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Dear Governor Schwarzenegger:

I'm writing to urge you to sign Senate Bill 375 (Steinberg), which focuses on improving California's housing and transportation planning in order to reduce fossil fuel consumption and conserve farmlands and habitat.

This legislation is vitally important to accomplishing goals set forth in last year's Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32), because greenhouse gas emissions associated with land use are the single largest sector of emissions in California. This important, balanced bill fills an important hole in California's global warming strategy, and it is supported by a broad and diverse coalition of environmental groups, builders and local governments.

The California EPA reports that better land use planning, which includes creating alternative choices for transportation, will achieve the largest emission reductions of any global warming remedy. SB 375 provides a path for better planning by providing incentives to develop housing closer to where people work and go to school, allowing them to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) every year.

SB 375 would:

• Require the regional governing bodies in each of the state’s major metropolitan areas to adopt, as part of their regional transportation plan, a “sustainable community strategy” that will meet the region’s target for reducing GHG emissions. These strategies would get people out of their cars by promoting smart growth principles such as: development near public transit; projects that include a mix of residential and commercial use; and projects that include affordable housing to help reduce new housing developments in outlying areas with cheaper land.
• Create incentives for implementing the sustainable community strategies by allocating federal transportation funds only to projects that are consistent with the emissions reductions.
• Allow projects that are shown to conform to the sustainable community strategy (and therefore contribute to GHG reduction) to have a more streamlined environmental review process.

It's clear that California is growing. Even conservative models predict population growth to be 7 to 11 million new residents by the year 2025. To accommodate this growth we need more housing--but we must build it intelligently.

Please sign SB 375 and help California accommodate our growing population and address global warming at the same time.

Sincerely,