Connecting the Dots ~ Fred Allebach

Fred Allebach Fred Allebach is a member of the City of Sonoma’s Community Services and Environmental Commission, and an Advisory Committee member of the Sonoma Valley Groundwater Sustainability Agency. Fred is a member of Sonoma Overlook Trail Stewards, as well as Sonoma Valley Housing Group and Transition Sonoma Valley.

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A Movement to Favor Residents over Tourism?

Posted on December 31, 2016 by Fred Allebach

visitors_bureau
There is a movement afoot to shift Sonoma’s primary emphasis from no-holds-barred tourism to residential quality of life. One place this can start is being clear what Planning Commission hearings cover and do not cover.

The Planning Commission, when vetting downtown hotel projects, always gets a big economic benefits presentation as part of the presentation. Yet, the charter of the Planning Commission has nothing to do with assessing how much money a project will make. Financial arguments and suppositions of costs and benefits are irrelevant to what the Planning Commission decides, and irrelevant to a Californian Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and Environmental Impact Report (EIR) process.

As well, it is irregular for city staff to cite economic benefits as part of an EIR justification for a project. Economic rewards are not an environmental impact. Yet developers insist on showing economic benefits as part of their presentation. In the benefits presentation, developers magically frame their personal gains as a public service. This fits the invisible hand/ free market meme: aggregate effects of individual greed make a collective public good.

Invisible hand, trickle down, these are Pharaonic and Divine Right type of rationales. Let’s not get fooled again.

Yet, ideology seems to work its way into city business. It is said, nationally, liberals were in their own bubble, and were beaten in the presidential race for losing touch with the working class. For the Bay Area liberal investor class, trickle-down economics is another turned-in-on-itself ideological bubble, another example of having lost touch with a large group of workforce citizens. For all the “rising tide” talk, the benefits never come, and the 1%, liberal or conservative, keeps running off with all the wealth.

The usual stealth economic case made in front of the Planning Commission is to strike fear of insolvency. The city’s, and school district’s finances are framed as being in dire need. And such and such hotel project will bring in a great of amount of tax money for the city. And there will be multiplier effects; and all the benefits will trickle down. And police and fire will be funded, and everyone will be safe and live happily ever after.

The only trouble is, trickle down is a fraud; it doesn’t work, and it hasn’t worked. This is a big reason why the Bay Area, nominally liberal, has serious problems with income inequality. Why should the Planning Commission fall for the same tired voodoo economics arguments that in the end only increase the wealth of already rich investors? The city is already doing great, school bond passed, ½ cent tax passed.  Adding more of the same luxury tourist economic drivers will just hasten Sonoma turning into Tiburon, more than it will meet any goals to make the town more resident friendly for a diverse demographic.

The General Plan is an applicable Planning Commission document, and I don’t think anywhere in there it says a goal is to turn Sonoma into Tiburon. No, it actually says that those who work here should be able to live and shop here.

If the working class trickles out of town for low hospitality sector wages, super high rents, and inflated prices of everything, that is not resident friendly. But alas, none of this should be part of a Planning Commission EIR hearing anyway. Pushback is called for however, if this economic benefit stuff keeps popping up. An EIR, if passed, lays a groundwork of environmental  facts that justify a project as OK, and contingent on this, the whole trickle down artifice appears to get justified as well. That funny math should not apply: an EIR does not sanction any economic theory.

If an economic case is to be made for large project benefits, this needs to be vetted in a separate, specific economic analysis format, by a neutral consultant, that looks at a full slate of costs and benefits. Looking at a full slate of costs and benefits is what happens when actual sustainability is the goal. Developers typically, magically, cite no costs at all. If there are no costs to a luxury hospitality economy, nested in an already unequal Bay Area economy, then where are all the good jobs to pay for the high rent and food prices?

A good example of an economic cost never cited: the social cost of a ton of carbon emissions. “The SC-CO2 is a measure, in dollars, of the long-term damage done by a ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in a given year.” (EPA) This cost is currently  @$40 per ton or more. In the Bay Area, wealthy residents who partake in the wine tourism economy, use more than twice the national average of carbon per capita per year. The Bay Area is green alright, money green.

For Sonoma to be sustainable, that is to say, to keep its carbon emissions down, and keep a resident-friendly demographic of young people, seniors, Latinos, minorities, working class, and middle class; these people need to be able to afford to live and work here, and get jobs that pay enough to stay and shop local. Local shopping has to meet actual population needs and not end up as a tide of more and more luxury tourist boutiques and venues.

Is there a movement afoot to shift Sonoma’s primary emphasis from no-holes-barred tourism to residential quality of life? Do we have enough tourism already and not need any more? Will this movement address income inequality and high prices? Will a failure of Bay Area liberal to address income inequality result in the rise of a regional Trump?

If so, this shifting movement needs to start with a serious examination of the roles of the Tourism Improvement District (TID) and the Visitor’s Bureau (VB), and their impact on the Valley’s environment society and economy.

A watchful eye also needs be kept on a regional nuclear arms race of speculative tourist investment unfolding all around. Cases in point: Koch Bros. in Napa Valley, and the huge Tolay Springs tourist project planned for the Sears Point area.

This will be a great challenge for the city council, the new city manager, city commissions, and citizens. The Valley’s most powerful economic forces are aligned with stoking the tourist bonanza fires more and more. For them, enough is always more. Full social, environmental, and economic costs have to be put in the table. Actual sustainability needs to be defined and worked with.

If economic benefits arguments are to be made for big hotel projects, the city Planning Commission is not the proper venue. And when an economic benefit argument is made, an explanation should be required as to why the working class is increasingly disenfranchised, and why a few individual’s bank accounts appear to be the main beneficiaries. Let’s see the tax returns disclosed. To confirm or deny developer claims of economic benefit, the critical problems are to one, steer the conversation into a triple bottom line analysis framework, and two, in choosing a neutral consultant that won’t simply rubber stamp the big money biases.

In an ideologically partitioned world, maybe dual economic-only and sustainability-based consultant analyses should be required, and then the public, commissioners, and council, can debate the points and facts of the dueling experts. In this way, clear choices as to alternate futures can be laid out, understood, and taken with eyes open.

 

 



2 thoughts on “A Movement to Favor Residents over Tourism?

  1. Clear and thorough. Why do so many get snowed by the ‘economic benefit’ arguments?

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