ARTICLE
Strategic Plans in an Uncertain Future The classic vulnerability of strategic plans is the evolution of the environment in which they must be implemented. Nowhere is this truer than in public planning. Macro impacts of global warming, disruptive technologies, a shrinking middle class, and tumultuous changes in basic industries from health care to retail to education all threaten the underlying assumptions of communities’ plans. This is especially true of plans and investments that have long implementation cycles such as water, transportation, education and land use. The great challenge is to create plans that are readily adaptable and responsive to threats and opportunities. In some of our local public planning we have notable successes. In other areas, our plans are not easily adapted. Examples of plans that have strong adaptive features: the Water Supply Advisory Committee’s report and the Regional Transportation Commission’s 2040 Regional Transportation Plan. At the other extreme are the General Plans of virtually every jurisdiction in California, trapped in a state statutory structure that virtually mandates inflexibility. The WSAC planning process was exemplary if expensive. The planning process did a particularly good job of evaluating the environment and the alternatives. The Committee’s research found that past plans had been both reasonably accurate in their assumptions but that there were options that had not been fully explored. Notwithstanding a public assault on the assumptions of those prior plans, it turned out that the water district really does have a serious water supply shortfall in drought years, a surplus when not drought impacted, serious issues regarding fish habitat, and the ability to desalinate water with only marginally greater environmental impacts and rather substantially lower costs than other potential remedies. On the other hand the ability to use aquifers for storage had not been seriously explored and waste-water reuse was for the first time expected to be available as a real option. The greatest strength of the WSAC plan is the development of a political consensus in support of an adaptable plan. It lays a path with staged performance requirements and deadlines, cost constraints, regular reporting mechanisms, processes to frequently review and revise projects, and relatively clear triggers for shifting to alternatives. The Regional Transportation Commission’s strategic plan is, likewise, a complex document that provides options for the future. Unlike the water plan, which focuses on the narrower issue of water supply, the RTC strategy considers the broad category of transportation infrastructure and systems throughout the County for the next quarter century. The 2040 Transportation Plan’s strategic variables tend to be less tangible than WSAC’s, less dependent on resolving complex science questions and more dependent on trends in social and political evolution. This is not to suggest that there are no interesting technology variables: the evolution of electric and/or self-driving cars, advances in the technologies of “fixed guideway” public transportation, and the development and adoption of online meeting and transaction systems could all have major impacts on cost and capacity. However, the greatest variables for the Transportation Plan are the future political choices of national and state lawmakers about transportation funding and transportation priorities. And, nearly as important are future residents’ transportation wants and needs. Will private automobiles continue to dominate? Will public transportation systems be better utilized? How will the social-economic makeup of the County change our wants and needs? The great strategic success of the 2040 plan is preserving options. Although a point of friction within the County, preservation of the rail corridor for future public transportation parallel to Highway 1 provides critical “systems” adaptability for the future. Investment in Highway 1, currently significantly over capacity, focuses on extending “auxiliary lanes”, connecting entrance and exit ramps providing the Commission future flexibility for alternatives without abandoning today’s most used mode of transportation. Investment in neighborhoods through safe-routes-to-schools, bicycle safety measures, and other similar programs provide real and immediate improvement in our transportation systems while preserving both local control and a significant amount of future flexibility. On the other hand, cities’ and counties’ capacity for responsiveness and flexibility is constrained by law. The basic structure of California’s General Planning requirements, under which every jurisdiction in the state operates, is vastly less adaptable. The State requires plans under which cities and counties land use, transportation, housing, conservation, open-spaces, noise, safety and other optional elements must operate to be intentionally inflexible. While these rules may have been a good choice when the General Planning statutes were created, today their constraints are problematic. While having plans and creating expectations is critical to public administration, intentional inflexibility and the high costs of changing the plans make them cumbersome stumbling blocks to efficient adaptation. A most immediate case in point is housing. Jurisdictions’ ability to respond to changing social and economic forces quickly is highly constrained by the requirements for amendment of a general plan. Some jurisdictions have adopted highly constraining general plans, others provide more options. But none permit the sort of flexibility that is called for - small subdivisions, experiments with “tiny houses”, higher-rise apartments construction, and changes in public transportation capacity. This might be acceptable if the amendment process was not as complex and expensive as it is. Perhaps more importantly, our capacity to adapt “across jurisdictions” is constrained by our General Plans. In a time in which regional adaption and shared solutions are the vision of our strategic future, the general planning process and rules seriously limit our collective capacity to do better. By all appearances we are on the threshold of significant changes in our social, political and economic environment. As we consider strategies that will guide significant new investments, community structures, and economic relationships, strong groundwork and plan flexibility will serve us best.