Assembly Standing Committee on Local Government

Good afternoon, everyone. We're going to wait a couple more minutes to give a little bit more time for those Members that are not here yet. Okay? We'll get started soon.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being here, and welcome to the Assembly Local Government Committee hearing of March 12th. I would like to remind the public that testimony will be in person for this and future hearings, as we no longer use a moderated telephone service. We also accept written testimony through the position letter portal on the committee's website.

We seek to protect the rights of all who participate in the legislative process so that we can have effective deliberation and decisions on the critical issues facing California. Protesters have appeared in legislative hearings, yelling from the audience and issuing threats about potential violence.

These actions actually disrupted the legislative hearing and the person who caused the disruptions were removed from the hearing. As we proceed with witnesses and public comment, I want to make sure everyone understands that the Assembly has rules to ensure we maintain order and run an effective and efficient and fair hearing.

We apply these rules consistently to all people who participate in our proceedings, regardless of the viewpoints they express. In order to facilitate the goal of hearing as much as possible from the public within the limits of our time, we will not permit conduct that disrupts, disturbs, or otherwise impedes the orderly conduct of legislative proceedings.

We will not accept distracting behavior or behavior that incites or threatens violence. The rules for today's hearings include not talking or loud hearing. Include the talking or loud noises from the audience. Public comment may be provided only at the designated time and place and as permitted by the Chair.

Public comment must relate to the subject of bills or information being discussed today. No engaging in conduct that disrupts, disturbs, or otherwise impedes the orderly conduct of this hearing. Please be aware that violations of these rules may be subject, may subject you to removal or other enforcement actions.

Before we go over additional details for today's hearing, I would like to welcome returning Members of the Local Government Committee. We have a new Chair who will be here soon, Assembly Member Tri Ta. And additionally, new Members include Assembly Member Hoover, who will be here soon, too. Assembly Member Ransom, Rubio, and Stefani.

Please send me a signal in your return or new wish to offer opening comments. No. Nobody wants to make some comments? No. Okay. I would also like to welcome Julia Mouat, the committee's Science Fellow, to her first hearing with us. Welcome, Julia. Welcome.

Last but not least, my Assembly Fellow, Ruby Arceo, who has been handling some work on the committee side, and we would like to recognize her for her efforts. Thank you, Ruby. Want to say hi? Now on some additional housekeeping items, two of our Members are absent today.

Assembly Member Wicks will be standing in for Assembly Member Ramos today. Thank you, Assembly Member Wicks. Assembly Member Quirk-Silva will fill in for Assembly Member Ward. Thank you. Ms. Wicks on the dais. Ms. Quirk-Silva waiting to present the bill, and she is going to be presenting Assembly Member Ward's AB 253. We will be hearing one bill this afternoon.

AB 253 by Assembly Member Ward, again, presented by Assembly Member Quirk-Silva. She will be presenting the bill. Our bill hearing will be followed for informational hearing on the general plan. We do have a quorum. And for our bill hearing we will take up to two primary witnesses in support and up to two primary witnesses in opposition. These witnesses will have three minutes each to provide their testimony. All subsequent witnesses should state their name, their organization, and their position on the bill only. As I said, we do have a quorum. As secretary, please call the roll.

[Roll Call]

Assembly Member Quirk-Silva, please.

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and Members. Today, I present AB 253 on behalf of Assembly Member Ward and as a proud joint author. First, I want to thank the committee for your work on this bill, and Mr. Ward accepts the amendments. AB 253 would allow homeowners and developers to hire licensed third party professionals to review a certain post entitlement permits if it would take the local building department longer than 30 days to conduct that review.

California is in the middle of a housing crisis, and delays in the residential building permitting process are often cited as significant constraints restricting the housing production pipeline. Local building departments review building plans to ensure compliance with state building codes and local ordinances, a process that is prone to delays due to fluctuating workloads and resource constraints.

According to the self reported annual progress data, the average fully entitled apartment building takes approximately nine months to secure a post entitlement permit. Lengthy review periods at this stage hinder housing production by delaying the transition from approved projects to active construction, affecting overall construction costs and housing affordability in California.

These delays also reduce predictability for developers, further exasperating California's housing shortage. For homeowners seeking to add gentle density to their property... I like that word. I haven't heard that in housing before. Gentle density to their property, bureaucratic barriers and delays may cause them to abandon the project entirely, further constraining the housing production pipeline.

AB 253 addresses this critical administrative hurdle by ensuring timely post entitlement plan checks for small 1 to 10 unit residential projects and providing an alternative mechanism for applicants to use licensed private professionals at this stage. This approach aligns with best practices from other countries and recent legislative actions in states across the USA. Today, in support, I have here with me Nolan Gray, senior director of legislation and research with California YIMBY.

Thanks so much, Assembly Member, and good afternoon, Chair and Members of the Committee. My name is Nolan Gray. I'm the senior director of legislation and research at California YIMBY, here to speak on behalf of AB 253, which we're proud to sponsor.

California YIMBY is a statewide organization of over 80,000 neighbors dedicated to making our state an affordable place to live, work, and raise a family. California is in the midst of a severe housing crisis, and one of the biggest obstacles to building housing in our state is the excessive delays in our permitting processes.

Even after projects receive full approval, post entitlement permits such as building permits can take months or even years to secure. These delays stall construction, drive up costs, and make smaller projects financially infeasible. On average, a fully approved apartment building in California takes nine months to obtain post entitlement permits, and as we all know from intro statistics, that's the average. So a lot of projects take a lot longer.

Missing middle projects can take six months, and even a single family home or an ADU can spend three months just waiting to get a permit reviewed. This slows housing production. It especially falls hardest on smaller builders who don't have the capital to wait forever. And it can imperil affordable housing projects that are potentially combining multiple funding streams.

AB 253 offers a straightforward solution that supports both local governments and home builders. It allows licensed and insured third party professionals, including architects and engineers, to assist in processing housing permit applications when cities face resource constraints and are unable to complete reviews within 30 days.

This ensures much needed housing projects continue to move forward while easing administrative burdens on local planning departments. Importantly, AB 253 does not eliminate city oversight. It simply provides an additional tool to help cities manage workloads and meet housing goals more efficiently. I would stress this is international best practice and reform that a number of states have passed and introduced in recent years, and I hope California can be one of them. For these reasons, we respectfully request your support on AB 253. Thank you.

Thank you. There's no secondary primary witness? Thank you. Any primary witnesses in opposition? Seeing none. Any in the audience that want to speak in support of the bill? In support, please. Again, state your name, organization, and position on the bill only.

Good afternoon, Chair and Members. Adam Regele on behalf of the California Chamber of Commerce in support. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair and Members. Catherine Charles on behalf of the Housing Action Coalition, the Bay Area Council, and the Chamber of Progress in support. Thank you.

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and Members. Raymond Contreras with Lighthouse Public Affairs speaking for SPUR, Abundant Housing LA, Fieldstead, and The Two Hundred. Thank you.

Thank you. Anybody in the audience in opposition? Again, please state your name, organization, and position only.

Yeah. Good Afternoon, Chair and Members. Happy to be back. Brady Guertin on behalf of the League of Cities. Not opposed. We have a concerns position that we've expressed with the authors and sponsors, and look forward to working with them as we continue the conversations to address our concerns. Thank you.

Good afternoon. Mark Neuburger with the California State Association of Counties. We also share the same concerns with Cal Cities on this bill. We've had some preliminary discussions the author's office really thankful for and we look forward to more.

Thank you, and seeing no one else. Before we go to comments or questions, just want to welcome Assembly Member Rubio and Vice Chair Ta. Welcome to the Committee. Assembly Member Wicks.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for letting me be an interloper here today on Local Gov. I'm glad because I actually was out of committee in Housing Committee this morning when we passed the bill out of that committee, so I didn't get a chance to put my comments on the record.

So I appreciate the opportunity now. I'm, I love this bill. I'm so glad that you're doing it and Mr. Ward is doing it. You know we had, I had a Select Committee on Permitting Reform. This one this idea and these body of ideas came was discussed a lot in that committee, so I love seeing us take action on it.

Nine months is simply unacceptable, and we have to do better as a state to expedite housing, period. And there's just simply no excuse for it, and so I just appreciate this bill. I'll make a motion if there one, if one hasn't been made, or maybe one was already made. But want to support the bill.

The good news is we have the ability to change this and to make this change. My only critique of the bill is I wish it was more expansive actually, and so maybe we can get to that point, or I know maybe others are doing bills in that space. But these are the types of solutions we should have in our back pocket because I think it's important. Would love to be added on as a co author and look forward to supporting the bill today.

Thank you, Assembly Member Wicks. Anybody else? Comments or questions? Mr. Ta.

Yes. Thank you so much. I really love this bill, and this is a excellent, excellent bill. I think that that really helps to streamline the process, and I think that we need that. So I really appreciate author for introducing bill. I strongly support.

Anybody else? Seeing none. I'll be the third one to say that I like this bill too. It's time that we really start building the units that we need. As planning practitioner in my previous life, I really appreciate this type of legislation because we need to build the number of units that we need in the state. Would you like to close?

Yes. In support of this, AB 253, I know that the author is passionate about this. I am as well, and with that, would ask for support of our gentle density bill and ask for your support.

Thank you for presenting this bill today on behalf of Assembly Member Ward and for his and your hard work towards the process of building new homes. The motion is do pass as amended Appropriations Committee. Would you please call the roll?

[Roll Call]

The bill's out, 10-0. Thank you.

Thank you, Members.

We're going to transition to the informational hearing. You can just give us a minute so we can transition. Thank you.

Okay, thank you everyone. We are ready to begin our informational hearing. The agenda, we do have three different panels and then at the end we will have an opportunity for public comment, closing remarks, and then adjourn the meeting.

First, I'd like to thank all of the panelists that have been time in and time out of their busy schedules, that have been traveling long to get here and to speak at this informational hearing. The Committee on Local Government welcomes you to our first informational hearing of 2025.

Over the past 10 years, the Legislature has run dozens of bills on general plan issues. From adding new elements and briefing up existing elements to adding requirements to the annual progress report, the General Plan has been a venue for policy innovation and experimentation.

As I stated, we have made great progress in ensuring that every level of government is thinking about environmental justice for disadvantaged communities, public safety as climate change continues to affect our lives, and housing that is affordable for all Californians. While we have made huge strides in housing equity and public health and safety.

This Committee sees bills every year seeking to redraft or add requirements to the General Plan. Though it is important to ensure that the law is working as intended, new requirements of the General Plan prompt local governments to update or plan to update this foundational planning document. New requirements, no matter how small, are not free.

In order to make the new changes, local governments must find ways to factor that cost. This may include raising fees on development, and I say that it's not to discourage members. This will not discourage members from raising issues that they feel important, but to encourage intentionality when we, the Legislature, propose changes to the General Plan.

As many of you know, I was a planner for about 15 years before holding local and state office. My experience as a planner gave me the opportunity to learn how the General Plan works on the ground in real time.

While not everyone has 15 years of dedicated to the learning about the document that forms the basis for local governments' land use decisions, I hope that the next two hours prove to be informative and help provide a deeper appreciation of the work that local governments' staff put into the General Plan. And now for a few housekeeping items.

After every panel, the members of the Committee will be able to ask questions. Public comment and questions will be taken at the end. The Committee has respectfully asked that the panelists stay until public comment to answer questions from the public to the extent that the schedule allows. Thank you for that.

And public comment should be limited to one minute per person. I want to emphasize that while we we will be reviewing the General Plan with a discerning eye, this hearing is not a platform to advocate for specific bills before the Legislature.

That being said, I open up the floor to my colleagues for any comments they would like to make. No? Anybody? Okay. Thank you. Ms. Ransom, I'm sorry.

No, I was just going to thank the Chairman for putting together this informational hearing. Also, having the experience in planning as Planning Commissioner for many years, the General Plan is very key to how we build communities. And as things evolve, it's important that the General Plan components make sense for where we are today. And so thank you very much for bringing this hearing together.

Well, thank you. And now let's begin with the first panel. I don't see anybody else wanting to comment. Before we go to the General Plan Panel One, we need to adjourn the meeting that we just had where we had one bill. And we have a motion to adjourn by Vice Chair Todd and a second by Assembly Member Ransom.

And the hearing is adjourned. And now we can begin with the panel. Thank you. Welcome. So presenting first is Dr. Catherine Brinkley. She's an Associate Professor in Human Ecology, Community and Regional Development in the College of Agricultural Environmental Sciences at the University of California, Davis.

Dr. Brinkley will take us all to school and provide an overview of the General Plan. She will also present Plant Search, the first of its kind researchable database for general plans. Dr. Brinkley, thank you.

Thank you. It is an honor to be here. I have a brief PowerPoint presentation that's really aimed at, as you said, Mr. Chair, folks who may not be familiar with California planning or the General Plan process. So this is introductory for everybody, just to get us all started on the same page.

General plans are often called comprehensive plans in other states. In California, every jurisdiction, all 482 cities and 58 counties, are required to adopt a General Plan. The document can be created in-house at no cost. But more often, planning consultants are brought in. The plan could be tens of pages, but more often, it's a lot longer.

Some plans weigh in in the thousands of pages. They include images, tables, and figures in addition to the text. And a plan update can take several years. It involves numerous community meetings to harmonize the vision, the values, and the goals. And it sets development action for the next 10 to 40 years.

The General Plan is made up of multiple chapters. These are called elements in California planning. And next we'll take a look at the timing and contents of these elements.

If you would like to quiz yourself just to see if you know what, when elements need to be updated, consider jotting down some numbers, and then we'll think about how those all fit together. As you do, think about the many technological advancements that are constantly happening with EV charging, and then also consider the many state updates to the planning process.

So this is just a little quiz to get us started, noting that a general plan is also a love letter from a community to its future self, infused with language about what the town or the county likes and what they hope to see in the future.

It's a state-mandated document, it's Assembly instructions for developers to meet those expectations, and it's, as you all mentioned, an exercise in local democracy that's an important feeder for governance at higher scales. So all of the above would have been the correct answer there. All right, so we'll start with transportation.

This element covers public transportation, roadways, and topics like active transportation with designated walking and biking path. Some cities have green belts which are required to be incorporated in all new developments. Others have removed minimum parking standards for new developments, and still others have cited public free charging stations strategically to encourage rapid transition to zero emission vehicles.

Updates to this element need to align with the Metropolitan Planning Organization Plan, and these are federally mandated and federally funded transportation policymaking organizations. There are 18 across the state. Next, we'll turn to the hazard and safety elements. These are often combined hazards, map hazards, earthquakes, floodplains, toxic waste.

Safety includes how to mitigate those hazards with evacuation routes, where to strategically place fire breaks and a local hazard mitigation plan is required by the federal management agency, FEMA, in order to be eligible for federal funding and aid in times of disaster.

Assembly Bill 2140, passed in 2006, authorizes local governments to adopt their local hazard mitigation plan in combination with their safety element. And then Senate Bill 1035, passed in 2018, builds on Senate Bill 379, requiring all cities to address climate change adaptation and resilience in their safety elements.

These are triggered by the next update of the housing plan of the Hazard Mitigation Plan, and you will hear about additional new requirements that deal with fire safety regulations, particularly for unincorporated communities, later. So next, we'll move on to environmental justice.

So, Senate Bill 1000, passed in 2016, requires that all jurisdictions with disadvantaged communities add environmental justice to their general plans to reduce the risks to disadvantaged communities. This requirement could mean a standalone environmental justice element, or environmental justice can be woven throughout the General Plan.

A disadvantaged community is typically defined as a community or an area that's disproportionately burdened by multiple sources of pollution, environmental degradation, or socioeconomic conditions.

The California Environmental Protection Agency, Cal EPA, uses the California community's environmental health screening tool, Cal EnviroScreen, developed by the Office of Environmental Health and Hazard Assessment, to identify areas that have both high pollution burdens and also have experienced health disparities.

In this way, your work in California has really modeled how to do climate justice for the world, really, and ensure that disadvantaged communities can receive funding and planning that is earmarked through the state's Cap and Trade program. That's no small thing.

Of course, you can be disadvantaged and not live in a designated area that is experiencing those spatial, those spatial environmental burdens. And this is where environmental justice approaches, like the City of Richmond's Health and All Policies, which was launched in 2014. The ordinance really helped pilot that approach and model it for other jurisdictions.

That ordinance, the Health and All Policies Ordinance in 2014, came about through their 2030 General Plan update. Jurisdictions are required to address environmental justice when two or more General Plan elements are updated concurrently. Air quality is an element that is required for cities and counties that are in the San Joaquin Air Pollution Control District.

And this relates to transportation as well as housing. So we'll get to the big one, housing, here. All right. Communities are required to update their housing element, and the timing depends on their metropolitan planning organization designation as well as the scheduling of their regional transportation plans, RTPs. There's so much jargon and planning, which makes it very fun.

The goal is to coordinate the regional housing needs assessment, which is the allocation of housing for low-income housing and low-income housing designation. Non-attainment metropolitan planning organizations adopt the regional transportation plan every four years. And the Regional Housing Needs Association and housing element schedules need to be coordinated with every other regional transportation plan.

This requires updating the housing elements every eight years, no later than 18 months after the Regional Transportation Plan. In metropolitan planning organizations that have achieved attainment, the Regional Transportation Plan is updated every five years, and housing elements are required to be updated in tandem.

Updates to the housing element often trigger updates to other elements, including land use, which covers zoning and topics like annexation conservation, which focuses on wildlife protection and wildlife corridors, as well as habitat restoration and open space, which includes parks and recreation, but can oftentimes overlap with conservation topics such as where to place green belts and trail systems.

And then last, we have the Lonely Noise element. This reviews the soundscape of any jurisdiction. This covers topics like nightlife, a music scene, and considers how policing of noise ordinances might impact particular neighborhoods. So I'm thinking here about.

I live in the City of Davis, where a Playground needed to be removed because it was in violation of the noise ordinance. So there are important environmental justice considerations to take into account. Even with the the noise ordinance, some jurisdictions go well beyond these requirements. So Again, Davis included 21 chapters more more than was needed.

All of these elements need to be integrated and internally consistent. So the housing element needs to agree with what the transportation element is saying, with what the air, the air quality element is saying. So, let's put this all together. If you've got your numbers written down, now's your time to check.

And this would be a schedule for updating and streamlining. So most often individual elements can be updated on a five year cycle. Remember, it can take multiple years of community conversations to update. So you're in the process. And the full General Plan should be updated every 10 years.

So think about that, and then let's look at the number of how often general plans are updated. So, to create this bar graph, we visited every jurisdiction's website or their municipal library and we scanned their adopted general plan. We built the first statewide database of, a comprehensive database of general plans.

No other state has fully wrapped its arms around all of these local plans and planning data. And California is leading. I will note that more than half of California's plans are more than 10 years old. About 13% are more than 15 years old.

And there are several elements within these plans which haven't been updated from since the 70s, in some cases. For example, only 30% of the safety elements have been updated in the last 10 years.

So the big takeaway here is now is a great time for local jurisdictions to consider updating and to work on reaching those these new state level goals as well as addressing the many rapid advances we've seen in technologies.

So when a General Plan is updated, there are a host of other policy tools which are brought along with updates. These include municipal ordinances, such as the noise ordinance or rent control ordinances. One specialized form of municipal code is the zoning code. This sets the heights and mass of buildings.

If you're using a form based code, just focused on the form, or more traditional euclidean zoning also focuses on the uses of the development.

So again, to wrap our arms around all of the many zoning codes across the state, we worked with the UC Davis Center for Regional Change partnered with UC Berkeley Othering & Belonging Institute to create a statewide California zoning map so we can see how many jurisdictions are zoning. It's like a quilt of zoning.

And this is a data set that's assembled through a partnership that's across the United States with Sara Bronin's National Zoning Atlas project out of Cornell University.

So if you're interested in tabulating how many zones are mixed use or multi family housing versus how many are focused on single family housing, this database can help with that as you're thinking about new bills.

So, given the update cycle and the years it can take to reach a plan, many jurisdictions are in planning mode. State-level guidelines note that during the preparation of an amendment to a General Plan or creating a new General Plan, the planning agency needs to provide opportunities for the involvement of all citizens.

California Native American Indian tribes, public agencies, planning public utility companies, civic education, and community groups all through public hearings and many meetings outside of those public hearings as well. So what I want to highlight here is some of the modes that this can take, and one is asset-based community development. We call it ABCD and planning.

And the idea behind asset-based community development is that you're focusing on the values, the visions and the goals of the local jurisdiction as opposed to a deficit model. So this really leads with what people love about their hometown.

For Valentine's Day I looked at how many times love was mentioned in general plans and about a third of California General Plans talk about love. And almost all of those comments come from public comments about what people love about their hometown or their county people.

People are talking about world-class industries that they love or world-class agricultural soils. So this is really a love letter to a place. Another planning term that is mentioned with plan updates is charette, and this is a French word.

It means little cart, and it comes from French designers who are using these big landscape maps or images of what development could be.

And in modern planning, this is oftentimes a planning firm will create visuals so that the public can see what a policy would look like if it were put in place and can have discussions about what they would like to see in place. So it's a visioning exercise with visuals.

The last as you noted, Mr. Chair, the Planning Commission really is a feeder for local democracy, for elected office. And so that Commission helps coordinate General plan updates as well as serving as a quasi judicial body that reviews the rules of the plan and the policies like zoning or permits or variances.

And many of the representatives in this room have served on their local planning Commission or outside of this room as well. All of these efforts, inviting the public to a charrette or to asset-based modeling, require an engaged and informed public.

And so to inform that, my research team at UC Davis worked with the California Air Resources Board and the Land Use Climate OPR Land Use Climate. Yes, to create the first searchable database. So this is a public-facing database, and we've included handouts in your packet there.

We've made the code available for other states who would like to follow suit. California is the only state that has a database like this that allows you to review and access all of the adopted general plans. No other country has anything like this either.

So you could ask how we're making progress on a variety of topics, and you could pull specific policy examples. So I'm going to walk you through this right now. The example here is environmental justice, and there's a QR code.

But before we do that, I just want to note that general plans address all kinds of things that they're not mandated to address. So if you consider a term like golf and consider how many general plans address golf, you can see that nearly all mention golf and planning for golf courses across cities and counties. So there's a lot in the plans that is not mandated to be there, but speaks to local values.

So if we turn back to environmental justice, you can see the progress that's being made just by using that specific term where now nearly half of the cities across California mention the term environmental justice, and the same half of the counties also address environmental justice. There's many ways to do this beyond calling it environmental justice as well.

So this tool is really meant to help jurisdictions that are thinking about how to make updates so that they can find examples of cities and counties that are similar to them and see who's leading the charge. I'm working with Jenny Wagner, who's now at SAC State.

We use large language models to pull out all of the associated language around environmental justice and the seven city plans that mention the most terms. We found over 628 discrete policies, which is a smorgasbord of opportunity for communities that are considering updates. We also worked with the California Environmental Justice Alliance to help make this database accessible.

They have a SB1000 toolkit and they were interested in seeing which jurisdictions are adopting environmental justice policies. And so at their urging, we've created several search features. You can sort by name, you can sort by year to see the most recent updates.

You can look at cities within the county so neighboring jurisdictions can do a keeping up with the Joneses and compare with one another, and you can see how many times that particular term is mentioned. So Menlo park here mentions environmental justice 326 times in their General Plan.

You can also pull up a PDF of the plan so you can see the policies in place with the figures and images so that you can look at particular policies and learn more about the context in which they're created. All right, so that's getting to the General Plan. Once the General Plan is adopted, it doesn't end there.

The plan undergoes the California Environmental Quality Act review because land use changes can impact can have significant environmental impacts. And the goal of CEQA review is to inform the public about these environmental impacts, explore alternatives to avoid damages, and explain why a project would be approved even with environmental impact if those could not be avoided.

Once a general plan is CEQA-approved, projects that comply with that general plan are exempt under CEQA. So this is a jurisdiction's ability to say what it wants and then have developers build to that. Developers can still, of course, propose alternatives at any moment, and there are cases where smaller-scale development projects might be CEQA-exempt.

So after the plan is adopted, specific development projects are proposed and reviewed that would comply. Capital improvement projects are aligned with budget on opportunities and constraints. And then there's ongoing public engagement for monitoring, evaluation and then adjusting for the next general plan update. Just a little note here.

Usually, if you plan for it, this is a field of dreams. If you build it, they will come before that. You have to plan for it in order to build it.

And so when we were looking at jurisdictions that have used their General Plan to plan for electric vehicle charging stations, we noted that only 55 cities across California don't have electric vehicle charging ports. And most of those don't talk about electric vehicles in their plan. So they're not planning, they're not implementing.

And you will see that with all of the efforts that jurisdictions are putting forth, if they're planning for it's in the General Plan, oftentimes it is then developed. I'll note that I'm always honored to represent our community, partner organizations, fellow faculty, staff and students who are who have joined me in building these tools and conducting these studies.

The California American Planning Association awarded Plan Search a few years ago, recognizing a broad desire amongst practicing planners for data tools like this to support planning across California.

And I'm very thankful to our elected representatives and their staff for taking time to learn and think through local efforts, especially right now as the federal landscape is changing so dramatically. I really appreciate the work that you and your staff are doing. Thank you.

Thank you. Any comments or questions by the Assembly Members? No. Well, I say thank you for being here, for showing that and bringing me back to my planning days.

Really appreciate you making the attempt to do this, and that tool that you showed seems to be very easy to use and practical, and I look forward to looking at it more. See how the cities that I represent are doing in planning in terms of the time that cities and local jurisdictions take to update their general plan.

We know there's small jurisdictions, large and larger jurisdictions. The 10 year timeline, would you say, based on your experience, what you've seen, is it 10 years or more for those big jurisdictions like say LA, San Diego, San Francisco, compared to those smaller jurisdictions, that there's a correlation there between the time that they do their General Plan updates?

If anything, I would say the smaller jurisdictions are often understaffed and struggle with funding, so they tend to take longer oftentimes than the larger jurisdictions.

Okay. As time goes by, there's new challenges that we face, and sometimes that's why I believe we see introduction of new General Plan elements. The buzzword right now is artificial intelligence. Do you think that in the future, we're going to have to look at AI as being part of a General Plan?

You would have to be specific about which way it will be used. I do think that tools like this data tool enable, enable large language models to rapidly pull best practices to create drafts of general plans that then can be edited by the planning team and with the public.

So there's potential to speed up those feedback loops between local government.

Yeah. And not knowing what it's going to look like too. That's a challenge. Now one last thing that I want to comment on is some public participation. When I was practicing, I did see a lot of public participation increase and this was pre Covid.

And now I'm looking at also looks like younger generations are willing to participate more in the General Plan process through the public meetings and things like that. Do you agree with that, or is there anything that I'm missing?

I do agree with it. And we're working on a module right now for high school level social studies classes so that students can rapidly learn what a General Plan is and how to effectively engage in the planning process.

Yeah. And lastly, I'll just say that this profession of being city planner is one of those professions that is not very well known. And I think that, you know, I actually participated in a pilot program through APA, going to schools, high schools in particular, to do an introduction of what a planner means.

Some people think it's like a wedding planner or a party planner. So we have to. Actually I had those questions from students when I first walk into the classroom. They don't know what the profession is, what the opportunities are there.

So I think that through APA having those kind of programs, pilot programs, to introduce what planning is to new students across the spectrum of the state so that we can have those that are interested in being planners are able to look at what the profession is. So thank you for that. Thank you for being here.

And we're going to transition to the second panel. Thank you. Our next panel includes representatives from local governments who will provide us with an overview of how the General Plan works on the ground and in real time. And this panel consists of Amanda Folendorf, County Supervisor of Calaveras County.

Tom Pace, Director of Community Development for the City of Sacramento. Right here. And technical Advisor for the American Plant Association, California Chapter. And also Jennifer Jolley, Community Development Director for the San Joaquin County, and also Omar Dadabhoy, Community Development Director for the City of Fountain Valley.

So in order to ensure that we stay on schedule, each panelist will present and we'll take questions from the members at the end of this panel. Supervisor Folendorf, thank you for coming. Can you please begin?

Good morning. My name is Amanda Folendorf and I'm currently in my second term the County Supervisor for Calaveras County. I was first elected in 2014 as a Council Member for the City of Angels and where I also served as the mayor. So I have gone through a couple of planning, general plans here in my term.

On top of that, I have also been the chair of LAFCO, Council of Government for Transportation, and local water agencies. I want to thank you all for allowing me to be here today. So who updates the local General Plan?

At our level, it is our planning department, but depending on the size of our jurisdictions, I have also had the experience of having to hire that out for consulting services because our, for example, at the city we have a staff of five.

We can't, we don't have an entire planning department. At times, we didn't have a Planning Department at all. Similar situations at the county where we do need to hire outside support to come in. But in a nutshell, we still go through that, we go through that process. Our workloads are one of the biggest things also.

So if our staff is inundated with other jobs and things that are happening at the county, we do contract, contract those items out. It is a juggle. You know, we've got to juggle what is coming down to make sure we're staying on a timeline and what are the state expectations are.

But we also have our own constituents we have to work for, and we've got Other things that they're expecting from us, as simple as processing a conditional use permit. So, it is a balancing act at small local jurisdictions. The other big part of our process is our Planning Commission.

We have a very strong Planning Commission and they are very actively involved in that. Funding the General Plan, funding money for our local jurisdictions. We are primarily funded by our General Fund. And so we are at a local elected level. We are making priorities on how we're going to spend our General Fund.

How much is going to go into, say, is it a year that we've got to update our General Plan or work on a general plan, or are we going to prioritize other items that are happening at our level that we need to address? Some areas in the state do have assessment fees.

They do find ways within their local jurisdiction to supplement or pay for those. But we, most rural areas, we just don't have the population and it's just not palatable for our consistent to consider another tax.

And so we, and just to get things through too, we try to work with our local businesses and those that want to build. And so. So a lot of times we are considering waivers and accommodation to ensure that things are getting done. Challenges.

The biggest challenge of keeping up with the state mandate, I will be frank, it is a challenge. As soon as we feel like we've got one, the we're chasing the next, and it slows us down.

Earlier, you heard the presentation that it takes years, it does take years to get it because, again, we're trying to juggle the workload. We're trying to get that. And then the biggest thing is our housing element.

I think we can all agree we all want more housing, but how do we accomplish those goals and those expectations that are happening? And now, recently, we'll be working on our safety element. And as a rural county, you know, we've got other external threats we've got to consider and address.

A lot of our foothill communities, it is one way, one way, one way in, one way out. It's not feasible to create another road to get them. So how do we balance those elements with keeping the characteristics of the communities in which our constituents live in? Public involvement.

At our area, most of the foothill communities, we have a very vocal community. They make sure they are involved in every part of the process, and they are not shy to let us know that they need more time to speak on this. We do everything from public outreach to town halls in each district.

We only have one city in our county. So for us, making sure there's at least a town hall in the city, online surveys because getting to county center can be over an hour drive for some individuals. And we also rely on our Planning Commission.

We will allow the hearings at our Planning Commission to ensure that the public is being heard and their concerns are being considered. This is just a snapshot of our General Plan. So, in a sense, that whole circle it took us five years to implement our last General Plan.

It was 22 years before that implementation or adoption in 2019 that the General Plan had not been updated. And that earlier you heard there are challenges. You know, we go through staff, we lose staff, we gotta hire staff, we run into money, changes in leadership, and then just local priorities.

We during that same time we had a catch a wildfire. We had the Butte Fire that whipped through our county. And so things took took a time out and we had to focus on rebuilding our community. So there's reasons across the jurisdictions why things are not on the set schedule.

But overall, I don't believe the intent is not to meet those timelines. It's just life happens, and we have a responsibility to our constituents waiting a year to implement some mandate, then we will take that risk because we need to take care of our constituents. The cost alone for us was probably just shy of $1.0 million. In some jurisdictions it's upward to $4 million.

How can the state support us at a local level? And that's why I'm here in front of you today. Small rural counties and cities, we want to evolve, but our evolution looks different than some of the larger cities and counties in this state. We need more tools in our toolbox.

Especially as fast as mandates are happening, we need more time to adopt and implement. Between staff, the processes at the state level, and going back and forth, it takes a lot of time, and it can be confusing at times. The ways that the state can help. And I know everyone asks for more money, but number one is money. You know, we need help.

You know, are there ways to support some of these elements as they come down through legislative bills? Be more pragmatic in implementing those, allow more local oversight. I previously was a Chair of LAFCO. For those of you that aren't aware of what LAFCO is, that is the Local Area Formation Commission.

And we really oversee the jurisdictions ensuring, for example, that water districts, when we are developing, we're not approving something that now we've got to figure out how to mitigate between two water districts of who is going to provide that service. And so there's a lot of those things that us, at a local level, we have to work through that may not be seen at a higher level. And some LAFCOs are strong and some are not, but most often LAFCOs are left out of the conversation.

And I'm thankful in my community that our LAFCOs make sure that we are present, and we are keeping an eye to help our special district go along with what the general plans are getting implemented and are part of that conversation. Others are relaxed timelines. You know, can we have more relaxed timelines on some of these elements.

Today, I hope that my presentation, some of the key takeaways are understanding the challenges that we have. You obviously understand what a general plan is and why and what it is. It's not just slapping ideas down. We really, in the small rural areas, we really take to heart these plans.

These are what's going to build us for a future and set us up so we can implement things such as infrastructure. We know what needs to happen. We've got geographic challenges as well. Just in our community, we go from below snow level to 8,000 feet. And so we've got different challenges. We also want to keep traditions alive and livelihood. We are highly dependent on the ag community and we want to keep that. We don't want to create such an overdevelopment.

We want to be smart, but we also realize we need more housing for our teachers, our firefighters, and we need more opportunities for not just my generation, but the younger generations coming up. And we want to plan for that, but we need more tools in our toolbox in order to meet the expectations from the top down. Many times a project doesn't even happen because of infrastructure. And I think that's one of the biggest challenges that local areas have is the infrastructure. We have no control over water districts or sewer.

And so we can approve a plan, but then the hiccup is going to be at those other jurisdictions where the price tag is $9 million to put in the infrastructure, and the project dies right there. Amazing housing development, but we just don't have the infrastructure in our rural areas. And the same goes for roadways. So the state support can be free too. It can. Other ideas to carve out. There's been SB 35, and yes, that is a loaded bill, but how can we learn from that bill to help the local rural counties and cities?

Can there be things that we can address to facilitate more streamlining process in the general plan to meet the elements within those general plans due to mandates. So it doesn't have to cost money, but you know, everything has a dollar sign. And then also less regulations in terms of bringing back to local control.

What can we do to collaborate with our local community partners to make the most sense of how we're going to implement some of these things? And in closing, my goal today is to be an advocate for the rural counties and cities and educate our challenges on how we want to implement these elements in the general plan.

We just need a different roadmap. I hope these takeaways are thought provoking and help you understand rural California more. And as a local elected, I hope to collaborate with you as electeds at the state level to make all of California successful in implementing their general plans and the needs of its constituents. So thank you again for allowing me to be here today.

Thank you, supervisor. I really appreciate your comments and the comments you made about rural communities. I believe that it's something that we need to keep on working harder in the state. I do represent a rural area, and just the way that some of the grant applications are made, it just makes it more challenging for rural areas to be able to compete with the limited dollars that are available in the county. Thank you for being here. I appreciate your time. Mr. Pace, I believe you're next. Thank you.

Good afternoon. I'm Tom Pace, technical advisor for policy and legislation to the board of the American Planning Association's California Chapter. On behalf of APA California, I'd like to thank the Chair and Committee Members for holding this hearing and giving us this opportunity to participate. APA California is a nonprofit organization made up of over 5,000 practicing planners, citizens, and public officials committed to advancing the practice of local, regional, and statewide planning throughout urban, suburban, and rural California.

The chapter maintains a robust legislative program and continues to offer our organization as a resource to you on planning and land use related legislation, offering technical expertise with the goal of ensuring that legislation can be implemented effectively at all levels. In my day job, I'm the director of community development for the City of Sacramento.

I have 30 years of experience in municipal planning and 19 years of experience in preparing and updating general plans. Today, I'd like to focus my comments on three aspects of today's discussion. First, the roles and responsibilities relating to updating the general plan and how local agencies balance workload. Second, challenges in updating the general plan when necessary. And third, what the state can do to help local governments meet the state's land use priorities.

As we consider roles and responsibilities related to general plan preparation, most agencies rely heavily on planning consultants to prepare housing elements, general plan updates, specific plans, zoning ordinance updates, and other long range planning documents. I will refer to these activities collectively as long range planning.

Local capacity in most agencies is severely constrained by limited staffing, limited fiscal resources, and in some cases, limited technical resources. The role of local staff is to oversee this work, but they may be limited in some cases to simply the procurement and selection process for the consultant and preparation of staff reports to the planning commission and legislative body. Why is local capacity limited?

Generally, this is because funding for planning comes from two main sources, the local general fund and permit fees. Most local general fund resources are consumed by public safety and essential services and facilities maintenance, so planning has to compete for this funding.

The other funding source, permit fees, often dictates that planning staff spend the majority of their time on current planning activities, like processing permits, entitlements, and CEQA reviews for development projects that are directly funded by these sources. This leaves little time for long range planning activities like updating the general plan.

In my experience, when we are faced with an ought to do and a must do, we focus on the must do items. In this context, the general plan update is the ought to do, while development application processing is the must do. This is because there is no overall statutory time frame for updating the general plan as a whole. Certainly there is for the housing element, which is one portion, but not for the whole general plan.

But there are numerous shot clocks for development applications, including the Permit Streamlining Act, CEQA deadlines, and 60 or 90 day ministerial reviews that must be done. Also, development has an applicant demanding attention, while the general plan may lack such an advocate. A relatively small number of larger agencies have in house staff resources to do more of this long range planning work, but even they will likely use consultants to some extent.

Moving on to challenges, we at APA California have identified the following challenges to updating the general plan when necessary. Extensive legislative mandates, unrealistically short mandated time frames for compliance, using updates to other elements as triggers to prepare or update additional elements, which adds costs, time, and complexity to the project. Lack of funding.

Nearly all planning mandates are legislated with the assumption that local agencies can just raise local permit fees to pay for them, while at the same time the Legislature has expressed concerns around local fees and impacts to development. And lack of local staff capacity due to most staff resources being devoted to entitlement processing, as I mentioned earlier.

General plans, because they cover such a wide scope of topics, can affect nearly all community Interest groups, tend to be time consuming mega tasks to complete. Questions regarding local development policy can be extremely contentious, and it can take considerable time to help inform communities about the options available to them and then try to come to a consensus.

Finally, considering what the state can do to help local agencies meet the state's land use priorities. At APA California, we would suggest that not everything belongs in the general plan. Plans are for high level policy guidance, while ordinances are where regulations are implemented. General plans should be general. They won't contain all the details that are required to implement a policy or program. Further work is required after adoption or amendment of a general plan to carry out its provisions in the form of zoning regulations or detailed design guidelines, for example.

We would like the Legislature to consider the cumulative impacts planners are facing of all the legislative updates over the years, including, by one count, 110 housing related bills over the past nine years, with 10 of those calling for general plan amendments. We suggest the Legislature consider prioritizing which items have to be done now or very quickly and which ones can wait.

Right now, planners are being asked by the state and by local agencies to help solve the housing crisis, the climate crisis, social and environmental justice issues, natural hazard mitigation and disaster response, fighting sprawl and promoting infill, and promoting downtown revitalization, just to name a few.

Next, we ask the state to provide ongoing state financial resources like predictable formula planning grants or programs like REAP and LEAP. We do appreciate the support provided in special session to assist Los Angeles with planning efforts, which will help planning departments keep pace with recovery in addition to the business as usual planning mandates.

And finally, we suggest that there is a need for a state technical resources clearinghouse for model ordinances and information sharing between jurisdictions. This concludes my comments. And again, we at APA California appreciate this opportunity to address you.

Thank you, Mr. Pace. Appreciate your talking points and presentation. And I just want to say that I do agree with you. REAP and LEAP, though those were funding mechanisms that help small jurisdictions like the ones that I work for. And you also noted the way that we need to address the real issues in the state, housing being one of them, and you mentioned a couple other ones. I agree with you and thank you for, for being here. Ms. Jolley? Yes.

Good afternoon. I'm Jennifer Jolley. I'm the community development director for San Joaquin County. I am also the immediate past president for CCPDA, which is the California County Planning Directors Association. It's a unique group in that we get different directors from counties together on an annual basis.

We have an intimate, you know, actual chance to speak with each other and see what we're, what our challenges are, and what we find across the board is that we're all struggling with the same types of things. I don't want to be redundant and repeat some of the things that have already been said.

I concur a lot with both the supervisor and Tom said on behalf of APA. I would like to give a perspective from a local perspective as a county director. General plans are prepared and adopted by every city and county, but their basic content is, as you know, established by the Legislature.

In 1990, the Supreme Court called the general plan the constitution for all future development, and I think we all take that very seriously. We all are striving to adhere to what we adopt by our policymakers. But one simple change in the general plan can affect many elements, as has been mentioned.

We also need to make sure that there's vertical consistency, meaning that the city and county's subordinate land use legislation, specific plans, zoning ordinances, development approvals, maps, et cetera, those also have to be consistent with the general plan.

So when you have the general plan, when there's a change to the general plan, you often will have to make an adjustment to your zoning code as well, which is an additional expense and time. Most commonly used on the daily basis is the zoning code. It can be very challenging to get public engagement for a general plan.

What people care about, for the most part, from a local jurisdiction, they want building permits. They want to know how high their fence can be. They want to focus on things like that. They're less interested, not everyone, but they're less interested in the big picture. In fact, I just want to share.

When we have tried to do community engagement, it's probably one of our biggest challenges. We will reach out. We have an ongoing list. Some of these people have been on this list for 15 years. And we will reach out and we'll say, please share. And they'll say, please remove me from your list. I no longer am interested.

So, you know, it can be challenging. Not to say that there aren't certain individuals that have certain things that they're interested in, specifically developers. But anytime you do a general plan update, that type of community outreach can take a lot of resources and time, and you still may not get the best results.

Who can update a general plan? We kind of touched on that already. The public can update the general plan. That's actually really challenging, but it is not off the table. So when you have a member of the public who has an idea on a certain type of development project, they are able to present a general plan amendment.

It is, as staff, we have to make sure that anything that they're proposing is done thoughtfully and consistently with the entire document. It's quite a lift. It's not as simple as walking in and saying, I just want to do my project here. I'm going to change the three words in the general plan.

We should be good to go. Although a lot of people would like to do that. That is not, not how it works. Who pays for the general plan? Well, we in San Joaquin County do collect a fee with each building permit. It's 5% of the building, plumbing, mechanical, and electrical permit.

That takes a long time to accumulate. For example, we updated our general plan in 2016. We currently have $855,000 in that account. It's already been nine years, and we're already coming up on needing to do some additional updates. So it might sound like a great idea that you're collecting these fees, but they can only be so large.

Otherwise, they make development cost prohibitive. They're not the only, they're not the only fees that are being collected. Our last general plan update began in 2008, and it took eight years to get adopted for a variety of reasons. And I was not part of that general plan update, so we ideally don't want to take that long.

But that one did take that long, and it cost well over $2 million. And then the zoning code that we had to do because it was a 30 year 1982 zoning code that needed to get updated. That was another three quarters of a million dollars. So it's a significant investment for the community and an impact on the general fund. Our housing element alone cost about $200,000. So if you're lucky to have that funding, which I'm grateful we have some.

One of the other challenges is the staffing. And I don't want to keep belaboring that. I do want to kind of touch on what Chair Carrillo, you said, which was that there's not a lot of people who understand what planning and planners do. There were two kind of quick situations I wanted to share with you. I went to my children's elementary school career day. I said, I'm going to go represent planning.

I took maps. It was great. I had one kid who stopped because I didn't have the guns of the sheriff's office and I didn't have the things that made young children excited about it. But I got one kid, and he was excited because he wanted to be either an architect or an engineer, and he was interested.

So we have to keep trying to educate those youngsters. And in addition, on CCPDA, we have the Cal Poly students come down and present some of their masters and undergrad presentations. That's been really valuable too. We've gotten to interact with them. They're all focused on cities. There are no real projects being done on unincorporated counties.

So that's often the case. Cities get a little bit more attention. There are 480 something of them and there's only 58 of us. But there is a unique, you know, they're very different. The way you develop a city and the way you develop an unincorporated county is very different.

In addition, speaking to all of those students, they all want to work for consultants. So getting them excited about working in government can be a challenge as well. So we're all dealing with the same thing. If you're lucky enough to get staff, then you have to train them.

And as you've been a planning commissioner and you have a planning background, you understand that it takes a very long time to educate an employee and teach them how to be a planner. And when they leave every one to two years, you're just constantly on that cycle. So you do have to rely on consultants quite a bit.

But there are only so many consultants in the world as well. So we're all competing for the same consultants. When we went to do our housing element update, we went out with our RFP through for the procurement process, not one person responded. So our purchasing department said, we're going to go out one more time. We got one, thank goodness we got the one.

So we do have, we did get some assistance, but that alone, even if we get the funding, even if we have all the resources we need, we need the people to work on that. And that's, I don't know how we solve that. That's a, that's a challenge. What's really, like I said, what's really important to the public is the day to day stuff. So while the general plan is all always our guiding document, it is something that the majority of the public don't care as much about, to be honest.

It's our job as staff to make sure that we are being consistent, not the public's necessarily. Another challenge could be that, you know, we report to the Board of Supervisors. There are, there are decision policymakers. They change, they change every eight years. And you may have to go in a completely different direction than what you started with.

When, when you have a general plan that takes 8 years to get through, that's an entire board term. So if you're a county like us, we've been always been very predominantly agriculture, but the world has changed. The goods movement, the logistics. There's a lot of interest in San Joaquin County in doing more industrial type development.

Well, when we had our justice general plan adopted in 2016, never envisioned the type of interest we would get. So that's going to be a very, that, that is a big thing that we are trying to address right now. Recognizing the uniqueness of the county and also balancing the history and protection of open space and agriculture.

So in conclusion, I just want to say that I have had this great opportunity to get to know different directors, planning directors, community development directors in the county. We are all, I hate to use the word struggling, but struggling with the same, with the same challenges. So we do appreciate the support.

Just, just as the other two speakers have said, we appreciate the financial support, but some of the things that are really difficult for counties to do are to get these things done in a quick manner. Just, like I said, the procurement alone could take you close to a year. So if you only have one year to get into compliance, you're likely not going to meet that goal. So a little bit more time would be appreciated. Of course, the funding is always appreciated as well. Thank you.

Thank you. I couldn't agree more with everything that you said in terms of your experiences, the challenges of keeping staff, hiring staff, and even going out on RFPs, not to get any responses. That's frustrating. Appreciate that. Thank you, Mr. Dadabhoy.

Yes, good afternoon, Chair. Thank you for this honor to speak before you this afternoon. Omar Dadabhoy, deputy city manager and community development director for the City of Fountain Valley. I spent seven years working for the State Assembly in the district offices and another 25 years working for local jurisdictions and a little bit of time working for a private consulting firm doing general plans and housing elements.

So I come to you currently with the City of Fountain Valley, and my colleagues covered many of the great points that I was interested in covering as well. I'll go over a little bit of commonalities I've seen in the local jurisdictions that I work for, which are mostly small to medium sized cities, go over some challenges again, and then some recommendations. And so what I've seen, we really don't have the opportunity. The 10 years was mentioned for the general plan.

It takes us five to six years at least to complete a general plan, and so 10 years is a pretty short window. What I've actually seen happen is the planners, community development director, they see that the general plan no longer is meeting the vision and the needs of the community.

You may see an increase in requests for general plan amendments that the city is actually in favor of. And so you see activity in the development community that really is showing you that you need to update your general plan. And so as we go through the general plan, are the goals and policies really meeting our current needs. And for mature cities, you don't really need to update it every 10 years. It may go out a little bit longer because you're at build out and not too much has changed.

And so what I've really seen is for the general plan to be good, viable for at least 15 to 20 years. Fountain Valley went about a little bit longer than that. We just completed it a couple years ago. It takes so long sometimes. I was the fourth director to work on the project.

There are two directors in the interim and then technically I was the fourth. So it does take a long time. And that continuity that you lose is a little bit detrimental to the project just because you don't have decisions are made early on and then those come back and you're wondering why the previous director made a certain decision or why they went in that, in that direction.

So the time is a little bit difficult. Once we make that determination and we get buy in from the community and the City Council, as was mentioned before, funding becomes an issue. The LEAP grant was great. We coincided in Fountain Valley, the general plan update with the housing element update.

So we got some efficiencies there. Used a LEAP grant that paid for about a quarter, actually a little bit less than a quarter, maybe an eighth of the general plan update. The majority of the funds came from the general fund. We do charge a fee for cities like ours.

You don't want that fee to be excessive, as was mentioned. And so it does take time for that fee to accumulate. We paid for about maybe a quarter of the general fund update with our general plan update fee. So the permitting, the amount of permits that come in, controls that fee.

And then also just the ever increasing cost. So that fee can't keep up with the rise in consulting costs. And consultant costs have been going up just naturally by labor, but also with the increase in requirements from the state, there's more time that they need to spend on it.

I'm going to talk about the public outreach, but with the increased time that's needed for public outreach, that increases our consultant costs because they're heavily involved in that as well. CEQA costs keep rising, keep doubling every 5, 6, 7 years. And the general plan EIR can cost upwards of a half a million dollars by itself these days.

And then that outreach. So outreach is great, but it's becoming more difficult to outreach to all the members of the community. And so, you know, 15 years ago, when I was working on a housing element update or a general plan update, there would be a laundry list of different things we could do for outreach.

And we'd pick a few and we'd be able to get to the majority of the community. Now we're going to all those different avenues to trying to get to the community. So we had a general plan advisory committee. We do bus tours, we do surveys, we go out to events that the city, the community might be attending.

And we try to hit all of those. Our general plan advisory committee, or GPAC, for example, we had 10 meetings with them. Consultant was there, we asked for their input in each meeting. Each meeting was at least three hours. There's at least five to 10 hours of pre-work that goes into that by the consultant.

So you're talking 13-15 hours times 10 just for that portion of the, of the outreach with that, with that committee. So those costs are ever increasing for us. I won't go too much into staff times. I normally have a staff of maybe three planners and an admin person. And you'll take one planner to be a project manager, hopefully. You have to train them up and then you have the admin person helping you out with the daily needs of the general plan update.

I've also run into rural communities where they had one planner and that planner had gone to work for an urban area not too far away from them. So they couldn't attract any new planners. And so they are actually hiring somebody to telework from outside the country to be their planner. And so it can be very difficult for rural communities to go through this process. In terms of challenges, again, this is the amount of time it takes. And then having the general plan be a visioning document versus a technical document.

So again, 15-20 years ago in the City of Stanton, where we updated the general plan, it was a true visioning document. We really looked at what could the community be in the next 20-25 years, what we want it to be. It was very aspirational, and through implementation, the community was transformed through that process. What I've seen now recently with say, Fountain Valley, it's a great document. It is the vision for the city, but it's more of a technical document that's more of a checklist of did we catch everything that the state is requiring.

That visioning is very difficult now to, to get into because you're just really trying to meet all those mandates. And then information and data is very difficult for small and medium sized cities to acquire. We're always scouring census data, Department of Labor, Finance, local realtors. Wherever we can get data, we're trying to find it.

And so one of my recommendations was going to be to somehow provide more data and a storehouse with the state. When I was writing the, in the housing element, there's a section for. It's called the AFFH. The affirmatively furthering fair housing, spent about 100 hours just writing that section of the housing element.

We did have a consultant, but I took on that responsibility for various reasons. But in the guidelines, HCD had the data sets linked. And so without those data sets, I wouldn't have been able to complete the housing element, so that was very helpful in that respect.

And then recommendations. Reassessing what elements are required versus optional and if certain older state mandates are required. So for example, somebody referred to the lonely noise element. Does the noise element really need to be a required element anymore? Could it be optional?

Could the requirements of the noise element be placed in, say, the housing element in relation to housing needs and in the land use element for non-residential purposes? Update the OPR guidelines so that they're not just a laundry list of everything that we should do or have to do.

But again, make it more open so that we really have that love letter or that that visioning document. CEQA. Housing element, in my opinion, should be exempt from CEQA. Why do we require the housing element to go through? It's a planning document. If projects go through, especially if they're affordable, I think those should be exempt as well. And so really creating additional exemptions for CEQA would be, would be beneficial. Keeping a running track of legislation regarding general plans every year.

So if we had, if I last updated my general plan in 2010, if there was some area I could go and see what legislation impacting general plans happened 2011-12 and so on, that would be helpful as well to keep track. And I'll just end with again, more data, more GIS information, any maps, mapping that would be helpful for local jurisdictions. So again, I appreciate your time. I think we're running up against the clock. So I thank you again.

I really appreciate your time being here and these discussions. I can relate to everything we've talked about because that's what I did as a profession. But something that I think that I can say is when you mentioned the directors coming and going, staff, not being able to keep staff for a long time, the local politics.

That's also something that I have to be mindful and respectful of you not saying that. But it's the local politics, the way that can change overnight because of an election. The way that the community wants to go one way by the elected officials and then suddenly that changes and that just creates even more challenges for staff to be able to follow the general plan that was approved and adopted by previous leadership.

Thank you for your time. Appreciate it. And we've been taking notes. Part of this is for us to learn what the challenges are between rural counties, urban areas, and small large jurisdictions. Appreciate you making the time to be here with us. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

And with that we go to our third panel discussion and final panelists. Panel three is the Oversight of the Governor's Office in Land Use and Climate Innovation. Presenting for the last panel titled Oversight of the Governor's Office in Land Use and Climate Innovation, Ms. Natalie Kuffel, deputy director of land policy for the Governor's Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation, or LCI.

LCI was formerly known as the Office of Planning and Research, has provided guidelines to local governments to help implement the general plan. Ms. Kuffel will provide an overview of LCI jurisdiction and resources for local government when they need help with changes to their general plan. Thank you for being here today. Appreciate your patience. Thank you.

Yes, of course. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for this opportunity to tell you more about our office and the role that we play in land use planning and specifically the general plan. So our duties are outlined in the Government Code Section 65040 in relation to land use and planning.

So we formulate long range goals and policies related to the development and the environment. We also create and adopt the General Plan Guidelines, which we'll be talking more about today. And we also draft the CEQA Guidelines for adoption and promulgation by the Natural Resources Agency.

In addition, we operate the State Clearinghouse, which receives and distributes CEQA documents for review by other state agencies. And finally, we provide assistance to local governments on the topic of land use planning and CEQA implementation. It's important to note that LCI is not vested with any regulatory authority over land use.

Our role is limited to providing guidance and assistance, and in the general plan context, that happens mainly through the General Plan Guidelines. We are required to prepare these under the Government Code, and they cover the preparation and content of all of the mandatory elements of the general plan. And we can also choose to include information about optional elements as well. The General Plan Guidelines were last updated in 2017, and before that they were updated in 2003.

The 2017 General Plan Guidelines updates made many significant changes to the 2003 versions, including statutory checklists for all the mandatory elements, updated and expanded sections on visioning and community engagement, and new sections on optional elements including Healthy Communities, Equitable and Resilient Communities, Economic Development, and Climate Change. Oh yeah. Thank you.

We also provided links to additional online tools and resources and had recommended policies in a cut and paste format with examples of adopted policy language to make it easier for local jurisdictions. We had an Infill Compendium, a Renewable Energy Compendium, and model templates for mitigation of agricultural land conversion.

In addition, we also created a General Plan Mapping Tool to provide that data to local jurisdictions. And thanks to funding from the Legislature, we are in the process of updating the General Plan Guidelines. We began that effort last month, and it will be completed in March of 2027.

LCI is going to comprehensively update not only the General Plan Guidelines but also two related supplements, the Planner's Guide to Specific Plans, and also LCI's 2005 Tribal Consultation Guidelines that were adopted pursuant to SB 18. This newest update will also have an interactive website that will be integrated with LCI's website to make this information easier to access by local planners. We are also funding the general plan search tool that Catherine Brinkley presented on earlier today and are actively thinking about how to incorporate that into this project.

So the 2025-2027 update that we're working on now will make the guidelines more interactive and user friendly, will provide guidance to local jurisdictions on how to embed equity, environmental justice, health, climate, resilience and adaptation into all of the required elements. We will also be updating these guidelines with the housing crisis in mind and all of the recent legislation passed about housing.

We'll provide implementation tools and strategies, best practices, and sample policies for every chapter, and we will include information on new optional elements like the urban design element, historic preservation element, water element, and the natural and working lands element. We will provide guidance on all of the new laws and amended laws and executive orders from 2017 to 2027.

We recognize that there have been extensive efforts in this area, and we want to provide information in a usable format. On that note, for those recent legislation, we've been able to fold the cost of that into this guidelines update and have additional staff capacity at this moment.

But in the summer of 2026, three of our staff will be ending their limited term positions, and we'll run out of funding to do that update. Outside of the General Plan Guidelines, most of our technical assistance comes in the form of technical advisory documents, which interpret state laws and provide guidance to local planners.

LCI recently completed two technical advisories related to general plan safety elements. In 2023, we completed the Fire Hazard Planning TA, which was updated to respond to SB 901 and AB 2911. These two laws required LCI to update our Fire Hazard Planning Technical Advisory to include specific land use strategies to reduce fire risk to buildings, infrastructure, and communities.

This TA includes guidance on conducting wildfire hazard and risk assessments and developing long range policies and programs to address wildfire impacts in the general plan. In addition, in 2023 we also finalized our Wildland Urban Interface, or WUI, planning document.

This guide overviews WUI planning tools like landscape ordinances, fire hazard overlay zones, and recovery ordinances and includes nine best practices and case studies. Currently, we're working on a suite of new technical advisories to address the most common questions that we're receiving.

This includes a technical advisory on SB 1425, which is new legislation that requires all jurisdictions to update their open space elements by 2026 and incorporate equity correlated with the environmental justice element, resilience correlated with the safety element, and rewilding as correlated with the land use element.

This TA will provide local governments with robust guidance on reviewing and updating local open space plans and to further these priorities. We're also working on a downtown and main street revitalization TA in relation to the governor's executive order EO N-2-24 passed last summer on infill housing.

Once completed, this will help local governments navigate the adaptive reuse process implementation and how to leverage funding sources. We're working on an evacuation planning TA that will guide cities and counties in updating their safety element of their general plan pursuant to the evacuation requirements in three recent legislation, pieces of legislation SB 99, AB 747, and AB 1409.

And finally, we are updating or recreating guidance on climate action plans. LCI is currently developing this TA focused on best practice in the preparation and implementation of local climate action plans as they've become more popular as a tool for local climate planning.

It's become clear that more guidance is needed on this topic in terms of how to develop impactful and implementable climate action plans, and so we are working on that now. In terms of reviewing local government's plans and programs, that primarily occurs through our annual progress reports, which are required by the government code.

So every city or county planning agency is required to provide an annual report to their legislative body, to LCI, and to the Housing and Community Development Department, or HCD, on the status of their general plan progress and implementation, and this has to occur by April 1st of every year.

Unlike the housing element APR, the general plan APR does not have a required format, and so we receive a variety of reports based on local circumstances, resources, and constraints. The general plan APR allows us to identify statewide trends in land use decision making and how local planning and development activities relate to statewide planning goals and policies.

APRs may also inform modifications to our general plan guidelines and identify other necessary technical advisory documents. Because of the varied information that we get in our general plan APRs, we also send out an annual planning survey. Thank you. With targeted questions for staff and local planning departments of every jurisdiction across the state.

State the last APR annual planning survey was conducted in the spring and early summer of 2023. The annual planning survey results allow us to gain information about the status of each jurisdiction's planning efforts. And you saw in the agenda today that some of that information came from our annual planning survey.

We actually get a fairly good response rate. 327 of the 539 cities and counties responded responded to the last annual planning survey. Many respondents noted that they were planning to update the housing safety and environmental justice elements of their general plans within the next few years.

They expressed a need for more support in topics such as housing affordability and production, applying for and managing grants, and interpreting and acting on new legislation relative to these areas. This cycles annual planning survey will be released this spring and will be aligned with outreach for that general plan guidelines update that we're working on. Finally, we were asked about whether local governments are reaching out to us and asking for assistance, and the answer is yes.

A lot of the topics are similar to the panel that you just heard in terms of navigating new legislation and any ambiguities in that legislation and dealing with funding constraints and staffing constraints. In terms of specific pieces of legislation, we've received a lot of questions about SB 1425, the changes to the open space element, which is why we're preparing a separate technical advisory on that bill.

We are also continuing to get questions about SB 1000, which added the environmental justice element requirement for certain communities. And also AB 2140, which is about the relationship between the safety element and local hazard mitigation plans.

We answer these questions via email for the most part, and then when necessary, prepare technical advisories. We are also working to become a better clearinghouse for data. As you heard, there is need for that, and we think that is a role that we can help fill. Thank you very much.

Thank you. It seems that the common challenge continues to be staffing and the lack of resources, funding for what's needed. So thank you for your time. Thank you for being patient, and I appreciate you being here with us today. With that, we're going to open it to public comment if any members of the public want to comment. We are, don't see anybody. So with that, I think it was very useful and informative panel discussions, all three of them. We are going to adjourn this session, and thanks for being here. Appreciate it. Thank you.