Hi All,
Many of you will recall that when we started United Neighbors we were focused on state bills like SB 9. State bills trump all local ordinances; they are always a huge concern for us. Because last year’s Housing Element process posed an immediate threat to our single family neighborhoods, we focused our attention totally on this LA issue. Working together we successfully preserved our single family neighborhoods from the Housing Element rezoning and successfully had restrictions placed on faith based institutions building apartments in single family neighborhoods and we had the guidelines to ED 1 enacted. But there are a few state bills that are raising alarms and might require all of our collective involvement, working together like we did last year along with our other United Neighbors groups statewide.
Currently, we are watching SB 79 introduced two weeks ago by Scott Wiener. The language of this bill is very ambiguous but suggests an attempt to rezone residential neighborhoods near transit corridors. Similar to the “options” that we fought during the Housing Element process.
We are waiting for this bill to leave the rules committee where it will be assigned to committees for review and where the bill’s wording will be clarified. Once we know what the bill states, we might need to start “rattling the pots and pans” and alerting our legislators and all our neighborhood groups statewide. We will do a campaign similar to what we did for the Housing Element, sending letters, contacting legislators and working together in a well coordinated process. We know that our state legislators have a lot of bills to consider. Only letters from constituents can alert them to issues of concern back home. Since we know how to send out plenty of letters, that is what we plan to do. We don’t want all our good efforts last year to be dashed by this bill. We will provide step by step instructions so we can be successful.
This will be a harder push because we have a state legislature that is very anti single family. But we believe good planning should always prevail.
Stay tuned. We are watching SB 79. We are also looking at other bills that we may need to get involved with. If you know of any, please alert us to them.
Best,
Maria, Cindy, Jeff, Marc
