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CGF ADVOCATES
The Tip of the Iceberg
by Lennie Roberts
As the CGF Advocates for San Mateo and Santa Clara County, Brian Schmidt and I spend lots of time in public meet-ings, speaking up to protect the natural environment and promote good land-use planning principles.
But did you ever consider that our public jobs are a bit like the proverbial tip of the iceberg? For every hour we spend in a public meeting, we spend many tens of hours, gathering information, analyzing staff reports, and networking with other environmental organizations, like-minded citizens, and public officials.
The importance of Task Forces and Committees
We have discovered we can be more effective in furthering CGF’s mission by serving on a wide variety of Task Forces and Committees.
Gateway 2020 Highway 101 / Dumbarton Corridor Study
One example is the current planning being done by trans-portation planners called the Gateway 2020 — Highway 101 and Dumbarton Bridge Corridor study. This is a multi-agency effort, involving the cities between Mountain View and Redwood City, as well as Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. The task is to find ways to relieve congestion in this already badly congested area. Impacts to the communities — particularly Palo Alto and East Palo — need to be minimized. Some of the alternatives might have included building freeways, on-and-off-ramps, or frontage roads out in the Bay. My thirty years of experience with Devil’s Slide taught me one compelling lesson — highway and traffic engineers will not necessarily consider environmental issues before they start considering the variety of alternatives.
Keeping Gateway 2020 “on track”
I volunteered to join the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) — composed primarily of City, County, and State public works people. One other non-agency person, Jim Bigelow, who represents business in the Menlo Park area, is also on the TAC — a Policy Advisory Committee (PAC) composed of elected officials that holds separate, but parallel, meetings. As a result of sharing the pitfalls of going down the “wrong road,” the alternatives TAC is considering will stay out of the Bay. Good thing too, as Caltrans found out when it was trying to build a flyover along the East Shore of the Bay a few years ago. Caltrans’ encounter with the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) left them bruised, and a bit wiser.
As the example of the Corridor study’s TAC shows, a lot of background work guides the Advocates’ participation in individual committees. The accompanying article, “A Committee Snapshot,” summarizes the committees Brian serves on in Santa Clara County.
Published October 2006 in Green Footnotes.
Page last updated October 30, 2006.
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