(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 545: The Powerless Brokers

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined once again by Colin Parent of Circulate San Diego to discuss a new report entitled The Powerless Brokers: Why California Can’t Build Transit. We talk about permitting delays and reforms, public sector capacity, and giving transit authorities more authority.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Jeff Wood: Colin Parent, welcome back to the Talking Headways podcast.

Colin Parent: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jeff.

Jeff Wood:Thanks for being back. Before we get started, can you tell folks who may not know you from episodes 2 33 and four 18, a little bit about yourself.

Colin Parent: Yeah. My name’s Colin Parent. I’m the CEO and General Counsel at Circulate San Diego, and we’re a nonprofit based in the San Diego area. We do a lot of research and advocacy around public transit, safe streets, and sustainable growth. That’s awesome.

Jeff Wood: And folks, if you want more background, you can definitely go back and listen to those episodes.

I highly recommend it. There’s some good stuff back there. But also since we last chatted, you ran for office. What was that experience like? What did you learn from that?

Colin Parent: Yeah, so I had served for two full terms on the La Mesa City Council. La Mesa’s, a city of about 60,000 people, about 10 miles east of downtown San Diego.

And last year I ran for the [00:03:00] state assembly and did not succeed, but definitely got to meet a ton of people in the area that I otherwise wouldn’t get to meet. Got to learn a lot about a lot of the issues that are happening in Sacramento outside of the areas where I already have some experience and expertise.

And so I definitely feel like I have a broader sense of how things work and I, and I’m also. Very glad to not be on the ballot this year and, and being able to enjoy a little more time for other things.

Jeff Wood: Oh, yeah. I’m sure it’s a busy existence. Absolutely. What did you learn the most from people that you talked to about transportation and urban policy Generally?

Colin Parent: Yeah. You know, I learned a lot about that, especially in my first campaign in 2016. I was going door to door a lot. I knocked on 5,000 doors in four months. That’s just like a ton of these one-on-one conversations. And I started out, you know, I’m, what I do for my day job is I’m a transit advocate. And a lot of the, a lot of the responses I got were.

Yeah, the trolley boy, that sure does get in the way of me as a motorist, and so it was a, it was [00:04:00] a good reminder that, you know, just because transit is very important to a lot of people, it’s very important to me. It’s very important in the work that I do in jurisdictions, like in the San Diego area, it’s about 5% of commuters rely on transit to get around, and so the vast majority of people who interact with public transit do it as a motorist.

And transit can actually get in the way, or they could feel like it’s getting in the way to folks. And of course, that doesn’t mean that we don’t support and promote public transit, but I think it’s really important. This is something I try to impart to my colleagues at Circulate and to other advocates, is to really go into those conversations with that understanding.

And don’t just assume that everyone that you’re talking to has the same priority of values and policy preferences that you do. And I think it has been helpful for me in my advocacy role. So when we’re, we’re promoting public transit, we’re not saying, Hey, what we’re trying to do is get people out of their cars and put them into transit.

Instead, what we say is we want to give people real choices so that they can choose to do that if they want. And you know, it’s the same basic [00:05:00] idea, but it’s also, it accounts for the fact that a lot of people, wouldn’t take positively to this idea that, that someone’s trying to change their mode share, but giving them a choice is different.

Jeff Wood: Do you have the discussion with them about like using it once in a while? Maybe like to go to like a baseball game or like a college football game or a soccer game or something along those lines where it’s like a trip that they would usually make in a car, but they know that it’s gonna be super crowded in the parking lot, so maybe this is a better way to do it.

And then it gets some kind of understanding that, hey, this is something I can do.

Colin Parent: Oh yeah, absolutely. But I think that fits into that choice frame too. Mm-hmm. Right? It’s that we wanna make sure that you can have a choice to be able to take it, to go to the Padres game. You wanna be able to have the choice to be able to take it to a concert.

And that’s different than what you hear from a lot of people in the transportation and advocacy space. And the professionals who will say that, like what they’re trying to do is promote share and to, and to get people out of their cars and that. That, like, that sounds very appealing to people like you and me and to all of your listeners probably.

That’s just not everybody. Mm-hmm. And I think it’s just, it helped temper my approach to these sorts of things so [00:06:00] that we could communicate in a way, not not to change what our policy goals were or what we’re advocating for, but to do it in a way that can be internalized, can be heard by folks who may not already agree with us.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, San Diego Comic-Con just finished up. I was thinking about the last few times I’ve been to the convention center and all I was doing was taking pictures of the trolley outside instead of worrying about what was going on inside. Yeah, absolutely. So I’m, I’m that nerd. Right. So, uh, to maybe think about things a little differently sometimes you guys have a report out called The Powerless Brokers, and I’m wondering what made you all put that out and put something like this together?

Colin Parent: So we’ve been kind of noodling on how to do a report about transit costs for a while. And you know, a number of years ago I had a colleague who wanted us to write something about that and my kind of answer to them was, it’s just too big for us, a small nonprofit based in San Diego to really say something about it.

You know, there’s folks like the Marin Center Transit Cost Project doing these big multi-year long studies with, you know, [00:07:00] millions of dollars in budget or, or whatever they have. And so I just wasn’t sure that we could say something about it usefully. But then we, you know, over time we kind of went back and forth about some of this.

We got some resources put together and we ended up narrowing on a piece of the total transit costs, which is about the third party permitting. Which is, honestly maybe not, it’s probably not the biggest cost driver compared to some of the other things, but it is an important one and one that has really been under examined in this public dialogue.

And then concurrently there’s been some permitting reform work in the state legislature. There’s a big bill, senate bill 4, 4 5 from Scott Wiener that’s intended to do some permitting reform. And so we just thought this was a good time to weigh in on this in an area where we could carve off something that we could actually do a good job about.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, you mentioned in in there the other white whales, I call them station size environmental review. The transit cost project does a lot of looking at those types of things. But this report, like you said, it discusses primarily pre-construction permitting [00:08:00] processes. And so I was actually interested in this because.

I felt like the other topics get a lot of play in the news. It’s very popular to talk about construction costs when you’re talking about transit projects. Obviously we’ve had this whole rigmarole going on with the Federal Transit Administration, the FRA and the Trump administration for a high-speed rail, and so there’s just like a whole bunch of stuff going on there, but then you dive down into something very particular and I really appreciated that.

So the report is actually a playoff, the Power Broker and Robert Caro’s writing about Robert Moses. And I’ve also just been seeing a bit of a reassessment of that time period a little bit lately and the pendulum swing that’s happened. I’m wondering if you talk a little bit about why you kind of modeled the thinking or at least.

Where the starting off point is, that kind of power broker mindset, the idea that one person can do so much to, you know, change a region or a city or a transportation project, and why That was kind of like your jumping off point.

Colin Parent: You know, it’s, it’s interesting, it, it actually wasn’t our jumping off point.

We were writing about this subject. We had done some outlines and [00:09:00] some internal dialogue, done a fair amount of research around it, and the name kind of came like midway through, but it was from a couple of reasons. I mean, part of it was that there has been that reexamination, right? You know, mark Dunkelman’s book talks about Moses a lot, abundance talks about.

Moses and Moses style planning a lot, and there’s sort of this growing understanding that some of the rules that we’ve put in place to counter the abuses of Robert Moses and Robert Moses style planning have maybe gone too far in the other direction. And so there’s that. But also relatedly it’s that last year was the 50 year anniversary of the power broker, so there was a ton of conversation around the power broker as a book and also a ton of conversation about why.

Robert Moses was bad and that it was good that we, you know, addressed and stopped some of those sorts of things. So there was just a lot of that in the air, right? Yeah. In the zeitgeist. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, and I think, you know, a good chunk of our staff at Circulate listened to the 99% Invisible podcast about the power [00:10:00] broker.

So it’s just very much top of mind. And then kind of the reason that we came up with the title was that I was talking with one of my colleagues, we were doing some of the research on it. It was trying to get narrowed down like, what are we, what can we really say about this? What’s really the problem here?

This is a little back and forth. I think some people on our team was a little hesitant to, to just really say it, but what’s problem here is just that the transit authorities don’t have power. That’s the problem. And it’s the inverse of what Robert Moses had. Robert Moses had a lot of power and it was unchecked and there was no accountability.

And then we’ve fast forward to where we are today and transit authorities that we asked to build things just don’t have any power to do them. And so it just seemed like, and you know, also the other parallel being, you know, like Robert Moses refused to build transit. He built a bunch of highways that separated communities.

We recognized that was not the right thing. Now we have transit authorities that are tasked to build transit to stitch communities together, but they don’t have the same, they have the opposite, uh, level of [00:11:00] authority that he did. So it just, it just made a lot of sense. The other important thing, Jeff, is that if we wrote a report titled Third Party Pre-Construction Transit Permitting, I don’t know that anyone would wanna read it.

I know. So we thought, we thought we would jazz it up a little bit with a fun name.

Jeff Wood: That’s usually how it goes. I remember trying to figure out report titles and find pictures for reports and stuff that we did when I was at Reconnecting America and it always a struggle to find something with people in it.

You know, people take pictures of transit projects and they like to, uh, take pictures of the transit, but then there’s no people or the architects. Like to take a picture of the architecture without people and so that doesn’t work very well. And so, you know, you have to appeal to people, right? Absolutely.

When you’re trying to write these reports, I do wanna think about the history a little bit more about, you know, going from Moses to now, because I think it’s really interesting that this discussion has popped up again. Specifically, like we had Yoni Applebaum on the show to talk about his book Stuck and in that book he talks a little bit about how there was kind of this, I guess, reevaluating some of the kind of [00:12:00] progressive reformers after the New Deal and after Moses, which were, were like Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader and others who started the pendulum swing, kind of the other way, from two powerful, centralized government to almost powerlessness, which you were talking about.

What the transit agencies are dealing with now. And so I’m interested in that kind of evolution as well because I think that tells an important part of the story of how we got to where we are today and how we can like start to think about how to stitch it back together from, you know, state capacity and everything else that goes along with that.

Colin Parent: Those are definitely themes in the report and stuff that we addressed. You know, really right at the top. I really liked in, um, why Nothing works. Mark Dunkelman describes this concept saying that there’s two competing progressive policy impulses. One is Hamiltonian, and that’s the idea that we’re, we wanna centralize authority, give strong power to the state to do important valuable things for the public.

And then there’s also this alternative, but also progressive impulse, which is Jeffersonian. Which is to disaggregate power and to make sure that no one [00:13:00] has too much power to avoid abuse. And the power broker from Robert Caro looks at Robert Moses and says, this is an example of, of Hamiltonian central power being consolidated.

And the solution to that is we need to disaggregate that in the more Jeffersonian way. And what Dunkelman argues is that both of these impulses are good and valuable, but they need to be balanced. In the case of Robert Moses, they were unbalanced. And now we’ve gotten to a situation where to counter that we’ve gone so far in the other direction that now we’re unbalanced in the Jeffersonian disaggregated way.

And so what we are in the report saying, yeah, listen, that’s true. We agree, and so we do need to. Pivot a little bit back to the Hamiltonian direction. Not all the way, we’re not saying that we need to like appoint someone in California to just do all the transit without any, any oversight. That’s not what we’re saying.

But to recognize that we’re, that we’re out of balance and that we need to bring that back [00:14:00] into balance. And I think that’s a core part of some of the challenges that we have for getting the abundant public goods and services that we should expect in transit being a, among them.

Jeff Wood: So we can kind of sketch this out in people’s minds.

What does a building process for transit look like and what are some of the barriers that pop up when we’re going through that process? And some of the barriers, meaning like some of the jurisdictions, the agencies, construction process, et cetera, et cetera.

Colin Parent: Yeah, so we included kind of a short summary of how a project gets from conception to the permitting stage.

And you know, it’s just public transit agencies. Uh, in California they’re almost always elected officials. Sometimes they’re directly elected. Sometimes there are representatives of local jurisdictions. They decide on a, a set of projects. Sometimes the voters decide on the set of projects through ballot measures.

Then when they decide they’re gonna go ahead for them, they either do some internal planning or they hire some engineers to help them come up with a concept of the project. They go and do environmental analysis, uh, CEQA, California Environmental Quality Act, or the National Environmental Policy Act [00:15:00] and do all that.

Then they go and get funding, oftentimes from grants, from state and federal grants. And then they get that all together. Their board of directors says, okay, great. We’ve got it. We’re gonna approve the project. We’re gonna issue a request for proposals. We’re gonna hire a construction firm, and then now we’re gonna go ahead and build.

And I think in the public’s imagination, it’s like, okay, well they’ve done all that stuff. It’s a whole bunch of public process involved in that, right? All being decided by elected officials. Environmental review, anyone who wants to sue on it, had an opportunity to do that. Now we’ve settled all those things.

Now it’s time to bill. But that’s actually not. How it works. So you do all that stuff and then the transit agency says, okay, now we’re ready to go. Uh, build. Now they have to go through this whole new set of processes where they have to ask for permission to build from all the different agencies and local governments and utility districts through which they wanna build that transit.

And so that may mean a right of way permit. So if a bus line wants to run across [00:16:00] Caltrans right of way on the, the state highway system, they gotta apply for a permit for that. They wanna build a station in the city that it’s running in. They gotta get a permit from that. If they wanna do any amount of construction, they have to do a bunch of roadway closure permits and noise permits and all these other things.

And there’s just an enormous amount of that kind of activity. And it’s not that those things are necessarily bad, like those things should be thought through, but because it’s one agency applying for this from another agency, it can create a ton of opportunities for, you know, just bureaucratic delay, but also sometimes bad faith delay too, where you’ll have a permitting agency who will hold up a project to extract something from the transit agency and drive up costs and all of that.

Jeff Wood: The exaction and extraction part is particularly frustrating. You have a couple of case studies in the report that talk about this specifically. I’m wondering if you’d tell me a little bit about those.

Colin Parent: Yeah, so the most salient examples are around California high-speed rail. And so high-speed rail. You know, they’re [00:17:00] conceptualizing it as a, you know, a hundred billion dollar project.

Uh, it’s gonna stretch, you know, all across California. And there’s a state agency that’s in charge of building it. But if they want to pass through any of these small cities in the central California, they have to ask for all sorts of permissions. And one of the real stark. Startling things is that you have city managers, county executives, those sorts of, you know, leaders in these jurisdictions being incredibly transparent about how they are shaking down HighSpeed Rail to get HighSpeed rail to pay for some infrastructure improvements that are really unrelated to the operation of high-speed rate.

There’s a variety of, and just like incredible quotes from some of these, the city managers who are saying it. There’s one example actually in the office of Inspector General. For the high speed rail report that talk about how there is a, uh, there’s this one area where the high-speed rail was planning to build some bridges over their route so that car traffic could move forward.

And as a [00:18:00] condition to do that, they also had to build. Bridges over an adjacent rail route that had nothing to do with high-speed rail. It’s just completely crazy. An incredible expense that all of us in California are paying for and just to, to the benefit of some small jurisdiction in Central California who probably doesn’t want that project to happen anyway.

And that’s just a pretty stark example of how this mismatch between negotiating power between trans transit authorities and some of these permitting agencies can open things up to abuse.

Jeff Wood: The other interesting part is just the power dynamic difference between what these transit agencies in the California HighSpeed Rail have to go up against versus what, like maybe a highway agency like Caltrans would have to go up against.

Do you think that like Caltrans would be requested to build a second overpass just down the road because they’re building an expansion of Highway 99? Like I don’t see that happening, and so it feels like. Transit agencies always get picked on for adding little things. And this isn’t just in California, right?

It’s like thinking about the Phoenix light rail line [00:19:00] and how they built that. Like they had to build from curb to curb, sidewalk, reconstruct the street and build a light rail line and do all the utility removal of changes, et cetera, et cetera. And so you’re asking a transit project, which is a very focused scope of work or a high speed rail project for that matter, and you’re asking it to do all these other things that the agencies that are asking for.

Probably would’ve done anyways, but they’re like, Hey, here’s a pocket of money that we can take from that are is now gonna be car oriented money instead of transit money.

Colin Parent: Yeah, absolutely. And we have a system of laws in the United States that requires State Department of Transportations to have like superior powers to the local governments through which they’re building their projects.

And that gives, that empowers them to like build their projects without being subject to that kind of shakedown. We just don’t empower transit agencies in the same way, or at least not consistently, but we could. And I think that’s what, that’s kind of what we’re recommending in the report is that, and they don’t necessarily have to have the same suite of powers that Caltrans has or, or another State Department [00:20:00] of Transportation.

I mean, maybe they, could or should, but like, but the core ideas, what we’re saying is that like you’re pointing out, when a transportation agency has adequate power to do the things that they want to do, then they can do them. We don’t have that situation for transportation authorities, and so we should instead give them some more authority to be able to do the things that we say that we want them to do.

Jeff Wood: I think also you’re, you’re very clear about saying like it should be a balance, right? And not just like that, the agency should have like ultimate authority to do whatever it wants. Obviously a lot of those permits are necessary road closures and things like that, but I think that’s an important point because I think right now what we’re seeing is the imbalance.

Colin Parent: Yeah, I think that’s right. And there’s different ways to go about these reforms too. Like, you know, you could have a situation where you empower a transportation agency if they’re able to, they want to build something. And we’ve gone through the process and there’s been a democratic process and, and elected officials have voted on it.

It’s got se a review and all that other stuff that they’re allowed to issue self permits. You [00:21:00] could imagine that that’s more or less what, how Caltrans operates in California. We’re not talking about getting rid of that, but you could also do some, some things that could be more modest reforms like shot clocks.

So, um, this is something that we talked about in the report where you could say, give the transit authority the power when they apply for a permit that a local government still gets to decide whether or not to issue the permit, but they have to decide within 60 days. And if they don’t yes or no, then the permit will be automatically issued.

That’s a policy that they have in Quebec for transit. It’s actually a policy that already is at play for Caltrans. Caltrans has to make those determinations. If a transit agency wants to use their right of way, they have to make those determinations within 60 days. And then as a federal policy, we have a very similar policy for that shot clocks for telecommunications companies.

So when they are coming in and trying to build some sort of infrastructure, you know, fiber optics or something across multiple jurisdictions, they have a right to get a decision [00:22:00] within a certain amount of time. And if the local government doesn’t make the decision, then they get that permit automatically.

So like this kind of system works and it exists elsewhere. It’s not something that we just invented and came up with. And so the kinds of benefits that we’re providing to telecommunications companies, well, why not let transportation authorities who are public sector agencies have those same rights and abilities?

Jeff Wood: Yeah, and it goes to this like this idea of self-certification too, where I know that the state dots, even in Texas and California for example, like have the ability through the FHWA to like self-certify their environmental impact statements, right? Which is a lot of power that maybe they shouldn’t have, but they do.

Yeah. Um, but those kind of things like self-certification really can help them move the needle forward because otherwise you’re waiting forever for somebody higher up, which may not have the capacity to do. Such a thing to do it. And you know, that goes into another question about state dots and capacity and what the capacity level of transit agencies and California ESP, ESP rail for that matter versus like what the state dots have at their disposal.

Colin Parent: [00:23:00] Yeah, no, that’s right. And we, we made some recommendations about what we wanted to see from Caltrans, the State Department of Transportation in California. And you know, one of the things that we put in there, echoing some recommendations from our partners at Spur in the Bay Area from a prior report that they published was, let’s have Caltrans provide more of a technical assistance role for transit projects, especially for the agencies and jurisdictions.

There’s too small to have that kind of in-house expertise, and that’s actually one of the challenges that we see in this, in this space, is that sometimes. You know, some transit agency or LA Metros, your Sand ags and San Diego, these big agencies, you know, they, they have all these experts and staff on who understand how transit works and all that, and they’re trying to get a permit from some small jurisdiction who’s never had a transit project coming through them.

And they just, their public works directors just has absolutely no expertise in this, and that’s not their fault, right? That’s just a factor of scale. And so, having a resource in the form of Caltrans to help navigate those things for smaller jurisdictions is, I think one thing [00:24:00] that that agency could do.

And it’s very much in line with the governor’s executive order about asking Interagencies to interagency coordination to help facilitate transit and other public infrastructures.

Jeff Wood: We had a D to mayor from Brookings on a few weeks ago, and what we were talking about is basically how much money that regions and cities generate for the federal government and then how much goes back to the states, and so the regions and cities don’t actually get back.

It’s like, I can’t remember the numbers exactly. We talked about it on the show. It’s like 8% back versus like the 32% that they generate or something along those lines. There’s a gap. And so it seems to me that Caltrans should be the one that kind of takes this mantle on because they do have this excess funding that should be going to cities, but doesn’t.

They have that capacity that exists to do all the environmental impact statements for all the roads and stuff that they do. The regions don’t have that, and so it seems like there’s some way for Caltrans and other state dots to step in and do a lot of this stuff that you know. The reason why these transit agencies and others can’t do it is because they don’t have the money, but the money goes to the state dot.

Colin Parent: So that makes a lot of like intuitive sense to me too. But when you talk to a lot of other advocates for transit in California. You talk about empowering Caltrans to take a larger role in transit planning, they usually go, oh no, that’s a terrible idea.

Caltrans is really against transit and we don’t want to, we wanna minimize their involvement in these sorts of things. And so I’m not sure that either of those are necessarily the right, you know, answer to that. I think it’s probably a little bit of both. I think you wanna see Caltrans reformed and have a greater interest in advancing public transit, and there’s been some efforts in that in this administration.

And the prior administration, in fact, there’s a director’s policy that’s in a draft form about allowing for this and to, to implement some recent state laws, um, related to this subject that, you know, hopefully will make some progress. But it is also true that there is like a legacy and history of Caltrans not being [00:26:00] always a useful partner in these transit.

Projects. And so it’s a tough one, right? I think we wanna see Caltrans be a better partner for transit and they’re trying, they’re, they’re trying, but also maybe we want the driver of transit to be the agency that’s most committed to that, and that’s generally not Caltrans.

Jeff Wood: I guess in my mind, I’m thinking about Caltrans as a general kind of idea rather than the agency as is exists right now, right?

You have these regional offices and you have Calta and other agencies and California High Speed Rail Authority and things like that, but it feels like we do need some type of. Increased capacity for building projects, for, having expertise and understanding. And so if we’re gonna do big projects around the state and even around the country, but if we didn’t do big projects around the state of California, which is a huge state, why can’t we set up an office of transit that actually has the expertise to build these projects?

We know we need capacity to do it. We can’t depend on the consulting firms to do it all for us. We should have that capacity, and that’s something that the cost project has talked about, I think a little bit too. [00:27:00] But you know, maybe it’s something like that where the agency creates a sub-agency or maybe there’s a specialist inside.

Because I agree with you, I don’t think that folks who are advocates for Transit would really appreciate Caltran as it exists now to jump in because they have shown in the past that they’re not really interested in the outcomes that transit advocates are. But at the same time, like that capacity issue is really big one.

Colin Parent: I think that’s totally fair, and I’m not convinced that just because Caltran hasn’t been always a good ally doesn’t mean that they couldn’t be. Right. Or it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t demand that from them, give them the the resources to do that. You know, that sort of thing. It is funny when you talk about some big reforms, and especially on the state level, people will decide, like it may make sense on sort of like an intellectual level to assign some power to some agency.

Yeah. But then oftentimes people go, yeah, of course that makes sense. Like on paper. Have you ever met anyone at that agency? Like they’re, they’re not on board, you know, and so it’s, it’s interesting. It’s not always obvious where you should assign these sorts of powers and authorities. But yeah, that being said, I mean like, I think there’s good [00:28:00] reasons to expect more from Caltrans.

They’re moving in some of those directions and I haven’t known, all given up on Caltrans being a better ally on those things and being, you know, potentially more in the driver’s seat. But I also temper that sense with. It’s really not Caltrans who’s building the big heavy rail projects in la. It’s not Caltrans who’s doing the Midcoast extension in San Diego.

They’re not doing the BART projects into San Jose. It’s actually these regional transit agencies, transportation agencies that have both the expertise and the, um, political interest in getting these projects done.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, don’t get me started on San Jose. It’s like a can of worms there. Another thing that the state, DOT is the standards, right?

Construction standards. You mentioned this in the report as well, design standards, those types of things. Sometimes those match what the cities are after and sometimes they don’t.

Colin Parent: To my mind, this is like the easiest reform to be implemented politically right now, transit agency wants to build something.

They have to go to the [00:29:00] jurisdiction in which they want to build it and submit their engineering documents and try to get a, a building permit. And they may have four or five or 12 different design standards that they have to meet depending on where, which segment of their project is, in which jurisdiction.

And that is just like an extra layer of complication and those standards themselves. May actually be really similar, but the jurisdictions wanna review them as though they’re different and they wanna review them from scratch and, and all this other stuff. And so it just creates this incredibly complex, unnecessarily complex system, and it just isn’t the case.

It just isn’t the case that the city of Encinitas. Has really different engineering needs, like the laws of physics are not different there than the city of Chula Vista. Like, it just like that just doesn’t make any sense. So I, I think there’s an opportunity to see either regionwide or statewide standards for these kinds of projects.

And I think you could easily imagine Caltrans or, or some other state agency. You know, if you, if you’re scared about Caltrans, that’s fine. You can find someone else to do it. To identify what these design and engineering standards ought to look like, promulgate them, and to require all jurisdictions to abide by them.

And I think that would just reduce a substantial amount of friction and confusion between public agencies without, by the way, without limiting their ability to review those projects and to approve or deny them, but just to require everyone to abide by the same standards.

Jeff Wood: It always makes me think about like why we have so many jurisdictions in the first place.

And I, I understand why, ’cause when we developed as a country, like, it took a day to walk between cities, but now it doesn’t. So, uh, a lot of these jurisdictions, [00:31:00] they seem like they should be one organization rather than 50. I mean, you’ve mentioned in the report the 27 agencies in, in the Bay Area, and we have this discussion all the time.

Some people like that idea and don’t, but there are a lot of jurisdictions that you have to go through and it would be good to have state standards that. Match. And we can argue also about, you know, whether there are car oriented standards or transit oriented standards as well. Right? So it’s a good point to be had.

Colin Parent: Well, the other thing just to point out about that is that like the politics of consolidating agencies or politics of consolidating jurisdictions is very hard.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, of course. Like

Colin Parent: there’s elected officials who are not gonna wanna give up their powers, you know, neighborhood groups don’t want, see their power diluted, that sort of stuff.

So those things are genuinely hard, and we’re not, we’re not recommending this report to do all that, you know, whether or not maybe it’s a good idea, maybe it’s not, we’re not touching that one. Okay.

Jeff Wood: Yeah.

That was me. That was me. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks. I’ll take that.

Colin Parent: Yeah. Jeff, everybody. But when we’re talking about consolidating or using the same engineering standards across jurisdictions.

I’ve been in local politics a long time. [00:32:00] I’ve never met anyone who ran for mayor saying that I’m gonna run for mayor so that I can preserve our public works department’s ability to use the AP W’S book as opposed to the blue, you know, the green book from the, you know, no one cares about that in politics.

So like, these are things that. I mean, there’s people who care about it, like Public Works, directors care about it, right? But I think these are the sorts of institutional political opposition that could be overcome in service of making things better for the broad majority of the public.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. I recommend folks go back and listen to the discussion we had with Bill s Schultes about the Aashto Bike Guide in the NTO Bike Guide, maybe a month ago or so.

Really interesting discussion about the processes and stuff for that. So what were some of the things that were good, like I feel like there was a positive, some of them were negative, obviously, like Wasco and some of the high speed rail examples, but then you’re pretty positive on what happened with the Midcoast trolley extension.

Colin Parent: Yeah, so we, we did four different case studies in the report about transit projects that were facing, some big permitting challenges. But one of those three was the Midcoast, which is a trolley [00:33:00] extension from San Diego, extending the existing light rail line that used to run only from the San Ysidro border to downtown and extending that all the way up the coast to the uc, San Diego campus.

And that project was opened in 2021. The project sponsor was Sandag, that’s the San Diego Association of Governments. It’s the transportation agency for the region, and it was all within the city of San Diego. And that project got done pretty fast and in the permitting process and didn’t face a ton of surprises or complications.

And it’s not that it had zero, I mean there was, there were some, but this was a contrast to some of the other projects that we had profiled where those third party agencies were really getting in the way of those projects. And so we attributed this for a couple of reasons. I mean, one is that San Diego has a relatively collegial environment between staff and elected officials on these transportation projects.

In part, that’s because they’re just fewer agencies. So San Diego doesn’t have 27 operators. It has [00:34:00] two, and the Bay Area has nine counties. San Diego has one. And so there’s just fewer entities, fewer staff, people who have to know each other to be able to get things going. So that’s, that’s one. And then the other big one is that Sandag, as an agency has some powers, some statutory powers that not every transportation authority enjoys.

So for example, SANDAG does not have to follow the zoning or building code decisions of the jurisdictions through which it’s building its projects. A lot of other transit agencies have that in California, but not all of ’em. And then additionally, SANDAG has the authority to use the right of way of any jurisdiction in its boundaries.

So any public agency that has a right of way Sandag can make use of it. And so some examples of why that’s mattered, I’ll give you the a building code example. So Sandag wanted to build a parking garage for its midcoast riders. [00:35:00] You know what we, I know I’m not always the fan of building that, but they, they, they wanted to build it.

There was some funding reasons, let’s put aside whether or not they ought to have built it, but they wanted to build it. It was important for them, for their project. The city of San Diego would not give them the building permit for whatever, some esoteric reasons. And so Sandag said, okay, well, we’re gonna adopt the state of California’s building code and we’ll appoint a building official, and we’ll ask them to issue the permit.

And they did. So they just like, they had the authority to do it. They didn’t wait on the city and they just did what they had to do, followed all the laws. Parking garage is still there. It’s fine. And that’s just an example of how if you have some authorities and use them, you can get through some of these challenges and not get tied up for years.

Jeff Wood: Can this be extrapolated to other states?

Colin Parent: I think so, yes. I think the situation in California is not different than others, right? Transit authorities do not have the same powers that State Department of Transportations do for highways, and they get tied up in permanent applications all the time. And [00:36:00] the fractured nature of a lot of local governments in, in California is maybe more so than some other places, but like, uh, it’s pretty common.

And so a lot of the, the reforms, a lot of the challenges that transit authorities are facing in California are, are being faced elsewhere too. And so that also the solutions to California are also gonna be the solutions elsewhere as well.

Jeff Wood: If you had one thing that folks would take away from the report, what would it be?

Colin Parent: I think the biggest thing is that we should be empowering transit authorities to do the things that we say that we want them to do. That’s very much an abundance answer, right? That’s an answer that says if we think that government is good and that can do good things and we want it to do good things, and so we should give it the power to do that, as opposed to constantly undermining it and then being surprised that we’re not getting what we want out of it.

Jeff Wood: And then is there something that surprised you about the process for researching this report?

Colin Parent: A couple things. I mean, I guess I was surprised digging into the Sandag example to understand more [00:37:00] completely some of the powers that the agency has and that those things really did matter and were able to be used to speed along a project.

But notably too, just because the transit authority has that power doesn’t mean that they use it. They may have political constraints, so give, give, you know that example again in that parking garage? Their first inclination was to apply for a permit from the city of San Diego, right, as opposed to just doing it themselves.

And so I think that suggests that you can provide a lot of these authorities to these transit agencies, and it sort of suggests two things. One is that they might be able to like supersede and get through some, some barriers, but it also means that they are politically constrained. You know, city of San Diego is, has the biggest vote on the San Diego board.

And so you’re not gonna, you wouldn’t expect Sandag to just plow through. The city of San Diego if it was, you know, a, a hot issue for the city. But that actually should hopefully give people some comfort with the idea of providing more authority these transit agencies, because they’re not gonna just plow through things like [00:38:00] Robert Moses did because they’re more, much more politically accountable than predecessor agencies.

Jeff Wood: There was a report from Yo f Freemark recently, which just said something similar, which is like, you know, you still have to depend on local folks and local agencies and local political connections to get some of these things done because otherwise you’re, cutting off the hand that feeds you and cutting off your nose, spite your face and those types of things.

So, mm-hmm. It is important from a political standpoint ’cause if you wanna keep doing these projects, you have to make sure everybody’s fairly happy, uh, even if you have to do a couple of things that you need to do to get the project going.

Colin Parent: Absolutely. Where

Jeff Wood: can folks find the report?

Colin Parent: It’s on our website that’s circulate sd.org and then slash powerless brokers.

And if you Google the powerless brokers. It’s definitely gonna be the top response.

Jeff Wood: And where can folks find you if you wish to be found?

Colin Parent: I’m, I’m on a lot of social media at, at Colin Parent Twitter and Instagram and what have you. I think there might be a, a dead TikTok account, but don’t expect any new contact there.[00:39:00]

Jeff Wood: Uh, I totally understand. Colin, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Colin Parent: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jeff. I appreciate it,