In January 2007, the chairmanship of the SACOG Board of Directors will pass from Sacramento Mayor Heather Fargo to El Dorado County Supervisor Rusty Dupray.
The new year is always an appropriate time to step back from the fast-paced daily routine and take a big picture view of where we've been and where we're going. At SACOG, the year that's now in our rearview mirror was largely a happy one. The 31-member board of local elected officials, representing six counties and 22 cities, has continued to build on our commitment to work together and find common ground on the difficult issues. We know this is how to make our choir of 31 have the sound and power of a group several times that size and do what needs to be done.
We raised our already high bar of citizen engagement in our planning processes — for the first time in the process of developing our longrange Metropolitan Transportation Plan for 2035, we held interactive citizen planner workshops, 16 during the spring attended by 1,800 citizens, and eight simultaneous workshops in November with 1,500 participants.
We continued implementation of our Blueprint smart growth land use strategy.
We "waded" in to the critical issue of flood management and land use, unanimously agreeing on a policy of how best to protect the safety of our citizens as future land use decisions are made, working with SAFCA and other local agencies. Support for the Greenprint — a plan for cities and counties on how to develop successful urban forest initiatives — continued to grow.
We re-established "conformity" with federal air quality regulations, enabling us to continue to implement a full slate of transportation projects. This helped us to continue to be the top performing region in the state in delivering transportation projects — even in a tough funding climate, we continued to build an impressive array of projects for bicyclists, pedestrians, transit and automobile riders.
Looking ahead to 2007, SACOG's biggest issue will be the adoption of the new Metropolitan Transportation Plan (MTP). This will occur in June, and will prioritize how $36 billion in federal, state and local transportation funds will be spent most effectively between now and 2035. The SACOG Board supported efforts to grow the region's clean energy industries and reduce greenhouse gases through the initiative of Partnership for Prosperity.
Early indications from both citizen input as well as our technical work give us high hopes that a combination of changing land use patterns and smart transportation investments will result in a promising transportation future for our region's citizens. Together we are developing an MTP to reduce the time people must devote to daily travel; shortening auto trips; growing the number of trips people take on transit, on foot or on a bicycle; and cleaning our air.
We are confident that this new MTP will again demonstrate the power of working together to address our common challenges.
Regional Report for December 2006 - January 2007 (text-only version)
Sacramento Area Council of Governments