I am pleased to announce that I recently qualified for certification as a LEED Accredited Professional and to use the designation "LEED-AP".
After nearly 30 years as a lawyer and planner, the last thing I really needed was more letters after my name - M.C.R.P (Master of City & Regional Planning), J.D. (Juris Doctor), A.I.C.P (American Institute of Certified Planners) and now LEED-AP to boot. The reason I joined the United States Green Building Council (USGBC), took the extra courses and studied for the exam is not to add to the alphabet soup, but to underscore my long-standing commitment to energy-efficient and environmentally-conscious design.
The USGBC is a gathering place for all of the professionals involved with building and development who want to establish and continue to evolve the state of the art of sustainable development. USGBC created the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating systems for new construction and renovation of commercial (office, retail, commercial interiors, core and shell, mid & high rise residential), health care, schools, homes and neighborhoods. The rating systems extend past construction or renovation to the operations & maintenance phases, so that the full potential environmental and economic benefit of the design and systems of the buildings is actually realized.
On an internet networking site for planners, a young planner asked whether the private sector values the AICP (American Institute of Certified Planners) credential. Here is my reply:
When I trained in the joint degree program at Rutgers (M.C.R.P. / J.D.) almost 30 years ago, I became a Charter member of APA, when ASPO merged with AIP. New Jersey was the only state with a license for planners, the with the unfortunate initials, "P.P." Since much of my subsequent work experience was as a lawyer, it took a sojourn away from law before I had the planning practice experience necessary to apply for the AICP credential.
The problem now is the same as recognized then. There is no standard route to becoming a professional planner. Economists, civil engineers, English majors, geographers, political science majors, architects, surveyors, the mayor's nephew, even lawyers, all become planners. Don't get me wrong. The diversity of perspectives is one of the professions' greatest strengths. APA and AICP establish a common framework and understanding with which the diversity of those who become planners must familiarize themselves. A statement of principles and ethical norms binds us, however loosely, together. APA and AICP reflect a commitment to professionalism even if "Any Idiot Can Plan".
In the article recently published in the California Real Property Journal, Vol. 26 No. 4, (January 2009) I explain the problem of governance that combating global warming through more efficient land use and development practices poses for California. The California Constitution directly establishes the police power of cities and counties, and state statutes enshrines the principle of local control for all land use, planning and zoning issues. The California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (better known by its bill number, AB 32) commits the state to reducing greenhouse gas emission levels equivalent to those as they existed in 1990 - a reduction of roughly 30% from the average in 2004-2006 -- by the year 2020. This puts local control of land use on a collision course with centralized state command & control regulatory regime that AB 32 creates to achieve the greenhouse gas reduction mandate.
AB 32 assigns the principle responsibility for developing an overall plan to accomplish the GhG reduction goal to the California Air Resources Board (CARB). CARB has the authority to adopt regulations needed to meet it, and to impose fines and/or injunctions or other penalties for failure to comply. CARB is also to recommend measures to further reduce emissions by another 60- 80% by 2050, in line with the Kyoto Protocol and recommended by the vast majority of climate scientists as necessary to keep human induced climate change from spiraling out of control and causing hugely disruptive changes in the earth's climate and sea levels.
CARB's Scoping Plan adopted in December 2008 identifies that the transportation sector is the biggest contributor of GhG emissions, with autos and light trucks being the greatest share, accounting for roughly 28% of all emission sources in the state. CARB's Scoping Plan relies primarily on much improved vehicle emissions standards (requiring a waiver from the U.S. EPA) and alternative low-carbon fuel requirements to meet the 2020 challenge. The longer range problem focuses attention on the contribution to emissions in the transportation sector that results from California's predominate pattern of auto-centric sprawl development.
Thresholds of Significance for greenhouse gas emissions retain local discretion in proposed SB 97 CEQA Guidelines revisions
First published in California Planning & Development Report, January 9, 2008
The Governor’s Office of Planning & Research (OPR) has released a draft of the new CEQA Guidelines for assessing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming impacts of and on projects as mandated by SB 97 (Public Resources Code § 21083.05).
To: California Air Resources Board
Subject: Comments on Scoping Plan - Regional Transportation Target
Submitted online on December 2, 2008
National Business Institute is offering "Climate Change: Local Government Response" on December 12, 2008 at the Sheraton Grand Sacramento Hotel, 1230 J Street in Sacramento.
The faculty for this seminar are land use and environmental attorneys Timothy D. Crimin of Meyers Nave, Eric W. Davis of Somach, Simmons & Dunn and Joel Ellinwood, AICP Lawyer-Planner. Topics include Planning, Land Use and Climate Change; Local Government Operations and Initiatives and CEQA and Climate Change. You will hear about the latest developments in this rapidly evolving field including a review of the AB 32 CARB Scoping Plan, SB 375 Regional transportation, land use, housing and greenhouse gas reduction coordinated planning, and the status of revisions to the CEQA Guidelines mandated by SB 97.
Registration for this timely seminar is at http://www.nbi-sems.com. For more information, call NBI at 800-930-6182
[first published in California Planning & Development Report on October 30, 2008]
The old joke about the man on the street who asked a scientist for the time and instead got a two-hour lecture about how to build a watch (and the poor fellow never did find out what time it was) was played out again in Sacramento this week when the California Air Resources Board staff released its "Preliminary Draft Staff Proposal Recommended Approaches for Setting Interim Significance Thresholds for Greenhouse Gases" on Friday and presented it in a workshop on Monday. The twenty-page document leaves most of the spaces for benchmark numbers blank, while proposing an elaborate process amounting to a new categorical exemption with CARB squarely at the controls.
Senate Bill 97 (Public Resources Code, § 21083.05), assigned the Governor's Office of Planning and Research (OPR) the task of revising the CEQA Guidelines by June 1, 2009 to address the conundrum for planners posed by the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32) in performing environmental review of projects under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Lawsuits and EIR comment letters filed by Attorney General Jerry Brown, as well as lawsuits by environmental groups, raised the stakes while uncertainty remains about many critical questions about how the substantive limits set by AB 32 for GhG emissions to be achieved by 2020 should be analyzed under CEQA's long-established procedures and standards.
When I delivered the three absentee ballots from my household to my poling place on Tuesday morning, November 4, I told the election workers I was from Chicago and so I was following the adage, "vote early and often." At first they weren't sure whether to laugh or call the cops.
Barack Obama's choice for his chief of staff of fellow Chicagoan, Congressman Rahm Emmanuel, known for his tough, competitive, but smart style, reminds me that for good or ill, all the presidents in my memory have relied upon an inner circle of aides from their region -- people they knew or knew about and felt they could trust. Kennedy had his Ivy Leaguers and large family, Johnson his Texans, Nixon and Reagan their Orange County crews, Jimmy Carter -- alas, Ham Jordan and Bert Lance, Bush 41 establishment conservatives and Bush 43 Texans and neocons. The Clintons drew both from their Ivy education and Arkansan experience, which may account for their many paradoxical qualities. The political culture of the president's people is rooted in their place of origin, and shapes the political culture of the nation for the term of that presidency.
I spent the Thursday afternoon after the election at a meeting of Northern California homebuilders listening to presentations on the economic outlook for the coming year. The CEO of a large national homebuilding company and one of the most highly regarded locally based builders both acknowledged that green building, infill development and other more sustainable practices are, "the right thing to do." They made references to being stunned reading Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded, and one joked that their 11-year old was reading An Inconvenient Truth and they didn't snatch it away and burn it. Four years ago the same group might have burned Al Gore in effigy.
The builders on the panel struggled with the fact that consumers balked at paying for solar options, rued lagging sales of projects with enhanced green features that have higher costs and prices. A vision of future homes with zero net energy demand was articulated, if somewhat wistfully. They are looking for a way to solve these problems and not make sustainability bear a market penalty. They look forward to higher volumes of solar and other green technology resulting from broader acceptance to bring down costs. They want acknowledgment that today's building codes bring new development to market at a fraction of the energy consumption of homes built before 1990, and that rates of new construction since the 1970s, even in the boom years of the housing bubble, amount to only about 1% annual addition to the existing housing stock, while the state's population continues to increase at significantly higher rates. They fear mandates to place the burden of past sins in energy-profligate planning and development patterns on future projects will make homes even more unaffordable to Californians in comparison to most of the rest of the nation, when expending less resources on retrofitting older homes will bring much greater efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction than trying to wring the last ounce of carbon out of new construction.
These are accepted as challenges and not dismissed as barriers. I asked myself if government regulators and environmentalists used to demonizing developers as despoilers of the earth are capable of hearing this radical shift in tone and be equally willing to accept the challenge of forging practical, cost-effective solutions to housing Californians while fighting global warming? I didn't want to spoil the moment by saying aloud what echoed in my head, "Yes, we can."
Seven hundred billion dollars, the price tag for the congressionally-approved financial market bailout, is an awful lot of money. It's over $2,000.00 for every single man, woman and child living in the United States. Can there really be that much money loaned to people on their homes who can't pay it back? In fact, there isn't - not even close.
"Sub-prime" mortgages have become the media shorthand for the cause of the crisis. The blame ends up placed on the greed or stupidity of home borrowers living beyond their means. To some, foreclosure is just the tough-love consequence for those who haven't learned to mind their money. It is also perceived as an "opportunity" by the untold number of acolytes of the foreclosure investment seminar industry. You've seen the info-mercials for these "get rich quick, no-money down, I'm teaching you my secret method" hypes on TV. Rescuing unqualified borrowers from foreclosure is against the laws of nature (or at least the capitalist nature) and deprives these "investors" of the red meat on which they think they can thrive. The image of bad mortgages as the root cause spreads the blame to lots of poor folks or is as diffuse as the American materialist culture - "we're just all responsible," so goes the line. Main Street and Wall Street are joined at the hip, tisk, tisk.
However, sub-prime mortgages are only the very tip of the iceberg that sunk the Titanic-ly reckless unregulated financial markets first enabled during the Clinton administration, and an article of faith for former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the Bush presidency. As a series recent articles in the New York Times ("The Reckoning: Taking a Hard Look at the Greenspan years, October 10, 2008) points out, such complicated mechanisms as "credit-default swaps" and other "derivatives" grew exponentially from $106 Trillion in 2002 to over $531 Trillion in 2008. By comparison, As of Dec. 31, 2007, NYSE Euronext's nearly 4,000 listed companies represent a combined $30.5 trillion in total global market capitalization. American commercial multi-family mortgage debt is a total of about $3.4 trillion. The total of all single-family home mortgage debt in the U.S. is pegged at $10 to 14 trillion. In other words, the unregulated market in derivitives is over 17 times the value of all of the equity of all the companies traded on the NY Stock Exchange and over 36 times the total of all mortgage debt. Now that's a lot of money - if it were real money instead of a kind of self-hypnotic monopoly money.
