RAFT
Regional Alliance For Transit
Founded 1992

1000 Union Street, Suite 207
San Francisco, California 94133
Telephone: 415 440–6895
Email: raft@MTCwatch.com

October 30, 2008

Senator Darrell Steinberg
Chairman, Committee on Natural Resources and Water
California State Senate
State Capitol
Sacramento, CA 95814

Re: California Attorney General’s letter on global warming and transportation

Dear Chairman Steinberg:

We wrote to you in August (a copy is enclosed) about the San Francisco Bay Area’s Regional Transportation Planning Agency/Metropolitan Planning Organization (MTC) and its current work on a $223 billion long range transportation plan. RAFT is troubled that the plan does not make a meaningful contribution toward the 25% reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2020 required by California’s greenhouse gas law, AB 32. A particular sticking point is that the present planning work incorporates, with no updated review, a large set of not–yet–built projects which were approved in the much laxer environmental situation before AB 32, but would not pass muster now.

Attorney General Edmund G. Brown, Jr. has now raised these issues squarely and with careful legal consideration in a forceful October 1 letter to MTC. He writes anticipating the transportation plan’s upcoming Environmental Impact Report.

Enclosed is a copy of the Attorney General’s letter. We commend it to your attention, and request that you support it in a communication to the MTC. The MTC needs to hear that perpetuating “business as usual” is not the way to reduce our oil imports nor our global warming problem.

MTC is able to change its plan and can address climate change concretely, not just verbally. By doing so, it can save public funds, as well as invest quickly in more cost effective projects than those it now intends to carry forward.

Sincerely,

Peter Lydon
for RAFT