is gentrification warning.

And the other thing we have to think about is, I think sometimes we think our infrastructure is set. Right? And we're not going to do large investments. But in my select committee on sea level rise in the California economy, we actually looked. And as sea levels rise, this is 7th grade science, groundwater rises too, and we're going to see more impacts in those communities and have to move infrastructure from the coast from places with extreme heat. And there's going to be a mitigation there.

So I would suspect in the next 50 to 100 years, there'll be another round of this. And what we want to make sure is we get ahead of it and that we don't replicate the mistakes of our past because it will be, at least when we looked at the Bay Area, 90,000 people will be displaced. And largely those are low-income communities of color from sea level rise around the bay. So we have to keep that in mind, too.

Thank you, Assembly Member Boerner. I just have maybe two follow up questions. And if you do see the report and you saw some of the slides, although I know they were difficult to see, but the report has really impressive and I hope at some point you'll get more funding, and you help us understand the history here in this community, because there's some people that are still around that remember some families that were displaced.

But your report gets into real specific data analysis of what the population looked like, where these highways were being planned or ultimately built. And I really would love to see that information for this community. So hopefully just putting a plug in for us for your next study. But I'm wondering, I don't recall from reading a report whether you talked about an estimate or a rough number of displaced individuals in terms of housing, maybe even commercial businesses, and whether there were racial disparities in those.

Can you talk about that?

Yes, I should say that our analysis vary from site to site depending on what data we have available. But the way we complement, for example, what Caltrans has already documented through the right of way documents and so forth, is that we are able to look at, for example, the racial composition of those who were displaced. And so, we do that through census block level data. We do that also by looking at individual documents, for example, reverse street directories.

So, we actually know who lived on those blocks who are displaced. Particularly for Hispanics and Asians, it's easy to pick them out because of their surnames. African Americans is a little bit more challenging, and that's where block data comes in to complement it. So, we complement what Caltrans has produced throughout time in terms of the right of way acquisition of properties.

With more detailed look at the exact population and looking at the racial composition, which has not been done before, using some of the same sources, we are able to look at the commercial side and also the institutional side, what churches were there and so forth. And so, by triangulating from multiple data sources, we think we have a deeper and richer picture of those impacted. We also, in some sites, look at the spillover effects both immediately and later on.

I talk about later on the legacy of it, but during that time period, there's also a spillover effect. I mean, just think about even if Caltrans didn't buy your property, but right up against the freeway, you have to live through the construction and then you have to live with the freeway, the noises and so forth. So, in some sites where we had enough information, we also looked at that.

So, in some ways, we're trying to drill down a little bit more to get a better picture, a whole picture about who was affected. And by understanding who is affected, I think we could think about how do we focus on the type of remedies we make.

I think that's a great way to segue into our next conversation. I want to thank you both, and I know that for us, for this committee, you will continue to be, I hope you are making yourself available as a resource as we make some decisions on future actions. But as you said, looking forward, but you helped us establish a factual, historical context for this conversation. That's why I was so thrilled to have you here. And thank you again for coming.

Thank you for the honor.

With that, we'll move on to the next panel. But before we do that, help me give them appreciation, please. Before we do that, I'd like to acknowledge some members who are here, the public who are here representing offices. Representing Senator Butler, our U. S. Federal Senator is Alberto Sanchez. Representing State Senator Padilla is Aria Lim. Representing Assembly Member Weber, our colleague in the Assembly is Sam Gonzalez. Representing Mayor Gloria is Keith Corey. And representing Council Member Woodburn is Malik Thornton. Thank you all for being here.

And we are now transitioning on to our next conversation, which is the co-chair of the LID, the I-5 campaign from Seattle, who's going to be sharing some of the experiences that Seattle has had as it relates to a effort that is well on its way as perhaps one of the largest examples on the West Coast that I've been able to identify of reconnecting communities in the city of Seattle.

So, Scott, I was with you for over an hour and I didn't ask you how to pronounce your last name, so I apologize. But Scott, is it "Bon-ju-ki-an"? Wow. Okay. Is here. Thank you very much. And he is going to share the Seattle experience, which I've also spent some time researching and reading. And they have a website full of information and it's also inspiring and helped me inspire do some of this work here. So, Scott, welcome and please proceed with your presentation.

All right, thank you, chair and committee members and everyone who helped put on the event today. I'm really excited to be here. My name is Scott Bonjukian. I'm a Seattle resident, and by day I work as an urban design consultant and work on this project as a volunteer basis. I got involved in the study of freeway lids through my work at the University of Washington for my graduate degree in urban planning.

And it's kind of surprisingly had a life beyond the classroom and is now a real effort. We're trying to continue in Seattle. Next slide. So, as I mentioned, we're a volunteer group. We're very scrappy. We're not even a nonprofit. But we work under the wing of the Seattle Parks Foundation. And we have a broad coalition of interests representing the neighborhoods around the freeway, businesses, affordable housing providers, transportation, and parks advocates.

And as you can see, we have supporters at local and state levels of government, which is important because this is a very complex, multilayered type of project. And there's a lot of other people not listed here, including the 30 folks on our advisory council. Next. So, Seattle residents have advocated for freeway lids since Interstate 5was built in the 1960s. And a key success of that was Freeway Park built in the 1970s. And I'll touch on more of that in a moment.

Since the 1970s, there have been various other groups trying to do more. And our current group really started gaining traction around 2015. And we've really been acting mostly as a kind of spurring community conversations and being a clearinghouse for information. We haven't been too specific about what the exact design we want to see is. And I think through that, we've been able to build up credibility and expertise as we've made strides in state and local government.

For example, last year, the Washington Legislature funded a statewide I-5 master plan that will look at the future of the I-5 freeway between Oregon and Canada. Along with us funding a specific study of the vulnerability of Interstate 5 within Seattle city limits to an earthquake, this year, we also secured another half $1.0 million in the legislature for the Seattle planning office to study lids and to do a ramp study of the freeway ramps and on ramps and off ramps in downtown Seattle. Next slide.

So, this is a map of Seattle with park space highlighted on the left. We're really focusing right now on the central Seattle area in the gray blob there. That represents about 3% of the city's land area, but it's about where a third of our population growth is going. Without a similar increase in parks, affordable housing, schools, and other civic infrastructure. The center city is pretty diverse compared to Seattle as a whole. It's more people of color, more racially and ethnically diverse.

In the city as a whole, median incomes are about 25% lower and has many more renters. And there are many other areas that Seattle could see lids in, marked in red on the map, where there are conditions appropriate for lids shown in the diagram on the right. But we're starting there because that's kind of where most of our team lives, and that's kind of the heart of the city that we're interested in seeing be successful. Next slide.

So, the route of I-5, when it was planned, was partly chosen because of topography. Seattle has a lot of hills and waterways to deal with. But it's also probably not a coincidence that the central neighborhoods there were higher numbers of people of color who didn't have as much political agency at the time I-5 was built. The central neighborhoods were also redlined by banks and lending companies to deny loans for homes and businesses to the native people and other racial minorities.

At the time I-5 was built, it also removed 11 acres of the Yesler Terrace Public Housing Project, which was the first racially integrated public housing project in the country but has recently been redeveloped. And overall, it's not surprising that over 80% of the renters in the center city study that we're looking at, or 80% of households are renters in the study we're looking at. Next. So, we did have some mitigations, as I mentioned, with some of the nation's earliest freeway lids on the left.

Freeway Park opened in 1976, about 10 years after I-5 opened. And then in 1980s on the right, we can see Seattle's convention center being under construction just a little bit to the left of the park, to the north of the park. And they chose that location for the very complex convention center project because even though it was more expensive and more technically challenging, it was an effort to bring more visitors and business activity downtown. Next.

So, equity is also an interest and concern at the regional level. Here we can see central Seattle on the left and on the right are some of Seattle's suburbs across on the east side of Lake Washington. The blue lines are other suburban freeway lid projects that have either been built or are in various stages of planning and indicated by the darker greens and blue colors on the bottom of the map.

Those are much more affluent communities seeing the benefits of freeway lids and the red lines in Seattle are where we want to study building more lids in a much more mixed income neighborhoods. So, we'll zoom in a little bit on the next slide. So, we've made progress on studying the idea. I'll get a little bit on that in a moment. So far, we've studied this area in yellow, which is in the core of downtown.

It was analyzed in depth by a feasibility study, and the area in orange is where we want to study further using new federal funding. The total corridor is about a mile and a half long. About 60,000 people live in within walking distance of the area. Also, you can see in the little red lines on the map, Interstate 5 severed multiple street connections, so this burdens all the remaining streets to cover all of the vehicular traffic.

And those remaining streets are not adequately designed for people walking and biking, which we definitely want to encourage people to do more. Those are particularly issues of pedestrian and bike safety is also a particularly issue. Near all the numerous arm ramps and freeway on ramps in this area, there's about a dozen of them. So, here's what I-5 looks like today.

The picture on the left is a typical view this time of year in Seattle, where it's rainy and dark and the freeway doesn't really offer any solace to people walking. People have reported to thus that they avoid walking near the freeway because it's a real psychological barrier between neighborhoods. It has no weather protection, it has asthma triggering pollution, and of course, very unpleasant sounds, whether you're walking or just living near.

And now for some views of what this could look like with the idea came to fruition on the next slide. So, on the left is kind of a before image of the south side of downtown Seattle. In the right side is the north side of downtown. If we go to the next slide, we can see some examples of how park spaces and mixes of commercial and residential buildings could potentially be put on the lid.

These renderings are unofficial images, but we've been using them to really spur conversations and promote the project since 2018. A lot of these images are the result of a yearlong volunteer design efforts that we hosted, and that was funded by a small grant from the city's Department of Neighborhoods.

Next slide as part of our design program, we recruited design firms and land use stakeholders ranging from affordable housing builders to our local school district, to come up with some more realistic lid designs than had been drawn up to that point. This is another example looking at the real mix of land uses and activities happening right in the middle of our study area. Interstate 5 doesn't just affect residential buildings, but also workers and visitors. We're looking at the left-

-there is the Paramount Theater, and then on the kind of the upper left is the convention center's newest building, built on solid ground next to the freeway. So, some ideas for park space, some other views shown here. Overall, the suite of renderings we have were the result of illustrating each design team's final design to show the possibilities from a variety of viewpoints. Next in the program, we led five design sessions and had a final presentation.

All of the work was open to the general public, and we probably had about 1000 people participate over the course of the year. All that work is documented in our blue book, if anyone's interested in taking a look at that. And kind of at the same time, we paired it with a second book that looked at about 10 other freeway and railroad lid studies across the country, just to kind of help demonstrate the knowledge that's out there.

So, for this and all of our other engagements, we rely on a mix of social media, email, newsletters, media coverage, and simply word of mouth and personal connections to help advertise. And it really helped us to start in a pretty savvy and engaged community, which was the architecture and design professions, which are very busy but also very interested in civic progress in Seattle. And from there, we were able to help spread a lot of the momentum. So, next, I mentioned the feasibility study we did.

We were interested in doing this to prove it's not just a good idea but it can be done. So that same year, in 2018, we were successful in getting funding for a feasibility study that was led by Seattle's planning office in collaboration with the Washington State Department of Transportation, or WSDOT. In 2020, that study came out and confirmed that we can and should live the freeway in Central Seattle for the many public benefits it could create. The next slide highlights a couple of the environmental benefits.

So, as you might expect, the study found that the lid could reduce noise levels and air pollution within a few blocks of the freeway, also very relevant to the recent heat waves we've been experiencing in the Pacific Northwest. The lid could help lower ambient air temperatures in the area. The lid could also be designed as a type of sponge to absorb and treat some of the rainwater runoff that spills off the uphill neighborhoods on the east side of I-5 before it reaches our marine habitat.

Next slide. The study also looked at the kind of three main scenarios of how a lid might be designed, not as alternative designs, but just kind of testing what are the implications of different program decisions so the test case one was on the simplest end. What could you do if you just built a simple park in the easiest areas to live? Test case two was on the entirely other end of the spectrum, where you partner heavily with private developers and build high rises on the lid.

And test case three is kind of a middle ground where you have some private involvement still, but it's more of a balance of park space and some affordable housing. And so, you can just see some of the numbers here on the quick stats on the various different sizes of lid, potential numbers of new housing, and commercial and civic space that could be provided. It's pretty substantial. We're looking at between 11 and 17 acres, which is the equivalent of about eight city blocks. On the maximum side.

Involving private involvements would potentially drive some larger economic benefits, depending on the amount of real estate activity. You could have, of course, a number of construction and permanent jobs, new revenue generated to the city and the state from increased property values in the area, and billions of dollars, potentially in direct and indirect economic activity associated with the construction and operation of the project. Next.

And looking at private partnerships is also interesting, especially when we look at a lot of what the East Coast is doing there tend to be more advanced in this arena, especially in Boston and Washington DC. Having a lot of private developers looking at airspace where available land gets tight, and it becomes to make economic sense for them to go through the complex process of developing buildings over the freeway. So, Seattle is starting to get to that point where we're running out of developable land.

We want to - we're interested in doing that, but we want to maximize the opportunity for equitable community benefits. That's why we're trying to do a lot of the visioning and master planning work up front before engaging in official partnerships. So, next steps for Seattle? One of the helpful things that just happened is in September, our city council passed a resolution formally throwing the city's support behind the project. That's also helpful since we just had a pretty large city council turnover in the November election.

We just applied for the USDOT Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods program; we should find out in November, or excuse me, in February if that funding comes through, to help do additional technical analysis and reassess some of the assumptions post-pandemic. And our work also as advocates is to continue banging the drum and raising public awareness for the project, which helps build political support and momentum to get the project done. And as part of that work, in 2024, Seattle will be updating its citywide land use and transportation plans.

And we want to get the lid more formally adopted into those. And so, through our work and through my earlier research at the University of Washington, just kind of discovered a couple of broad steps in lid development that we seem to think might be common across the country, no matter what the program envisioned is: first, is the location being important?

You want to start with an area that's flids are very physically dependent on being kind of the freeway is below grade, and so you can bridge over that basically anywhere you have overpasses instead of streets passing below the freeway; tends to be more viable. You also want to look at what stakeholders are going to be involved and who will be able to benefit from the project. It makes more sense to probably build a lid in a residential or commercial area than an industrial area, for example.

Next would be to assess the level of community interest in the project before putting too much time and energy into it. Find out who cares about the project, who will benefit. Find out if it's worth the effort and the public investments to do it. Establish relationships with the asset owner and see where they're at with the idea. See if they have any plans to upgrade the freeway or modify it that could be worked into some type of combined project.

See if the freeway is in a poor condition. That could help justify dollars going to a larger project. Like I mentioned, explore private partnership opportunities. If there's an interest in going beyond just public park space, then from there, develop a master plan that determines what the lid is used for, and that can help determine who pays for it.

Obviously, if there's more public uses like parks and affordable housing, that probably implies more public involvement, versus private real estate involves more private funding efforts minimizing construction disruption, that's always a concern. There will probably inevitably be disruptions with any type of lid project because you're going to have to close some freeway lanes temporarily. But we've seen with projects like Clyde Warren Park in Dallas, they were able to do, they placed all their girders in just 20 weekend and nighttime closures.

So, it can be pretty efficient if it's done and planned well. And then thinking long-term, concrete and steel projects tend to last 50 to 75 years, and so thinking about the long-term operations and maintenance in the project, too, is important to get buy-in and make sure that the space is well maintained.

And then I'll wrap up with a couple of other kind of nuggets of information that we've developed in terms of lid design that we derive from the consultants who worked on our feasibility study. In my own research of lid products around the country. One is the width of the freeway really matters and where you can place columns.

Longer spans require deeper girder supporting the lid, which can affect the quality of the edges of the lid and whether it's accessible, and it makes actual improvements to the properties surrounding the lid. So, if you can find two or three places in the middle of the freeway that put down columns, that can really help make the design more efficient. Heavier loads, taller buildings or deeper soil for trees require thicker lid structures; thinking about the maintenance obligations, -

- typically the State Department of Transportation will maintain the understructure up to the waterproof membrane, and then it'll be the local authority or partner's responsibility above that. Lids at 800ft or longer roughly start to become a tunnel, which triggers requirements for mechanical ventilation, fire safety suppression, and emergency exit stairwells, and things like that. So that adds more to the cost, but it can be worth it.

If you're in an area that really deserves or needs a larger investment, use the opportunity to look at the rest of the surrounding transportation system: qre there duplicate ramps or off-ramps that can be removed or reshifted to help improve the pedestrian environment, reconnect the street grid, and improve pedestrian and bicycle mobility. Thinking about economies of scale, larger areas cost less per square foot to do than a smaller lid. Phasing is necessary, not just from a cost perspective but usually from a project management perspective.

So oftentimes, looking at existing street overpasses as one chunk and then going down from there can be a natural way to phase up projects. And then there's a number of urban design components. Thinking about how the lid connects into the existing land on the edge of the freeway, how you activate any ground floor uses on new buildings, and thinking about landscaping and other public spaces to make sure they reflect community needs.

So with that, I'm happy to answer questions and happy to also potentially talk to our state legislature about doing a similar committee because we're really interested in using new federal resources and energy around reconnecting communities in Seattle and across the country. So thank you.

Thank you, Scott. Appreciate you being here sharing the Seattle story. I think it's inspiring for anyone who's done community organizing activism work to see a group of residents really lead this effort that now seems to have been almost adopted by the stakeholders. So I know our colleague has to get going soon, so I'll give her a chance maybe to make some comments. I don't know if you have any questions on this particular panel or additional comments that Assembly Member Boerner like to make.

Thank you, Assemblymember; I want to really thank you for selecting such a great parallel to what we have in San Diego because you looked at some of your slides were about the seismic, about liquefication, about sea level rise, all those things. And we're going to deal with that in San Diego as well. So I think it's a really great example.

And in Encinitas, we've talked about tunneling the train from Oceanside to the mid-coast trolley for years, and it always comes up what the opportunities are that you've highlighted, and then it comes up all the challenges, and it seems nearly impossible to do. So I think when we look at reconnecting communities, this is a really great investment and it's a really great parallel. So very well selected to my colleague for doing that. And thank you for coming down.

Thank you. I think a question I have for you, Scott, and you have the other commitments. Thank you very much. It seems like you've gotten your last slide, in particular is - I really appreciate it because some of us who've been talking about this idea here locally, there's some pretty basic sort of checkoff list that helps us continue to determine from at least a community standpoint, is this a viable project or idea concept going forward.

So I want to thank you for getting us to that level of detail. But can you tell us, I heard you mention that this year you received some additional funding. What are the sources of support that you've received to date? Because doing this work, envisioning and doing the beautiful renderings is fun, and architects can get really creative about all that. But at some point, you need to have technical analysis of whether you can.

As you said earlier, this goes from an idea to an actual potential project. So, can you talk about what the evolution or the progress of that has been, just so we get a sense of what you had to go through to get to where you are today?

Yeah, sure. So there's kind of two columns of funding. One is us as a volunteer group. We basically operate on a shoestring budget funded by local citizens just donating small amounts. So we put on a couple of $1,000 here and there for community workshops and whatnot. So that's pretty small. But what we've really found, we've surprisingly found to get the actual project funding going. There's been a number of sources.

I mentioned that design program we did was a year-long effort that was funded by a $48,000 grant from Seattle's Department of Neighborhoods. I'm not sure if San Diego has a similar fund, but basically, they help Fund local efforts to help improve neighborhoods. And so we were able to use that funding to help book venues do public printing, get food and drink to events and things like that. And we had the match chat with volunteer hours.

The feasibility study that we did was funded by the convention center as part of their public benefits package. It was really lucky timing, actually. They had to provide public benefits because they were vacating or buying up the land for a couple of streets and alleyways at their new building. And we were able to get a small slice of their $90 million public benefits pie to help fund that study. So that was kind of a one-time deal. Not sure how else we would have funded it.

And then also I mentioned-

Just interrupt. You, that was one time, but really critical funding, if I remember correctly. A million or how much?

The feasibility study, they provided a million and a half dollars for that. Yeah, we kind of based that estimate for level of need for the feasibility study based on some other lid projects around the country. I don't think there was a dollars per acre ratio or something like that, but that was kind of roughly the scale we looked at. And then, as I mentioned, the state legislature has also recently stepped up with some kind of seed funding, both kind of directly for the lid project.

They provided $200,000 to our city planning departments recently. We're still trying to scope that work and also kind of indirectly through their corridor master planning funding as well.

Thank you. That's all really helpful. We have folks who are in all those spaces that hopefully you're taking note, and we could all collaborate on requesting some of that funding. In the interest of time. I think we're going to continue with our other panels. I want to thank you for coming down all the way from Seattle. And I, again, really encourage you all: 'lidi5.org" if I remember the website correctly. Yes, encourage you to check it out. And there's also some good information in your books.

Please join me in thanking Scott for his presentation. Up next, we'll hear from a very localized perspective. We have Roger Lewis and Johanna Mall from San Diego Commons. They will also touch upon some of the community-led conversations on reconnecting communities here in San Diego.

I had the honor of connecting with Roger, maybe now, a couple of years ago before actually getting into the Assembly, and I was inspired by the work he is doing, certainly in our community, and we connected at that point about how we could push forward projects and communities that desperately need this kind of investment. And so I want to thank him for his ongoing, also voluntary giving back to the community for this effort and thank you both, Joanna and Roger. And I'll turn it over to you now.

Do I need to do that again? Sorry. Very pleasure to be here in front of you today. We appreciate it. I'm Roger Lewis. I'm the Board President of San Diego Commons. We'd like to express our appreciation to the Select Committee for Considering in More Depth how to address the negative impacts that urban freeways have brought upon those communities they pass through. We'd also like to thank to select community Chair Dave Mr. Alvarez for this opportunity to present for you today.

Good afternoon. I'm Johanna Mall, I am also a board Member of San Diego Commons, and we would like to share with you a little today about our strategy and lessons learned in developing San Diego Commons and our experiences with community outreach and the challenges with engagement as well. We hope this will provide you with a little bit of insight on our efforts and challenges as you look to develop policies to effectively reconnect our communities going forward.

We will begin with a narrated overview of our presentation and our mission.

We are San Diego Commons, a California nonprofit corporation formed in 2019 by civic minded individuals working to improve San Diego's urban quality of life. Our Green the Gap effort is a citizen based initiative to create freeway covers that will reconnect communities by creating new public land while also reducing the adverse social, health, and economic effects created by interstate five as it passes through San Diego's urban core.

We can improve the community's freeways divide by creating new green open space, which could then provide community amenities, housing and services while improving the environment we live in. Addressing global warming is urgent and the reasons are profound. We must reduce the toxic air pollution that freeways produce and minimize the concrete heat islands they create. The covers will consolidate transit, exhaust and cleanse it before releasing it back into the atmosphere. The vision for freeway lids in San Diego was not our own.

The Downtown San Diego Community Plan calls for two freeway covers over I five to be implemented. The plan specifically details one cover, reconnecting Sherman Heights with the East Village, and the other cover would reestablish Balboa Park's front porch with downtown San Diego. The southeastern San Diego Community Plan also details the Sherman Heights East Village cover as well as two other covers a bit farther south, which are also part of the Barrio Logan Plan, connecting the communities of Barrio Logan and Logan Heights.

The Green the gap effort specifically focuses upon building the Sherman Heights and Balboa park covers. The Sherman Heights Lid is a straightforward cap over the freeway. Although Balboa cover is larger and more complex, it would also greatly enhance a major regional amenity. Creating the Sherman Heights cover would foster a linear parkway from the heart of Sherman Heights all the way to the waterfront.

In doing so, it would pass through a number of urban amenities, including the UCSD Downtown campus and Central Library, traveling all the way down to the Children's Museum. Today, not only are these historic communities separated, but dangerous pollution wafts up through the neighborhoods, causing pervasive health problems accompanied by reflecting heat, visual and noise impacts. The Sherman Heights cover is lid ready, meaning that it is relatively inexpensive to complete as it doesn't require modifications or re engineering to things such as on and off ramps.

This green blank slate rendering provides a sense of the area that the communities would have to work with to determine what amenities and uses they deem appropriate. This should be done through a community driven design process which San Diego Commons has the ability to assist with the time is right our government recognizes that the severe, numerous impacts that began with the Federal Highway Administration's programs in the late 50s must be addressed. Money has been appropriated specifically for communities at the hardest.

Formal criteria have been established for grants at the federal and state levels. At this time, the greatest possibility to develop freeway covers is in areas where the resulting freeway impacts created communities facing environmental, social and economic disadvantages. Sherman Heights and East Village are considered historically disadvantaged communities and thus fully qualify for available funding at both the federal and state level. While current major funding programs favor the Sherman Heights cover, our other green the gap effort is upon the Balboa park cover to downtown.

Prior to the 1960s, San Diego was a seamless collection of neighborhoods and Balboa park was situated in the heart of them. The image on the lower right shows the southwestern side of the park with the formal gateway, the Ellipse, where the freeway was built. This resulted in the familiar scene in the upper right hand corner with the Ellipse eliminated and the freeway isolating the communities at Bankers Hill, Golden Hill, Sherman Heights and Logan Heights from downtown. The Balboa park cover is unique unto itself.

Not only the Bankers Hill and Cortez communities reconnected, but it would also reintegrate the southern face of Balboa park with the downtown core. Balboa park would literally be the center of the city, accessible directly to walking and biking from all the surrounding neighborhoods. This is I five today again billowing polluted air, excessive noise and reflecting heat into the park and adjacent communities. Here again is a simple green slate rendering that provides an idea of the additional area public space.

The COVID would add over 14 acres of public land, the uses of which would be determined through a vibrant public process. While the green the gap effort is grand and ambitious cities all over the country and in fact all around the world have and are building freeway covers. San Diego has our own local examples, with one being Toralta Park, a belong cover over Interstate 15 and city Heights, the first developed in California.

This is our mission to green the gap over the I five corridor in the urban core of San Diego. We welcome your interest and comments become a part of the movement to address critical climate warming impacts and relink San Diego's historic communities.

San Diego Commons was formed in 2018. A small group of engaged community Members, aware that our urban community plans called for several freeway covers, believed there was an opportunity to do something significant of an impactful scale for San Diegans. We soon became aware of the Friends of Hollywood Central park in Los Angeles and their work for 15 years on reconnecting eastern and Central parks in central Hollywood Park over the 101 Freeway in downtown Los Angeles.

We were fortunate to garner the participation of two founding Members of that board who helped us to initially form our nonprofit structure. Their knowledge and expertise further affirmed our belief in the absolute imperative that for success, it would have to be achieved through a community driven effort. Our board directors, as you can see on the screen here, are first and foremost civic oriented Members of these core communities.

The collective body of our directors, along with the accomplished Members of our Advisory Council, represent many of the most recognized people regionally. Working across the realm of government relations, urban design, architecture, public policy, and community engagement, San Diego Commons was self constructed as a resource for communities to utilize. We are an all volunteer organization, however, and with that comes the challenge of meeting the demands of constantly developing and maintaining an effective operational structure. Excuse me, this is immensely aided with financial resources.

We are pursuing a strategy whereby we are working to cultivate relationships with local private philanthropic resources for potential grants to provide staffing and grant writing. We could greatly benefit from resources to assist our organization as we're just one of so many volunteer groups looking to compete for large scale funding opportunities to pursue the missions we work for. While we have focused our efforts upon pursuing large program funding opportunities such as the HABs reconnecting communities, we understand clearly to be effective.

This requires an active supporting partnership with governmental agencies for us, despite meeting with all the local elected representatives in the city to federal hierarchy as well as local community groups, the question has become, how do we get that first foot in the door? Perhaps the creation of a state policy focused upon allowing for the direct interaction of historically disadvantaged communities with state programs to advance targeted community supported initiatives just might be extremely beneficial in getting projects off the ground.

I can relate this idea to the working structure of California redevelopment before its demise. In the 2011 local project, area Committees comprised of elected community Members advised and advocated for community scaled projects with their related cities redevelopment agencies. Ultimately, for funding transformational projects in disadvantaged communities, Caltrans or the state's economic development programs could provide an avenue for the establishment of local citizen comprised boards or organizations, elected or appointed.

Given the ability to directly engage with state resources and utilize funds to start forming the foundation of ways to reconnect communities adversely affected by the freeway system, this could give well conceived and supported ideas a step forward, especially at a time when city departments are often predisposed to dealing with services, health, and safety issues. Foremost.

When San Diego Commons engages with local community organizations, we are mindful that we bring a very focused professional background before them. The social, cultural, and economic environments determine the level of a community's awareness of opportunities, their interest, and, most importantly, their trust. This poses a challenge in engaging and communicating effectively in our outreach efforts.

Since every community has a different dynamic and a different set of needs, we often hear that we should present a graphic rendering of what a freeway lid could look like in order to inspire and give the communities a visual idea. However, we are aware and concerned of the risk that this may be perceived as us San Diego Commons presenting our idea of what the lid should be or us deciding what is best for the community.

Our purpose is to discuss with the community an opportunity that is already approved in their community plan to create new public open space. We emphasize that it is for them to decide what programs and amenities would best suit the needs and wants of the community. We ask and listen for their ideas while making it clear to them that we are resources to assist in building community support, engage in government interaction, facilitate a community driven design process, and then explore and pursue funding options.

Despite that, how our approach is accepted varies from community to community and can still be viewed with skepticism, distrust, and a predisposition that their community will not get the amenities promised in the approved community plan. These feelings are understandably prevalent in disadvantaged communities because they have been hurt the most by transportation, infrastructure, and historically economically discriminating policies.

Gaining the trust of these communities has been the biggest challenge we have had to work through so far in our efforts to engage and enlist the interests of the community of Sherman Heights, a historically and culturally Latino working community.

Sherman Heights had its connection with the East Village in downtown, severed just as Logan Heights and Barrio Logan were divided by the development of the Interstate Five in the 50s, our very first exploratory meeting was with a group of 11 respected local community leaders referred to us by the leadership of the Sherman Heights Community Center. Although they eventually opened up to dialogue, their apprehension was very clear from the introductions.

What has made engagement efforts all the more difficult is a very prevalent feeling amongst the community that it was abandoned after a fair amount of community participation and negotiation with Caltrans to facilitate the addition of a freeway lid in addition to the new HOV lanes that were going in the State Route 94.

After about six years of community meetings and workshops, the communities of Sherman Heights and Golden Hill believed they had a three block freeway cover going over the Highway 94, creating public open space that would reconnect their communities as a part of the freeway widening project. Unfortunately, it was decided very late in the planning process to drop the freeway lid in the project. This action left the community disheartened as the promise of reconnecting their communities was taken away.

And so this is what leads to the distrust that we are encountering in our engagement with the communities. On a positive note, our persistent efforts to engage the community led to two Sherman Heights leaders to join our Advisory Council. More significantly, we also received the full endorsements of the Southeastern San Diego Planning Committee to pursue the Federal Department of Transportation Reconnecting Communities Grant of 2022.

Our next step is to secure funding to develop a community driven design process for the people of Sherman Heights and the East Village.

Early on in our outreach efforts with people and organizations in Sherman Heights, we had an opportunity to meet with three representatives of the local Carpenters Union. We were looking forward to inform them of our efforts, ask them for their insights, hopefully getting their support.

There was one comment from that meeting I can still recollect clearly today, and I think we saw that in presentations earlier today, and that was there are so many people who live in these neighborhoods that drive up to LA every day to work on the freeways. What if they were going to work, ideally on a local project right here, one that directly benefited their community? For historically disadvantaged communities, this is an opportunity to foster local civic investment and pride.

My sense is that in good governance, this is what we all ultimately are wanting to achieve. The enormous economic and social benefits to everyone in the communities affected would begin the very first day the ground was turned on construction and extend and grow through years of be it providing daily services, housing, social and cultural amenities, economic opportunities, as well as safer quality neighborhoods and cleaner air.

These are but three specific thoughts and experience we wanted to highlight with you today during the generous time afforded to us. We've provided you with a few more in the sample bullet point outline contained in the presentation packets for the Assembly Members today.

We thank you for your time, and we are here to assist you in your efforts as you consider policies and programs which would assist those communities who have carried the burden of persistent negative impacts from our vast and certainly critically important urban highway system. Thanks very much.

Thank you, Roger. Thank you, Joanna. Appreciate your presentation. As a Member of this community, lifelong Member of this community, and someone who got involved in civic activity, as an organizer, as what some people call activists, I just want to recognize that you are intentionally trying to bring the community in a participatory way to the work that you're looking and hoping to do in San Diego.

And I completely understand the sentiment of the Members of the community of Sherman Heights who came with you, with the sort of apprehension as someone, again, who's lived here my whole life and has seen renderings of many things with very little to show over the course of now four decades, living here can sometimes feel that way.

And so the work that we're trying to do through this Committee is to actually deliver something that's tangible to community with some results which we all know will take a long time when we talk about projects like these. But we need to start to demonstrate that it's not just about words, but actions, and that means forward progress, movement on these.

So I appreciate that you are looking at it this way and thinking about it this way, and I hope that you continue to be doing this work, because what's interesting, I don't know if you all sort of caught this, but we are literally talking to probably the northernmost activity on the five freeway with Seattle, and we're now talking about the end, the southernmost section of the Interstate Five Freeway.

And you appear to be in the early stages of where lid the five were just a few years ago. But we've seen how with real community participation and obviously government support, there can be progress made so that we actually have tangible results to show to our community. So I thank you for that.

I think you've outlined the challenges quite well, but I'll give you one other chance if you want to share sort of the next steps, if you will, as you look at these projects in San Diego, what some of the challenges are and what some of the potential opportunities are out there for you to continue this work.

Well, I think our next thing is to continue to engage with the community. As Johanna said, we've made some inroads, and there's differences, as we mentioned, too, between all the different communities that are involved, we've certainly had very positive support initially from the communities around the Balboa park area.

But given the particular funding circumstances and the importance of being able to reconnect communities and deal with all the adverse effects, we still focus extremely much on the Sherman Heights East Village area, and we would like to be able to work with the community now to engage them in the type of early design process that would allow them to be able to come forward and say, consider the different options which are there.

And I think, as I mentioned, Many people in our organization are very well suited to do this. And it's the kind of thing that you often look for funding to do community outreach and so forth. And this is something that we could do. We kind of look at ourselves almost as a wagon or arc or something, that we were designed to be able to provide resources to the community. So we could do that, we could bring that to the community.

And I think the major thing we need to do would be some kind of a level of a feasibility study. I know we heard the feasibility study for I five was extensive, and they can get pretty costly. But in our certain situation, it would just be good to start off just to find out with initial ideas, scale and scope what's practical, and then go to the community with further ideas.

Do you want to add something, Johanna?

Yeah, I just want to add in providing community workshops, design workshops for communities such as Sherman Heights. A challenge is know most of these families are working families in Sherman Heights, right. So it's difficult to draw them know out of their busy lives. They have children.

And so know to encourage community Members to come out to participate is having amenities available at these community workshops, such as, for example, having childcare available where they don't feel a burden, they can't participate because they have to take care of things at home and children at home. So that's something where funding would be like, again, we are a volunteer organization, just like the Seattle group. So funding like that could go a long ways in helping the community participate in these community design workshops.

Thank you. I'm taking something away from every single panel. And just so that you all know, again, we're not just meeting to meet, we will have a report at the end of today, at the end of the series of hearings with recommendations and one of the ones. Roger, thank you for reminding me. We quickly forget redevelopment, an important tool that we had. But one of the key components of that was the pacs where we had the community project.

Area committees come in and provide and so as I'm thinking, okay, if we want to do some sort of larger scale planning, maybe like Seattle appears or Washington appears to be doing with the whole five, that is a component that we cannot forget about. So thank you for pointing out.

If I could just mention an interesting thing out of that first meeting that Johanna mentioned. There was reticence when we were at the table, but we had phone calls. We walked away from there that day a little bit disillusioned, but then because there was the natural concerns about homelessness and things that we really want to be connected to downtown, and it was just planting that seed.

I remember getting phone calls from a few of the people that attended that day, later on, a week later, talking about different uses. Well, could we do housing on one portion of it, maybe at the south? So I think the communities are there. They're engaged, and it's just a way to be able to give them the ability to be able to come forward and speak. And as Joanna said, there's certainly impediments to doing that.

But I know that you've got that first and foremost to think about. So we appreciate that.

Thank you again. Thank you for your input. Please join me in thanking the panel, Joanna and Roger. I want to also acknowledge a couple of folks that I saw walk in the room. We have California Transportation Commissioner Clarissa Falcon, who is here and representing the California, sorry, the San Diego Air Quality Control District, Melina Mesa was here. And the reason why I remember or think about those two is because, as you just heard from the last couple panels, this work is going to take some resources.

So, Clarissa, you come right at the right time. We're going to see how we can identify some resources from different partners to start to some of this work. And clearly the next panel, as they walk up, also is critical to identifying a pathway forward for these conversations, particularly today focused on Lids, but reconnecting in multiple ways. And maybe we'll talk a little bit about that in a second. But I want to thank Marlon Florine from the Division of Transportation and Planning.

He is the chief of that division from the California Department of Transportation, who is here. Thank you, Marlin. And we have Gustavo Dalarda, who still is the Director of District 11 for the California Department of Transportation, as we know Caltrans. We want to thank both of you for your time here today. We have had some initial discussions, and I thank you for that as well.

But thank you for being here to talk about some of the work that you may be doing here in the San Diego region or in other parts of the state as well. So I'll turn it over to you both. And thank you for being here.

Great. Thank you so much for the opportunity to come talk to you and present in front of this Committee. And we especially thank you, Assembly Member Alvarez. We really want to appreciate your leadership on this topic. And we know that removing barriers, enhancing access to opportunity and providing healthy and equitable outcomes is a priority for you and this Committee. And we want to talk about these priorities and how it's a priority for us as well. So next slide.

All right, so in our presentation today, we're going to cover some of the historical harms and I know some of the prior speakers have touched on this. We're also going to provide an overview of the federal and state reconnecting communities programs, ways that Caltrans is advancing connectivity within and outside of the reconnecting programs, and a holistic look at many of the different state opportunities for communities to pursue. Next slide.

All right, so collectively, America set out to create a connected transportation system to combat congestion and to support continued expansion of the economy and expected population growth. Working with the Committee of Governors, President Eisenhower and the Congress passed the federal Eight Highway act of 1956 creating the federal funds for InteRstate highways. And that was mentioned earlier today. With these funds we were collectively tasked with constructing a national highway network and we were very successful at it.

We built a national network to grow and connect the economy. But the reality is that we've divided communities in that process. The US Department of Transportation estimates that more than 400 and 7500 thousand households and more than 1 million people were displaced nationwide. Because of this, federal roadway construction and highways have disrupted pedestrian landscape, worsened air quality, depleted property values, areas, lost churches, gathering places, local businesses, green space and a sense of community.

The construction of highways have also led to decline in the middle class footholds and neighborhoods already struggling from redlining zoning policies as well as disinvestment. Next slide. So recognizing the historical harm freeways and highways have caused in underserved communities, the Federal Government and the State of California have taken steps to address these harms. In 2021, the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee, including California's US Senator Alex Bidia, proposed the Reconnecting Communities act to create federal funds for reconnecting communities.

Under the bipartisan law, also known as Bill and the Investment, Excuse Me, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The federal and Reconnecting Communities Pilot was created under the USDOT with about $1 billion of funding over five years. The Reconnecting Communities programs offers opportunities for communities to repair rebuild and reconnect to their surrounding resources. Remove retrofit and mitigate highway and other transportation facilities that create barriers. Increase community connectivity, economic development, access to food, health care, recreation, jobs, and education.

It also prioritizes equity outcomes and restoration in historically underserved communities. Next slide.

Thank you. So in cycle one of the Reconnecting Communities program that was awarded in 2023, California received about five awards, receiving about 19%, or roughly $35 million. Out of the $185,000,000 available through the first round of this program, there were four planning grants that were awarded, and then there was also a construction grant that was awarded. This was the Shoreline Drive Gateway project in Long Beach, and this was one of six nationwide construction grants that were awarded.

Vision 980 Planning Grant was awarded to Caltrans in partnership with the City of Oakland, and Caltrans also partnered with the City of San Jose on the Monterey Road Study and also City of Pasadena on the State Route 710 study. Next Slide so Congress enacted the Inflation Reduction act of 2022, which created the Neighborhood Access and Equity Grant program. In 2023, the Federal Notice of Funding Opportunity Combined two programs, the Reconnecting Communities Pilot, as well as the Neighborhood access and equity.

The program is now called the Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods, or RCN, which is worth about $3.3 billion this year. Three types of grants are available. So there's capital construction, there's community planning, and there's regional Partnership Challenge grants. Planning grants are available to community based organizations and nongovernmental organizations, and also CBOs and NGOs. They can also coapply for regional partnerships.

The Neighborhood Access and Equity program also allows eligible agencies to apply for funding with no funding match awards for this grant cycle combined RCN are anticipated to be announced in spring of 2024. So to discuss Caltrans, how we're basically using the state Reconnecting program and strategies, I would like to introduce District Director Gustavo DeLarda, who oversees the Department in the San Diego and Imperial counties.

Thank you, Marlon, and good afternoon, Chair Alvarez and distinguished Members. And, no, I'm sorry, back to the previous slide. I would like to start by recognizing the change within Caltrans. Over the decades, we have transitioned from a highway agency to a multimodal transportation Department. Our mission, vision, values and goals are reflected in guiding documents like our Strategic plan, our Climate Action Plan, and the State Transportation Plan. Equity and engagement, safety, climate action, and a multimodal approach are now at the core of everything that we do.

We aim to put people, planet, and prosperity first. Next slide. The State of California also recognized the need for a specific program to address historical harms caused to communities by transportation infrastructure. 149,000,000 in state General funds was approved in the fiscal year 2022-2023 budget for planning or implementing the conversion or transformation of underutilized state highways into multimodal corridors that serve residents of underserved communities. Originally called Foreign Captive Directing Communities. Highways to Boulevard's pilot program was created in Streets and Highways Code Section 104.3.

This pilot program seeks to upend the traditional transportation funding model by, in part, basing the selection of communities on historical harm. Need an ability to develop community partnerships rather than a specific project idea. In addition to aligning with a federal program, the Highways to Boulevard Pilot will provide matching funds for potential federal grant funds, philanthropic and place based funding. We'll also provide technical assistance and support to advance community based and community driven transportation planning.

We'll also create opportunities for implementation of affordable housing and furthering the advancement of fair housing. And finally, it'll prevent or minimize direct and indirect displacement effects from project implementation. Next slide Using the 149,000,000 as approved in the 2022-2023 budget, this pilot program will select three communities, one in each of the following grant categories. The first one is urban. This includes communities with populations of 50,000 or more. Urban clusters will also fit in this category. The second category is rural.

These are areas with less than 50,000 people and the last category is corridor. This is a Linear geographic facility that support the needs of multiple underserved communities and can consist of multiple focus improvement areas. The corridor does not necessarily need to be the eligible transportation barrier, but must, at a minimum, be impacted by the eligible facility. A corridor can be there in a rural or urban area.

Combined with support and technical assistance, the larger award investments will provide the necessary resources to truly engage the community and partners in an inclusive planning process, beginning with a community readiness phase. Next slide, please. But even before these federal and state programs, community connecting work has been a core component of our projects.

We've already heard in the introductionary video and also by the presentations by Dr. Ong and also San Diego Commons that the creation of a new project to complete the missing segment of State Route 15 provided a lot of learning opportunities. Teralta Park, California's first freeway park lid, or CAP, was a community led effort as part of SDSR 15 project. The community organized and led the change and the charge to ensure the project included all the elements they desired and needed.

The people drove planning and engagement to fight for a variety of transportation options and community elements. The corridor now includes center line, bus, rapid transit stations, bus only lanes, commuter bikeways, art, housing gathering and green spaces, and small business opportunities. It is a model of a holistic transportation corridor. Next slide, please. Building strong communities starts with an inclusive, community driven process to equitably involve people in things that impacts them. For Caltrans, that commitment is now reflected in our people and processes.

Statewide and district level engagement playbooks will guide staff on conducting equitable engagement through the planning and project development processes. The Public Engagement Plan template and Guide will be a resource for staff to design equitable engagement plan for each project based on the specific needs of the community and project. In addition to training all staff and having a process document, we're also expanding staff dedicated to engagement. We want to expand our community relationships, not just gather input.

And that also starts by having staff from the communities that we serve. Next slide please. Here are a few examples of how we are doing that in San Diego, we have brought people into our house like hosting an engagement panel by community leaders for over 120 of our supervisors and managers. This included hearing from Members of the State Transportation Equity Advisory Committee. We have also taken staff, officials and leaders into the community to meet people where they are.

You can see Marlon and I in Chicano park and also in city Heights in one of those pictures. And finally, the Governor's Clean California program has also allowed us to go and meet people, listen and Institute community based projects big and small, from art installations at schools to closing the freeway for a citywide bike ride. As you can see in the newspaper headline, next Slide please.

There are many additional ways to reconnect communities outside of the designated programs, so I'm going to go through the pictures on a counterclockwise from the bottom left. Under clinical California, we collaborated with communities to beautify public spaces like this Sustainability center at Southwest Middle School that built a community garden next to a light rail transit stop, and regional bikeway projects and grants are improving spaces on, around and away from the highway with art and Greenery.

We have also used infrastructure to connect and enhance access to medical facilities and educational centers like the Gilman Bridge over Interstate Five. This project, incorporated as part of the Mid Coast TrolLey Blue Line Extension, facilitates mobility next to the University of California next to the University of California San Diego campus. We have also created multifaceted projects by collaborating with local and regional partners like the Build North Coast Corridor project that includes carpool lanes, rail trails and active transportation to improve connectivity in the coastal zones.

In addition to lagoon restorations, through our grants and local assistance, we are increasing connectivity with active transportation projects like the border to Bayshore Bikeway. The state funded local project crosses three freeways and train and trolley tracks in our border communities, one of two designated environmental justice areas in San Diego designated by the California Air Resources Board and Assembly Bill 617. Next Slide Please. This is happening not just at Caltrans, but across state agencies.

The Strategic Growth Council, a cabinet level collaborative of state agencies, was designated by Senate Bill 732 in 2008 to coordinate state activities around air and water quality, protecting natural lands, increasing affordable housing, public health and equity, transportation and infield development, economy conservation, revitalizing communities, and sustainable and climate adaptation planning.

An October 2023 barrier Logan visit included Chicano park and Museum and Cultural center, the Cesar Chavez Continuing Education Campus, Gateway and Lantrada Family Apartments, Harbor Drive 20, the Blue Line Trolley, Bayshore Bikeway and Mercado Del Barrio Mixed use Plaza. The tour was a way for state leaders to see how collaborating various state programs look like on the ground. Barriologon projects included grants from affordable housing and sustainable communities, Transformative Climate Communities Program, Trade Corridor Enhancement Program, Clean California Active Transportation Program, and Sustainable Planning Grant.

Next slide, please. Strong, healthy and resilient communities need and rely on more than just transportation to give a holistic look at opportunities for communities. I would like to give the floor back to Marlon to talk about strategic investment.

Thank you, Gustavo. So while divisive transportation infrastructure may be the most evident based on the sheer amount of highway miles, the solution to restoring divided communities will not be done solely through transportation. These areas have suffered from disinvestment, lack of housing and economic opportunity, and it will take a comprehensive effort through a variety of projects, funding sources and agencies. This slide lists a number of state funding programs that can be leveraged. Gustavo just talked about the Strategic Growth Council, who administers three programs.

So the Transformative Climate Communities Program, as well as the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities Program, as well as well as the Sustainable Agriculture Lands and Conservation Program, which fights climate change by encouraging compact, transit oriented development and protecting our farmlands. We also have the California Department of Housing and Community develop that administers three different programs as well.

So there's the Community Development Block Grant Program, which provides economic and economic development and disaster recovery to create suitable living environments by expanding economic opportunities and providing decent housing and Low income households. There's also the Infill Infrastructure Grant program for infrastructure improvements that are integral part or necessary to facilitate new infill housing and mixed use. And the list goes on and on.

There's also the Office of Planning and Research, the California Air Resources Board, as well as the California Transportation Commission, who administers the Active Transportation program. I did want to just talk a little bit about the planning opportunities that exist within Caltrans. And so we have the Environmental justice and Community Based Transportation Planning Grant program. It is now called the Sustainable Transportation Planning grant program and we have about $30 million in that annually.

We also administer the Climate Adaptation Planning Grant program that currently has about $32 million, as well as the Strategic Partnership and Strategic Transit Partnership grants. In fact, SANDAG received a fiscal year 2324 Sustainable Transportation Planning grant this fall for the San Diego Regional Study on Reconnecting Communities. Many communities, including groups here today, have ideas and needs for reconnecting communities. And in funding this grant, we felt that it was important to study opportunities at the regional level to be inclusive of those ideas and needs.

And Sandac next presenter, they're going to talk a little bit more about this and I did just want to offer a little plug. Right now we have our call for proposals for our 2425 cycle for our Sustainable transportation planning grants. So we have about a total of $53 million available statewide and applications are due January 18 of 2024. Additional information can be found on our website. So I just want to make sure that that was available to you.

So to close, I just want to say thank you again. Caltrans is committed to our communities and we recognize that reconnected California starts with us all and it's going to take us all. So happy to answer any questions you have.

Thank you, Division Chief and Director. Appreciate your presentation. I definitely have some questions. Before I get to that, I'd like to let everybody know we are going to hear public testimony. We would love to hear actually public testimony. And there is a sign up sheet over there on Myra.

Can you just tell us where it's at so people know exactly where they can go and sign up so we can call you up to provide some testimony on maybe, like me, you've heard some ideas that have sparked specific interest or ways that perhaps we can continue to do this work. And I want to make sure we capture that for our report back to the Legislature and for future legislative action.

So I think I want to start off, Marlin, with sort of where you ended, because as a former community involved individual, and I've heard from some community involved folks, sometimes it's really hard to capture and understand what opportunities exist. And you just outlined a couple of them.

But I guess my question is, and you don't have to have a full response to that now, but is there a way to more easily identify for the public, given all of these investments that we're making in the state, what those opportunities are? You heard specifically here from our San Diego folks. There's some work that needs to be done to sort of move some of these reconnecting projects that the community has some interest in.

And I know we'll hear from Sandag on sort of what they're doing, and I'm going to ask them, obviously, follow up questions to see how that all connects with some of the community work. But is there a way to somewhere just capture what those opportunities are for, specifically community organizations? And then I think you've heard this from me before.

Certainly Director DeLardo has heard this, which is sometimes our community organizations don't have the technical expertise for some of these grants that are available, and therefore, it makes it challenging to apply and be competitive and receive funding to do some of this community engagement work.

So I would just ask, as you have clearly changed the focus in the right way towards public engagement, what other things can we do to just make it easier for the public to access information on funding opportunities so that this work can continue?

I really do appreciate that question, and I do empathize with all the different folks that aren't experts in this area. And I think one of the things that we're thinking about just within my area alone is all the opportunities we have within Caltrans, but not only state government, and how to make sure that that information can be more accessible. And just with any large organization, maybe not the right hand is always talking to the left hand.

And it's important as an organization, that's not the community's problem. That's our problem that we need to solve. And so we are actually doing some work to kind of lay that groundwork. We have programs within our division of local assistance. Who operates a clean California program? We operate the planning grant programs. We offer programs related to. We're.

What we're wanting to do is to make sure that the information is more accessible, rather than people having to go to different websites, a one stop shop where they can actually go and get the information and be able to apply for those funds. And from a technical perspective, that's one of the things that we're thinking through as well. Technical assistance is something that is extremely important because a lot of times filling out these different proposals can be very challenging.

And one of the things that we're thinking through is how do we leverage community based organizations to maybe help get the word out, actually paying them funding to help assist in bridging some of those gaps? So those are some of the brainstorming that we're doing internally. Yeah.

I think Dr. Ong's research solidified sort of the belief with those of us engaged in public work that some of the most challenged individuals, in terms of making it to effectuate change or participate in a process are the ones who should be reached out the most, and they don't because of a variety of barriers that aren't necessarily of your making or of your ability to fix. But acknowledging that is important.

And I think one of my takeaways for our report is certainly following up with the Department on Can we, I was thinking the same thing right before you said it, the one stop shop, so that people know, because there's a lot of programs, and it's like, which one do I fit under? And so that's something that I want to definitely follow up on potentially at further hearings. Are we making progress in that regard?

What do you need from the Legislature in order to be able to successfully do that? But again, I wanted to acknowledge that there's been a shift. This used to be the Department of Highways, and it's slowly and justifiably so and with good reasoning, becoming a Department of Transportation, multiple methods of transportation. And so continuing to go in that direction is going to be important.

The only other question I want to ask you so we can definitely have time for folks to participate, is the Justice 40 program. It was mentioned by Dr. Ong, and I had honestly forgotten, so I'm glad he mentioned it. Is California. Do we have a version of that? Are we trying to implement that? What can you share about that, if anything?

Yeah, so Justice 40, that is something that we're doing some work on. But we also want to recognize there are, I think, other methods for helping to identify and prioritize communities.

I know on the federal level they do have a couple of different criteria that they're using as part of their reconnecting communities program, but also for our state program, we also want to make sure that we're leveraging tools that can identify different communities, because as much as data isn't important, we want to make sure that there are just a variety of tools. California is a very big state, and sometimes these tools may not necessarily hit all the areas.

And so we want to make sure that we're using a variety of different tools where we can sort of appropriately identify issues and be able to utilize data to prioritize communities. And so we're using about, I think, four different definitions, and we're also working on our equity index tool that we're rolling out to have more of a transportation lens as act related to identifying underserved communities.

I'm trying to move the hearing along, but then you caused me to think of other questions which I really want to hear. Your input on, on the front end, as California, your Department, I should say, takes on new projects of whatever kind they are. And every part of the state has different needs. Is there a lens or a tool that's being applied on?

Because we want to be forward thinking on not continuing the division of communities so that we don't have to talk about reconnecting those communities 3040 years from now. Is there a specific tool that's part of the assessment of the planning process?

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. So a huge priority for us is working with the community. Day one. We want to make sure that we're not bringing a solution to them, but we're actually having them drive the solutions and the needs in the community. And what that really consists of is working with them as early as possible, even before we start the planning stage, having that dialogue, because it really is about the trust building and that will be the starting point.

And the tool that you had mentioned, one of the important things that we want to do is Gustavo had mentioned this in his comments. We have our public participation plan template and we have guidance to our districts which provides the needed tools on a variety of different projects and plans to be able to work with the community as early as possible, but just as important as working with the community and having them really drive the decision making as it relates to those projects.

It has to be continuous. So it can't be something that we do a great job on the front end. And you know, how big the Department is. We have different parts of the Department that advance these projects forward. And so as good as a job as we do in the beginning, it has to be continuous all the way through development, through construction. And we want to make sure that that dialogue and communication is continuous.

Well, I want to thank you, I think for our reports purposes. One of the things that we'll follow up with you on are two things in specific that I don't want to forget. And one is just, you've listed a lot of funding potential or opportunities that exist. And maybe just getting a total sum of what that is would be one thing.

We already talked about a one stop shop, but I also, to this last point, would be interested in Preparing in the report what exactly that assessment tool is for Caltrans on projects, whatever projects you're engaged with, because I think rather than having to again304050 years from now, ask a researcher to go and do all that background research and try to piece things together, I think impacts to communities and who those communities are is something that should be very much part of the planning process and the public document available as you move forward with projects.

I think we'll follow up with that. Did you want to add something?

Yeah, I did want to add that on our more complex and larger projects during the CEQA and do that is the kind of stuff that we look at environmental justice and socioeconomic impacts to communities as part of those complex projects.

Thank you. Appreciate that. Please join me in Thanking Director Alarm and Division Chief and now even getting more local on the public. And this is our last panel. I'm hoping we can get this done in the presentation anyway, done in about five minutes. And I will keep my mouth shut so that then you all can speak. I think she can do it in five minutes.

I want to thank, from San Diego Association of Governments, SANDAG Mobility planning manager Jennifer Williamson, who's here to present from SAnDAG's perspective. So, Jennifer, thank you very much, and please go right ahead.

At SANDAG, we're used to speeding things along, so I think I can do this. I'm Jennifer Williamson. I am the mobility planning manager at SANDAG. Next slide, please. So just quickly to note what SANDAG does. Everybody knows we do a regional plan because we beat the bushes to get your input on it. We also do a lot more. We plan and design our transportation system. We preserve our natural resources through mitigation efforts, and we provide resources and programs.

You might have heard of our youth opportunity program. That's the SAnDEG program. Next slide, please. So why are we here today? What does Sandeg have to do with this? Well, we've identified a lot of needs throughout our community, and one of the things I want to note in this slide here is that we don't think this is just a freeway issue. We think that reconnecting corridors kind of develops through a wide variety of infrastructure. And you'll even see our beloved trolley and transit system on here.

We think that we could do better to connect corridors by developing infrastructure for people to cross through those corridors a little bit easier. Next slide, please. So, social equity. Sandeg knows social equity. We're really good at social equity, I would say. And we've gotten much better over the last five years. So we know how important it is to ensure that every time we develop a project that we have our partners and our stakeholders walking hand in hand with us.

We do this through our social equity program. We have a network, a partner network of social equity providers. We have a social equity working group that represents all of the different agencies, social agencies throughout the region. And then we have a comprehensive network of community based organizations.

And one of the things that we've done at San Diego that is pretty unique, I think, to a lot of the organizations like us is that we are paying our social, our community based organizations to be part of our projects. We don't want them to have to volunteer their time to come to our meetings. We want them to be at the beginning, middle and end of our projects. And towards that end, we contract directly with them to support our projects.

One of our top priorities in planning is equity. And we use the California Environment Enviro screen data tool to ensure that we're making strides in communities that need the services and the programs the most. And I'll talk a little bit about our Barrio Logan Logan Heights CAP project. And that's one of the areas that Kellenwire Screen has popped. It is one of the neediest areas in terms of overcoming barriers to transportation in this region. Next slide, please. So Sandic is already doing this.

We have a regional reconnecting community strategy that we have underway right now. The objectives of this study are through stakeholder and public engagement and advanced data techniques, methodologies. We are defining and prioritizing disadvantaged communities. And really what this is, is let's develop a list, see where the needs are and see how we can help these communities the most. We're exploring solutions through the development of best practices analysis. We're working to provide better amenities to bridge economic, social, employment and educational barriers. We're providing sand egg.

And remember, we have those 18 cities and the county. We're working with them to provide them also with short term and long term projects that are informed by these studies and strategies. And finally, we're developing a guideline for where the money is. How do we go after the money? Where are the funding that's going to support these projects in the future?

So that when it's time for them to go out and find one of these grants or opportunities, they can come to Sandeg and they can get that information. Next slide, please. So mend the gap. This is our cap study that we are looking at, at Sandag. And we have submitted a grant application to the Reconnecting Communities grant program. That's no surprise to anybody that Barr, Logan and Logan Heights have been bisected by a variety of transportation infrastructure.

First it was the I five about 60 years ago, and then along came the Coronado Bridge. And so not only was it hit first by a freeway, but then a major bridge structure as well. These communities were one vibrant community of Logan Heights when the bridge and the freeway were committed. They were basically bisected. And today, community Members that once could just walk down the street now have to go miles out of direction to get to their neighbors.

And so here, this is what we think is a very important project, and we are working with the City of San Diego, Caltrans, and our partners, our CBO partners, in the development of this project. Next slIde, please. So here's another project that we have applied for, a grant, the reconnecting communities highways to Boulevard Grant. And here we're looking to do a project that would look at mitigating some of the impacts related to infrastructure investments that occurred that bisected communities in the southeast community of San Diego.

The first thing we're looking to do is to mitigate and retrofit the 43rd street connectors on the 805, which were formerly built for Sr 252. Does anybody know what Sr 252 is? Except for Caltrans, no. Essentially, this was a contentious highway that was never built. So this infrastructure exists today, and we think it could be better utilized and better suited for something else within the community.

The second thing we want to do under this study is to build formal connections between Cholis Creek through southeast San Diego. And then finally, we want to foster transit oriented development. We're working very closely with our structural partners, City of San Diego, City of National City, and Caltrans, of course. But then we also have a wide variety of community stakeholders that are supporting this project as well. And that includes our urban core collaborative, groundworks and Mundo Gardens.

So this is one that we're pretty excited about and hope to hear good news about soon. And I think I did it quickly, so I'll be happy to answer any questions that anybody has.

Great job, Jennifer. Thank you. Thank you. I just want to acknowledge your perspective, and others mentioned it. I know the Department of Transportation did and others did. It's not just about the freeways, it's reconnecting communities another way. And obviously, the last project, the 252, definitely captures that.

One idea that I think we'll further discuss at a next hearing is how do we value the land that currently has a zero, basically zero tax dollar value to the property tax base in order to recapture some of that potential? You mentioned potential development, transit oriented development, which could happen at this particular project at 252, but it could happen also over lids and caps. And how do we capture those tax dollars to help Fund the investment, the infrastructure investments that need to occur?

So I just wanted to say that out loud because I want to make sure I remember to capture that conversation for our future. I have only on one slide, slide number five. You don't have to bring up the slide, but when you were talking on that slide, you were talking about the work that you're doing already. And I just want to confirm that this is the Department of Transportation's funding that was mentioned earlier. Is this what's funding this study?

And can you talk just a tiny bit more, you said in the 18 cities, but just talk maybe a little bit more about how wide that net that's been cast on the work that you're doing as it relates to that funding. And then when do we expect to have a report, whatever it is that you're going to be producing as a result of the studies?

Yeah. So as I mentioned before, we use Cal enviros screen as a way to really identify these communities that are most in need. And that's what this study is looking to do, is to let's figure out where the greatest need is and then let's prioritize that need. So Sandeg gets a lot of money through the region. And as we prioritize these needs, it can help us develop projects that go first for are those areas.

And so our study, I'll have to ask Lizzie over here, 20 months, that's how long the whole study is, but we're starting it off.

So just so we capture you for the feed, you can repeat.

Yes. So I asked my colleague Lizzie Harvey, who is actually the PM for that project. The project will be done in 20 months, so give us a little leeway. I would say two years, and we'll have the study out for you guys to review. And then if I could mention about land value, Sandeg is undertaking a comprehensive land value study right now that will also look at things like you just mentioned.

If we did do caps or linear corridors that support biking or PEDs adjacent to transportation infrastructure, how do we recoup the land value for that?

That's going to be very useful information. The only other thing that I'll say, and you mentioned about community involvement, because the Department of Transportation, as they're looking to grow their community participation, I heard them mention that perhaps compensation for community participation is something that SAndAG already engages with. Maybe it's just a comment.

We'll have to follow up with you on how that is allowed, if you will, by the rules that often government is placing on agencies, but certainly want to look at that and how we can help Caltrans sort of be at that same so that we can get some. Thank you, Jennifer. Please join me in thanking her and stay connected with SAndAG, especially over the next 20 months with the work that they're going to do.

So now we will take Members of the public who'd like to share some thoughts. So we are going to start with whoever signed in first and go in that order. And I know that we've lost some folks because of time, but hopefully some are still here. Chris Cannot read the last name from the local 619. Maybe it's Allen. Chris Allen, come on forward. We ask you to please state your name. You'll be captured also by the audio feed and the video feed. And we thank you for sticking around and we'll give you a couple minutes.

Good afternoon. My name is Christopher Allen. I'm a representative for the Western States Regional Council of Carpenters. And we just want to go on record saying we're in full support of this. Good paying jobs and an ability to connect the communities is something that is transformational in our communities. Right. With these freeways, it oftentimes breaks apart sections and we just want to connect it. Right. We work together. We live here. We want to build here as well.

Thank you very much. Thank you for your testimony. Ricardo Sanchez. Ricardo. And thank you for your prompt comments.

Si buenas tardes stardes mi nombre Ricardo Sanchez representante LA Union Carpenteros. Carpenteros. AFA Orcian Porcintos projectos estate Las Camonias Al Rad Del Condo San Diego perotambien Travajo Locales Parahente, Kevivaki, Comoyor resident Grandes Libres, Paradon De Familiaris Ninos and Dio De.

Good afternoon. Jason Wells. I'm the Executive Director of the Senate Cedar Improvement Corporation. That's our local Chamber of Commerce and Business Improvement District in know the senaced community. You guys, just for the record, you obviously know this Assemblyman, but the saniceed community was first bisected by the Five, then dissected by the 905, I'm sorry, by the 85, and then trisected by the 905.

So what that created was a choke on an underrepresented, historically poor community, limiting any ability or opportunity they would have to grow with that. Now there's been some higher end housing that's been placed around that community. And so I think your initiative, this connecting communities, is the perfect timing and the perfect need in San Jedro to start bringing parts of our community together.

At the San Cedar Improvement Corporation, we thought we were in a silo, but I love hearing now from Commons and the Seattle project, we actually had an idea of joining for those that know the area, basically doing the cap from the communal Plaza vehicle bridge over the five to the new East west pedestrian bridge that runs almost parallel to that, creating some green opportunity, some respite for those that have crossed the border, been hours on foot crossing the border and Joining the two commercial parts of our community, the outlets on the west, the large chains, and the mom and pops on Santa Cedar Boulevard.

The one thing I would ask or hope that would come out of know, I was in Washington, D. C. And there was the gentleman from Caltrans, from the LA office, came into this beautiful presentation about Bill and Ira and all of these funds that they wanted to get to underserved communities. And then at the end I said, that's awesome. I said, so how do groups like mine, those in the community, get access to those funds?

And he says, zero, you just need to get to the top of the mayor's list and of Sandeg's List. And I said, well, that's the reason we're underserved is not being able to get to the top of those lists.

So if the Committee, this movement connecting communities, could help not only access to funds, but access to the access to funds, certainly in planning funds, because once we can actually get architectural renderings and cost estimates, then we may be able to get up those lists but just getting to that point for small organizations like ours is almost impossible. Thank you.

Thank you very much for your testimony. We have Clarissa Falcon, and I introduced her earlier. She is a California Transportation Commissioner, so we are really lucky to have her here with us today. And after Ms. Falcon, we will have Rob Quigley.

Hi. Thank you, Assembly Member, and thank you for holding this hearing. Clarissa Reyes Falcon on the California Transportation Commission and very proud to represent this area. I just wanted to enhance Marlon and Gustavo's explanation to the question that you had asked in regards to how do communities that have been historically impacted by our transportation, their voices to have a place at the table as we move forward with how we make decisions on our funding.

And so there is a mechanism that was newly created that is memorialized in the climate Action Plan for Transportation Infrastructure captive, and it's a newly formed mechanism called the Interagency Equity Advisory Committee. And we hear, they're fresh in my mind because we hear updates from them at every hearing. One of the Members is Randy Van Vleck, who is locally here from San Diego.

It consists of 15 Members in that Committee that represent many communities that have been impacted historically, from our tribes to rural to some of our impacted urban. And so that Committee is going to help advise us going forward as we go through each cycle of our funding on our guidelines. And so that is an opportunity to help inform the way we Fund projects moving forward with all of our funding programs that CTC allocates, that CalSta and Caltrans implement.

So I just wanted to offer that as an opportunity to engage with those that Fund those projects.

Thank you very much. Appreciate your testimony. Before those of you that are ready to leave, since we said one to four, I'm going to keep us on time. I'm going to take a picture, probably a selfie. This is a historic occasion. We haven't had a conversation like this in our state's history to capture the moment. And if you want to be part of that, please stick around. We will be done by four. We have about five other public speakers, so, Mr. Quigley, thank you very much. Janice Luna Reynosa will follow. Mr. Quigley.

Yes, thank you. I'm with the San Diego Commons, and I've been interested in this, reconnecting communities, especially in the urban areas, ever since I worked on the downtown community plan almost 20 years ago. I want to say I think that the formation of your Committee is one of the most exciting things I've seen happen so far, because there's a chance to really resolve some issues that have not been resolved.

I'd like to talk about four of them that weren't really mentioned much today, or if at all, but one is continuity. It's been my observation that one of the reasons these projects don't proceed or get accomplished is that they're long term and election cycles are short term. And so I think it would be wonderful if your Committee could creatively think of some ways to bridge that gap. An example is sustainability.

20 years ago or so, we were frustrated because the political entities, our elected officials, weren't really behind sustainable efforts in the building trades. And the Green Building Council came up with a brilliant idea called Lead. And the essence of lead is not only a checklist to make sure you're doing the right things, but a plaque you can put on the mayor's wall. And that changed everything. So maybe there's similar kinds of creative ideas that could be implemented here.

The next point I'd like to make is small grants really make a difference to groups like ours. $5,000 would give us the ability to hold a community workshop, and yet the grants are all oriented towards much bigger segments, which we wouldn't turn down. But there ought to be a system of small seed money abilities to get these institutions started. Thirdly, management facilities. Specifically, facility management on these freeway covers is really important to the community. There is fear of them becoming homeless.

Parks, for instance, that's happened in my neighborhood in East Village. There is concern that the restrooms won't be open, which I understand happens at Toralto Park. So there needs to be money allocated when you build these covers for ongoing and permanent facility management, security management. Otherwise they'll fail ultimately. And lastly, buildings themselves. I mean, to make these things affordable.

If we could build on top of the freeway, a library, community housing or private enterprise could put buildings on top of the freeway, that would go a long way to helping pay for them. This is done in other states. My understanding is that Caltrans still does not allow that construction on the freeways, but that they're working on making that happen. Your Committee may be able to help that happen more quickly, because I think that's really a key to making these things reality. Thank you.

Thank you very much for your testimony. Janice Luna Reynoso, followed by Anthony Avalos.

Good afternoon, Janice Luna Reynoso with Mundo Gardens. Thank you so much for holding this convening. Excellent. We've all learned so much. I hope that we can encourage you and host you in National City as well. This has been wonderful, and we serve various communities. Right and some of us see it as a whole community, whether like Mundo Gardens that serves in National City, southeast and Logan. We cheer each other on.

We feel like we have cracked the code as far as like the community based organizations come together. We are supportive. We've learned that competing against each other is not what works. That's the old way. And so seeing this happening, the highlighting of the five freeway, we have the five freeway in National City as well, right? And the 805 freeway. We heard from a brother here in San Diecro all of the divisive areas and we're like, yes, they need that.

So how do we figure out a way to continue to work collaboratively so that the benefits that are coming to the different freeways, the different disadvantaged areas are not in competition with each other? I don't know if it's a Bill, if it's asking for more funds. Just really encouraging the collaboration, the coalition building. We were able to do great things with the application we submitted with SAndAG, the City of National City, the City of San Diego, leaders from southeast San Diego and National City.

Just wonderful work that we hope it doesn't become something that is nuanced, that is not the norm. How do we continue to apply for things as a larger community? A lot of us see ourselves as sister communities. How do we enhance that? Again, I'm looking to you, is it a Bill? Is it really stating it that we are not competing against each other? We are communities that sometimes are looked as different communities that have been subdivided. Right.

The other thing is that it has been extremely instrumental, the support that we have received from some of the Caltrans staff. And anytime that we get a chance to communicate with them, when tHey're available, they are helpful. They're sensitive to the community's needs, really just wanting them to amp up that community engagement component with their legislative affairs staff, with their community engagement and legislative affairs staff, more community oriented outreach, because it works.

They listen to us, they visit us, they know the history, they're there learning along with us and also providing great advice. So really just Caltrans, keep that good work going and really more of that. So that way the staff isn't spread thin and they're doing a great job and so really allowing for more participation, more conversation, and it is all about relationships. So thank you so much.

Thank you. Appreciate your testimony. Anthony Avalos is followed by Chris Reese.

Good afternoon. My name is Anthony Avalos. I'm the co founder of the Council of Equity Advocacy, San Diego and also working very closely with Mundo Gardens and their environmental justice efforts. So just wanted to kind of briefly talk about some of the takeaways that I had from this phenomenal meeting. Thank you, Assemblymember Alvarez and all the organizations for putting this phenomenal presentation together. Funding is obviously a critical issue. I can see, based on some of your questions, that you're trying to navigate that space.

I will say that it is very difficult for me to see a sustainability pathway without funding that's coming from multiple sources to turn a lot of these volunteer organizations into permanent structures of our community. Second, with the idea of trust building, which I think is another huge component of this process and is going to be something that we're judged by in years to come. There needs to be outcomes that reflect the community's original demands.

And so when you have six years of phenomenal connectivity to the community, but then you have the outcomes which negate that six years of work, it's going to be very difficult to build trust with communities.

So I do think that while we have this conversation about funding and making sure that the organizations doing the work are able to sustain that work, we also have to look at the analysis of some of the outcomes of some of these cap projects as well as some of this other freeway infrastructure projects to see which of these existing projects actually impacted the community that we're talking about impacting right now.

And so without that additional analysis, I think that we will fall into what's comfortable, which is going with what we know, going with what has been done. So I just wanted to highlight that really quickly and again say thank you for providing this historic moment.

Thank you, Anthony. Appreciate your testimony. Chris Reese, followed by Ryan Miller.

Thank you so much. I've enjoyed this. I've learned so much. It's tremendous. Thank you to everyone who put it on. So, following on that gentleman's comments, I'm a big advocate of data. I'm here representing the United Nations associations, local groups that are working to implement the United Nations tenants. And my passion is climate. So sitting here and I'm listening to us reflecting back on the mistakes we made 30 or 40 years ago, and how are we going to actually measure what we want to accomplish.

So, thinking about climate, for example, can we bake into the plans that come out of your Committee, a structured process to measure the climate data, greenhouse gas emissions, for example, in certain neighborhoods? Can we take it one step further and tie that into health outcomes? Identify respiratory diseases and other diseases that are directly related to climate, particularly emissions from cars. Right. Because when you look at Pie charts that show what are the greatest impacts in terms of climate transportation is usually between 45 and 55%.

So that's impacting global warming, it's impacting local people's health, it's impacting quality of life. So there are qualitative and quantitative measurements that we can start to do when we enact these projects and then track them over a period of time51015 years, to determine whether or not we're having the impact we hope for another example is canopies. So the caps, the lids, create some kind of a tree canopy that has a marginal impact on climate change.

It's an important step, but everything that we do to reduce the emissions from vehicles, trucks going up and down the road, that's what's going to have the biggest impact on both the climate and individuals health. So again, to measure effectiveness, let's get some data and let's think about the metrics that are both qualitative and quantitative. And I've done a lot of work where it feels good to do things like, it would feel good to create this freeway cap.

But if we don't know what the actual impact is on people's health, if we aren't measuring what the impact is on the local business and the economy and the local business, if we aren't impacting what it's doing to climate, we actually don't know if it's successful. It might have felt good, but we don't know if it's actually successful. Thank you.

Thank you very much for your comments. Ryan Miller. And then our last speaker will be Bill Anderson after Ryan.

Hi. Thank you for this opportunity. First, want to thank the panel for getting a lot of excellent information. I'm actually a graduate student at UC Davis. I'm from Northern California, just visiting today. And I also teach urban planning and geography classes at Chico State and Sacramento State. So I just wanted to add a couple of thoughts from a Northern California perspective. One thing that I wanted to mention was specifically about Caltrans.

And I want to make sure I say this in a way that is respectful to Gustavo and Marlon. I think it's amazing to see that there is great work happening from Caltrans here. But one of the things I continue to be worried about is other Caltrans districts that might be a little bit less progressive and kind of mindsets at the highest levels of Caltrans. And just to make people aware if they weren't. We're facing a situation right now in Northern California.

In my home countY, where Interstate 80 is essentially being expanded, it's undergoing a lane expansion. Kind of under the guise of a bridge maintenance project. There was a really good article on October 13 in the LA Times about a whistleblower at Caltrans who was fired for bringing up that we should not be undergoing this expansion. That was Jeannie Ward Waller up in the Northern districts of Caltrans.

So part of me really worries that in some sense there's amazing things happening at Caltrans, and I'm really happy to see that change. But I think there's a lot of institutional change that still needs to happen. And the cynical part of me worries that some of these projects that are going to be amazing might, in a sense be used as kind of greenwashing or as kind of COVID for Caltrans to continue to double down with their car dependence expansion, maybe in other parts of the state.

So I just want to make sure that we're thinking about institutional reform continually, and we're also thinking about other districts that might not have the kind of enlightened approaches that I was learning about today, which were amazing. And then secondly, I just also wanted to add, other people have said this, but really, any opportunity in any incentive programs or state funding to also incentivize affordable housing construction as part of these lids, I think is just an amazing opportunity.

I think probably everyone in this room knows we have a decades long history of racist and exclusionary zoning that have led to a deep, deep deficit of affordable housing units across the state. And so I think anytime state policy can be used to kind of nudge us in that direction, we should be taking that opportunity. Thank you. Thank you for representing NORCaL. We will give them some love.

We'll have a hearing there in a month and a half or so and perhaps a third and fourth hearing in other parts of the state. We want to hear from the entire state. This Committee is not just a San Diego Committee, it's a State of California Committee. Our final speaker, Bill Anderson. Mr. Anderson, welcome.

Thank you very much, Assemblymember Alvarez, for holding this and for the panelists to provide the information. I'm here with the San Diego Commons Group and did want to just emphasize and you consider funding and strategies for the reconnecting the communities, that we are careful not to compartmentalize the components, that we don't have boundaries, that it's not just a cover, it's what happens outside the COVID that connects to the COVID that connects to the streets, that connects to the parks, that connects the community, and so ensuring that our scopes, our NOFAS notices of funding availability, the grants to organizations really encourage thinking about those interconnections, because that's where we've gotten in trouble in the past, is by compartmentalizing each of these components and then finding gaps that some future generation has to try to fill.

So just wanted to end on that. As an aside, I was the economist on the I 15 freeway cover strategy in the late 1980s. So if you have any questions about how we valued land back then, feel free to call me. Thanks.

Thank you. And guess what, everybody, if you turn around, it's 04:00. zero, it's 401 now. Man, that was almost perfectly timed. It has been a real tremendous honor and pleasure to hear from our panelists, to hear from the Members of the public. I'm excited about this continued conversation. We will be having a series of these hearings, as I mentioned, and we'll be putting out a report from the Committee staff. We'll put a report out on recommendations on policies and on legislation.

And certainly all the comments that were received here will be memorialized in that report. So I want to thank you for that. And before you leave, I do want to do this little thing. Take a little picture here so we can share it with everybody. So you can just stay still for a second, see if I can do this. Thank you, everybody. Our hearing is adjourned. I don't have a gavel, but adjourn. Thank.