AGENDA 21 RADIO

BY Joe Mathews

Connecting California

This expanded notion of the Bay Area’s reach isn’t a joke. It reflects the biggest thinking about California’s future.

Welcome to the Bay Area, Merced!

Welcome as well to Modesto, Sacramento, and Yuba City. Looking south, you’re invited, too, Santa Cruz, Monterey, and Salinas.

And while you’re almost another state, don’t worry, Tahoe City! The Bay waters are warm.

This expanded notion of the Bay Area’s reach isn’t a joke. It reflects the biggest thinking about California’s future. If you’re a smaller Northern California region struggling to compete with the Bay Area, why not join the Bay Area instead?

The Bay Area would benefit too. It is one of four connected Northern California regions—along with the greater Sacramento area, the Northern San Joaquin Valley, and the Central Coast triumvirate of Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito counties—that face severe challenges in housing, land use, jobs, transportation, education, and the environment. Since such problems cross regional boundaries, shouldn’t the regions address them together as one giant region?

The Northern California Megaregion—a concept developed by a think tank, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute—includes 12 million people and 21 counties, extending from the Wine Country to the lettuce fields of the Salinas Valley, and from the Pacific to the Nevada border.

The pieces of the Megaregion are integrating as people search a wider geography for jobs, housing and places to expand their businesses. The trouble is that this growth is imbalanced. The Megaregion is home to wealthy San Francisco and poor cities like Stockton, Salinas and Vallejo.

And as high housing prices push people out of the Bay Area, these refugees flee deep into the Megaregion, only to find they are too far away from their jobs and schools. The results: brutal traffic that produces greenhouse gases and longer commutes.

Figuring out how to rebalance the Megaregion and solve such problems is a high-stakes challenge, and not just for Northern Californians. The entire state relies heavily on the economic growth and tax revenues generated by the Bay Area. Megaregional planning could offer a vision for how the state might spread out its prosperity, creating a better-distributed version of the California dream.

This does not mean allowing the Bay Area to colonize its neighbors. Rather, it’s mega-rethinking so that planning and development enables the Megaregion’s pieces—Bay Area technology, Sacramento government, San Joaquin Valley logistics and Monterey area farming—to magnify each other.

One example: If new state research-and-development tax credits were to target inland companies, an infusion of technology and investment could allow the Northern San Joaquin to make its logistics industry more efficient and less polluting as it moves vegetables from Salinas to expanded ports in Stockton, West Sacramento, or Oakland.

Megaregional planning could create more high-tech jobs and companies outside of the Bay Area, by better connecting universities, laboratories, and research institutions with local entrepreneurs.

Companies now leaving the Bay Area for Austin might be redirected to Sacramento or Santa Cruz. Such efforts would be strengthened if Bay Area entities jointly lobbied Sacramento to develop a more educated workforce in the San Joaquin and Salinas Valleys.

Of course, making such a shift would require a well-integrated set of transportation connections across the Megaregion, including more Amtrak service between San Jose and Placer County, new links to Salinas, and planned expansions of the Altamont Corridor Express train to Merced and Sacramento. (Political note—the controversial gas tax increase provides $900 million for these ACE expansions.)

It’s easy to mock such mega-visions. For years real estate interests have done silly things, like touting a San Joaquin County housing development as “Far East Bay.” (Local joke: Is that nearer Singapore or Hong Kong?)

But if Megaregion planning succeeds, it could inspire imitators. Could L.A., San Diego, and Las Vegas (and maybe Tijuana and Mexicali) further integrate into their own Megaregional triangle? Could the Northern California Megaregion expand further south to the state’s fifth-largest city?

Welcome to the Bay Area, Fresno.