5 Things You Can Do Now To Help Conserve Water!

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Happy Independence Day!

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Our nation has seen wondrous things happen in the last weeks.  As we celebrate our Independence Day, it is a good time to reflect on the power of the people and the ability of our government to respond to its citizens.  Those who have felt powerless now see the possibility of better days.  Those who longed for equal rights to marriage or the comfort of health insurance can now be secure they are protected.

There is more to do, especially to end racism, but the past weeks give us renewed hope that change IS possible, that our system of government can work and that we, the people, once engaged and committed, can make the difference. Custom Laravel Development Services

It does get better.  America is beautiful.  And there is much to celebrate on this year’s anniversary of our nation’s birth.  Happy 4th of July!

Business, Government Leaders Urged to Build More Housing at NBLC’s North Bay Housing Summit

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Claiming that a shortage of affordable housing is starting to hurt the local economy, North Bay business leaders were urged Friday to get involved politically to acquire financing and win regulatory approval for local workforce housing projects.

“The key thing is we need to go into action,” said Cynthia Murray, president of the North Bay Leadership Council, the sponsor of a housing conference that drew more than 250 participants Friday in Petaluma. Murray called on attendees to join the council’s efforts to support new projects, go after financing and, when possible, reduce regulatory hurdles.

The effort to build more housing must resemble the yearslong campaigns to build Warm Springs Dam and the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit commuter rail line, former congressman Doug Bosco said. Until now, he said, the housing issue often has suffered from a lack of community focus.

“We are good at infrastructure. We are bad at housing,” said Bosco, a principal investor at Sonoma Media Investments, which owns The Press Democrat.

Friday’s conference assembled more than 15 speakers to discuss the lack of housing and offer possible solutions.

Attendees learned of separate efforts by filmmaker George Lucas and Novato’s Buck Institute to build new housing units in Marin County. They heard about state legislation that could provide hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidize affordable housing projects. And they were assured by none other than Grant Davis, general manager of the Sonoma County Water Agency, that despite four years of drought, “we’ll have enough water, so that’s not an excuse to say we can’t build affordable housing.”

Speakers repeatedly called on business leaders to help educate the community on the need for more housing and to offer a counterpoint to those who routinely oppose new developments.

“It can’t be just the ‘noes’ at the hearings,” said Linda Mandolini, president of Eden Housing, a Hayward-based nonprofit developer.

Many insisted that the lack of housing is hurting business expansion and economic growth. Mandolini noted a recent study by UC Berkeley and University of Chicago economists who suggested that removing obstacles to home construction in the Bay Area and New York could boost the U.S. gross domestic product by 9.5 percent.

The conference occurred as Sonoma County has ranked among the hottest markets for homebuyers and last year was named among the top communities for rising rents. Apartment rents here have jumped nearly 30 percent in three years, and the vacancy rate is less than 3 percent — essentially full occupancy.

Meanwhile, the county’s local governments issued just 251 building permits for single-family homes last year, the lowest total in at least 45 years.

In Marin County, meanwhile, purchasing a median-priced home requires an annual income of $193,000, according to a video shown Friday on the plight of firefighters, teachers and others who work in that county but can’t afford to live there.

Around the state, demand has dramatically pushed up home prices. At $440,000, the average California home costs 2½ times the national average. In the 1970s, the average cost here was only about a third higher than for the nation, according to a recent report by the state Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Brian Uhler, a senior policy analyst and an author of the state report, on Friday used Petaluma as an example of how demand has affected prices. A two-bedroom home in the city could be purchased in the 1990s for a price equal to 2½ times the county’s median income. By 2000, the price had jumped to 4½ times the median income, and today the same home costs eight times the median income.

The North Bay counties of Sonoma, Napa and Marin historically have built about 3,800 housing units a year, Uhler said. To significantly slow the increases in home prices, the region probably would need to build about 7,500 units a year. He acknowledged such building would bring impacts, but maintained there also are impacts from a lack of construction, including longer commutes and workers leaving California in order to obtain more-affordable housing.

The focus Friday was on workforce housing. But several speakers suggested the issue was broader and encompassed both market-rate, for-sale homes and housing for the homeless and working poor.

The most repeated suggestion Friday was to educate the public on the value of new housing. Bob Glover, executive officer of the Building Industry Association of the Bay Area, explained the dilemma that builders face in seeking regulatory approval: “Our biggest opponents are the people we just sold homes to.”

Susan Gorin, chairwoman of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, insisted that environmentalists shouldn’t be painted as obstructionists in the process. She maintained that when housing developments were proposed near pending SMART stations, environmental group leaders “were at the table in force,” with many saying “we want to move there.”

Among specific solutions, Bosco called for a county “housing czar” tasked with building 1,000 units. And Carol Galante, a UC Berkeley professor and former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development for the Obama administration, proposed a statewide appeals board that could overturn the denial of housing projects by local agencies.

Galante told how she recently read a 1982 study that listed virtually all the recommendations mentioned Friday. She suggested the housing issue finally may be at “a tipping point,” and she urged listeners to get involved to implement change.

“We don’t want to be looking back 30 years from now,” she said, “saying we didn’t have the political will.”

NBLC Endorses Measure A, the Sonoma County Roads Tax Measure!

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NBLC strongly supports Measure A, “Sonoma County 2015 Transactions and Use Tax Ordinance,” on the ballot for the June 2, 2016, election. The measure calls for a five-year, quarter-cent sales tax increase to be spent on “general governmental purposes such as public safety, local roads and pothole repair, senior, student and veterans transit and other essential services …” The measure would raise about $20 million in its first year for the county and its nine cities, with revenue estimated to grow by 3 percent annually and would include annual audits.

This support comes with several caveats.  It has been a long standing policy of NBLC’s board to not support General Taxes, because they are not binding on the jurisdictions receiving the money.  But in light of the dismal state of Sonoma County’s roads, NBLC is making an exception in this case, as it appears there is no other source of funding to do these critical road improvements and this tax cannot be passed by more than a simple majority.  The fact that the Measure is only for five (5) years is also appealing.

NBLC members intend to closely monitor the Board of Supervisors and the Cities to ensure that the funding raised by this tax measure is spent on road improvements and transit as outlined in the measure, and is not diverted to any other purposes.  NBLC is on the record of calling for pension reform, and fears that by the County and Cities not doing enough to address this growing liability, jurisdictions will be looking for new taxes to bail them out.  This cannot be the case in this ballot measure.

NBLC also urges the elected officials of Sonoma County to work together to better coordinate a response to the looming unmet funding needs.  There is a need to recognize that we are approaching the upper limit of the taxpayers’ ability to pay new taxes and that there is a finite amount of tax-paying capacity, whether the sales tax cap is raised or not.  Our municipalities need to work together to prioritize funding needs so that new funding can be allocated to top priorities and not to those who get on the ballot first.

Equal Responsibilities

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Growing up, my parents taught me about my responsibilities to my family, my school and my country. Taking responsibility was expected of me. Today, it appears the emphasis has shifted from people taking responsibility to demanding their rights.

There is an extreme focus on rights — as individuals and as members of a democratic society. The public discourse is filled with discussions of rights — whose rights trump the others or are being infringed — but often there is silence about having responsibilities.

There is a constant tension between rights and responsibilities that requires attention to be paid to both sides of the equation, if balance and fairness are to prevail. If responsibilities are ignored, rights are jeopardized. Those who came before us did not ignore or shirk their responsibilities. Our forebears made great sacrifices to secure our rights. They saw that they had a responsibility to shape the future, in fact, they took responsibility for the future.

To protect our right to liberty, the generations before us shouldered the responsibilities to defend our nation, house their families, educate their children and be active participants in our democracy.

The North Bay is paradise and we are blessed to live here. But that blessing may become a curse if we continue to focus primarily on rights.

One area that points out the disparity in focus is the housing crisis.

Housing is a basic human right and we, as individuals and as a community, have a fundamental responsibility to provide it. If we continue to throw up barriers to block new housing, we are doomed. There is a shortage of workers; the strong economy is generating lots of new jobs and at the same time, the workforce is shrinking as the baby boomers retire.

There is no good outcome to a community that refuses to house the workforce it depends on — teachers, health care workers, public safety personnel — because those workers, when given the choice to be rid of long commutes, will choose jobs closer to home, leaving communities with costly housing without the workforce needed.

We have been failing to meet the demand for housing for decades and that failure has put us in a crisis today. We have a responsibility to build more workforce and affordable housing. Rachat de véhicule sans contrôle technique https://rachatvotrevoiture.com/rachat-de-vehicule-sans-controle-technique/.

When even two-income families are priced out of the market, it is time to recognize that not building housing is more threatening to our future than building it.

How wide can we force the gap between the “haves” and “havenots” before there are serious consequences from those who been denied their right to housing?

It is time for each of us to take responsibility, to choose to be part of the solution and join together to support more workforce and affordable housing so the future of our cities and towns is shaped with intent and purpose.

To keep our economy strong, we need to welcome the next generation of workers. We want our families close by so let’s give our children and our aging parents a chance to live near us.

If we shun our responsibility, we push the problem onto people in other counties — why should they shoulder the responsibility that we refuse? Let’s make room for the people who have a stake by birth or employment in the North Bay, and not risk the health of our environment, economy and social fabric.

The housing crisis is a great challenge. It will take the collective efforts of right-minded people with a shared purpose to solve this crisis. We need a willingness by people and our elected officials to explore how to make housing, for sale and rent, more affordable, allow new types of housing, revisit zoning and permitting fees, adopt new innovations and support possible and promising ideas.

It is our responsibility to bear some change, make small sacrifices, accept newcomers and work together to strengthen our communities. We need to figure out what can we say “yes” to and not stop at “no.”

Let’s end the silence and speak about our responsibilities as loudly as we do about our rights. The future we want can begin with this step — a step towards solutions, understanding and opportunity.

When we value both equal rights and equal responsibilities, we fulfill the ideals of our founders, the needs of our communities, and the dreams of our children.

Cynthia Murray is president and CEO of the North Bay Leadership Council. She is a former president of the Marin Board of Supervisors and former mayor of Novato. The council, an organization of employers in Marin and Sonoma counties, is hosting a North Bay Housing Summit on May 8 at the Petaluma Sheraton.

North Bay Leadership Council Lands State Housing Expert as Summit Speaker

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An author of a new government report on the high cost of California housing is slated to speak at a regional housing summit this spring in Petaluma.

This month’s report by the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office concludes that California housing prices have risen so much over the past four decades largely because demand has far exceeded supply, especially in the state’s coastal communities.

As a result, home prices and rents in the Golden State are “higher than just about anywhere else,” the authors write.

In the 1970s, California’s average home price was about a third higher than the nation’s. Today the average home in the state costs about $440,000, or 2½ times the national average. Rents, meanwhile, are about 50 percent higher here than in the rest of the country.

Addressing the shortage might require building roughly double the number of homes now constructed each year, with the extra units located “almost exclusively in coastal communities,” the report stated.

Cynthia Murray, president and CEO of the North Bay Leadership Council, said she read the new report and wanted to include its findings in the discussion at the May 8 event that her group is hosting.

“This is exactly what I want to talk about at the housing summit,” Murray recalled thinking. As a result, one of the report’s authors, senior fiscal and policy analyst Brian Uhler, has agreed to appear on a panel addressing possible ways to increase the housing supply.

Five years after the last recession, Sonoma County’s homebuilding sector is still pumping out less than a third of the number of new units that were built here over the past quarter-century. Last year, the county and its cities issued building permits for 465 units.

The lack of supply is one reason the county last year ranked among communities with the biggest rent hikes in the nation. Apartment rents have climbed nearly 30 percent in three years.

The leadership council, a regional group of private and nonprofit employers, has called the housing shortage a crisis and in response is hosting the May 8 summit.

One of the summit’s two keynote speakers, UC Berkeley housing and urban policy professor Carol Galante, praised the legislative analyst’s report for explaining how the state’s fiscal and environmental policies make it difficult to build more housing.

For example, local governments have more of a financial incentive to approve construction of sales-tax-generating retail projects rather than housing subdivisions, Galante said. And the state-required environmental review process “totally stymies” even ecologically sensitive housing proposals, she said. In so doing, such reviews fail to consider how the rejection of housing in a community can increase greenhouse gas emissions by forcing workers to live farther away and make longer commutes, she said.

“I think we as a society have to look at what the true cost of these policies are,” Galante said.

NBLC Fights to Open the Third Lane on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge

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When originally built, the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge had a third lane.  Given the horrendous traffic in the afternoon commute, it is time to reopen that third lane to traffic.  Sounds easy, right?  But it is not.  With dozens of studies required by the state, and a need to reconfigure the access and egress to the bridge, Caltrans projected a three year time frame to complete the project.  NBLC joined with other business groups to press for a faster completion, and called for a temporary fix to allow traffic to use the existing lane immediately.

We are pleased that some progress has been made. By agreeing to do the design and environmental review concurrently, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Bay Area Toll Authority were able to cut one year off the completion date.  Two years is better than three, but still seems way too long to provide a much needed traffic fix.  NBLC appreciates the cooperation and the agencies working to expedite this project but with such an obvious solution in place, we can only hope that even speedier progress can be made.

A Bio Revolution

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ALL THE WORKERS in BioMarin Pharmaceutical’s Novato plant look alike.

It’s not that the drugmaker’s more than 1,100-strong local workforce lacks diversity. The uniformity comes from the dress code required to enter the clean rooms where the company’s lifesaving drugs are made: dark blue pants and shirts with tight cuffs, puffy caps covering hair, goggles and layers of disposable booties over shoes.

That’s just to walk the halls.

To enter the rooms where the company cultures and purifies the enzymes that make up its drugs, workers first enter an air lock, where they don rubber gloves and unwrap freshly laundered lab coats from plastic packaging. One more layer of booties, a squirt of hand sanitizer, and finally they can enter, their bundled-up feet making whisking sounds across the floor with each step.

Inside the rooms, air whooshes through filters that catch any bacteria, skin cells or hairs somehow shed by the wrapped-up humans within, lest the impurities get into the product. So clean is the air that the only smells in here are the astringent odor of sanitizer and the occasional whiff of plastic from the disposable tubing that moves the brown liquid that will become the drug Vimizim through the plant.

“If you have allergies, this is a great place to be,” jokes Erik Fouts, who oversees BioMarin’s three drug production plants in Novato. Fouts has a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology; the majority of his staff, who are busy cleaning out stainless steel vessels in preparation for the next production run, have bachelor’s degrees in life sciences or engineering.

This is the epicenter of Marin’s small biotech cluster, which is growing thanks to the area’s educated workforce and proximity to research facilities. Between Marin and Sonoma counties, biotech firms bring in $2.7 billion in annual revenue, the Marin Economic Forum estimates. The biotech mini-boom is an outgrowth of the region’s strength in life sciences. While other counties, such as San Mateo, may have more companies, we have more life sciences businesses per capita here than in any other California county, according to the MEF.

Biotech companies harness living organisms to create products and processes. Many, like BioMarin, are drugmakers, using living cells cultured in stainless-steel vats to produce enzymes that can treat diseases.

A Rare Breed

BioMarin specializes in “ultra-orphan” drugs, meaning that the enzymes it formulates treat uncommon genetic disorders. Vimizim, approved by the FDA last February, is for rare metabolic syndrome Morquio A, which afflicts 260 known sufferers in the United States. BioMarin executives refer to many of their customers by their first names, and patients themselves have suited up to tour the plant and visit with scientists researching new cures.

“We treat rare diseases, and that gives us rare opportunities,” says Chris Brodeur, associate director of commercial manufacturing, who likes to show visitors photos of the time he and a patient’s mother swam to Alcatraz together in a fundraising effort to combat Morquio A. Employees are especially tight with that patient’s family, who relocated from Chile so the patient could participate in a clinical trial at Children’s Hospital Oakland.

As for the company’s older drugs, like Naglazyme, approved in 2005 to treat a disorder called MPS VI, some staff members are now working with patients they have watched grow up. MPS VI patients, short in stature and with enlarged heads, can suffer from poor endurance; Naglazyme gives them the strength to walk farther and climb more stairs, and data suggests patients on the therapy also live longer.

A marketing director was recently trying to arrange a video shoot with the first patient to receive commercial Naglazyme, now a student at Louisiana State University. The patient’s exams schedule was interfering. “Jill sends a note and says ‘School first!’,” says spokeswoman Debra Charlesworth with a grin.

With such tiny customer bases and high research and development costs, BioMarin must charge high prices for these drugs. Infusions of Vimizim cost up to $400,000 a year for one patient.

In addition to its expanded Novato production facility, part of which used to be a Birkenstock warehouse, BioMarin is expanding its new San Rafael headquarters and laboratories. Two start-ups that spun off from BioMarin, Raptor Pharmaceuticals and Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical, are both based in Novato. Marin is also headquarters to a foundation that pushes for biotech-friendly public policy, the EveryLife Foundation, led by Dr. Emil Kakkis, who left BioMarin to start the foundation and later launched Ultragenyx.

The Buck Starts Here

Supporting these companies with research partnerships and talent are the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and the University of California, San Francisco. UCSF is more commonly associated with the much larger biotech cluster in South San Francisco, but BioMarin CEO Jean-Jacques Bienaimé (“JJ” to his staff) points out that the university is “not that much closer to South San Francisco than it is to here.” BioMarin has partnered with both, as well as with research institutions outside the region.

The Buck is helping to grow the Marin biotech cluster by spinning off independent companies to bring its scientists’ discoveries on prolonging healthy life to market. The nonprofit research facility has also supported the growth of BioMarin and other existing biotech drugmakers through scientific partnerships and by sharing resources like laboratory space; Ultragenyx leases its lab space from the Buck, for instance. The Buck also continually draws new research talent to the region through its undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral programs, some of which are run in partnership with universities.

“It’s very important for us to have a growing biotech sector in this region,” says Buck president and CEO Brian Kennedy. “While we’re happy to partner with pharmaceutical companies anywhere if it makes sense, it’s nice to be able to bounce ideas off people who are local and get that exchange of ideas that it’s hard to get at a distance.”

Over time, more companies are expected to spin off from the Buck and BioMarin and even from their spin-offs. Despite all this growth, Marin’s biotech cluster is still far from rivaling the size of the cluster surrounding Genentech in South San Francisco, or even San Diego’s cluster. But it has progressed from the early start-up phase to the second stage of development, says Robert Eyler, chief executive of the Marin Economic Forum.

Growth With Challenges

Many of the smaller companies, like Ultragenyx, are also expanding. The firm grew its staff to more than 100 from 59 this year and is likely to need more space as its products move into later-stage development, says Chief Financial Officer Shalini Sharp. Rounding out the cluster are biotech firms that don’t make drugs, most of them also in Novato, such as Cytograft Tissue Engineering, which repairs diseased cardiovascular tissue using the patient’s own cells; Biosearch Technologies, which makes nucleic-acid-based products for genetic research; XCell Science, which creates human neural cells for research, and Marin Biologic Laboratories, a research contractor.

“You’re seeing a lot of the businesses in Marin County are maturing, but are not yet mature enough to have multiple product lines and multiple years’ worth of contracts. A lot of the companies are still trying to get drugs through the testing process and are in a fundraising phase,” Eyler says.

That applies to Ultragenyx, which has four products in clinical trials, and Raptor, which has one drug on the market and three in clinical trials. BioMarin is more advanced, with five drugs on the market, including Vimizim and Naglazyme, as well as Kuvan (for PKU, the disorder tested in newborns with a heel prick), Aldurazyme and Firdapse (approved in the European Union only). It has five more experimental therapies in clinical trials and two slated to go to trial in 2015. The company has been publicly traded since 1999, reporting revenue that has grown steadily over the years to 2013’s $549 million.

However, BioMarin is not yet profitable. “What we’ve been communicating (to investors) is that when we reach a billion dollars in revenue, which should be in two to three years, we will be operationally profitable,” Bienaimé says.

The fact that investors are willing to wait through more than a decade of testing and steady growth throws biotech into sharp contrast with high tech. “It tends to be a longer term play than the short bursts you see in tech like mobile apps, social media,” Eyler says. Pair that with its hunger for educated workers, and the industry has the potential to be a good driver of Marin’s economy, he adds.

But biotech firms that would launch or expand in Marin County face challenges. A major hurdle is finding space for laboratories and drug production plants. The vacancy rate for industrial and warehouse space in Marin is only 4.1 percent, meaning that space here is much scarcer than in Oakland, where vacancy is almost 20 percent, or San Mateo, with 11.8 percent, according to the Marin Economic Forum.

When considering if Marin’s biotech cluster could ever rival South San Francisco’s in size, Bienaimé gazes out his office window. BioMarin is constructing a new research laboratory not far from where he is sitting and has drawn up plans for another building across the street. “Maybe it could happen here too. It would take a while. The space is more limited here,” he says, finally. BioMarin has purchased a drug production plant in Ireland, but intends to continue growing in Marin as well.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if Marin’s cluster will ever rival South San Francisco’s. It’s a good thing at any size, industry insiders agree. “We don’t have to get to that level to be successful,” says Kennedy, CEO of the Buck. “These are high-paying jobs, they’re technical jobs, they bring a lot of young exciting people into the region — and we’ve got a nice base to grow from here.”

Housing Starts Drop to New Low in Sonoma County

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The Great Recession may have officially ended five years ago, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at construction activity in Sonoma County.

City and country building officials issued just 251 permits for new single-family homes here last year, according to the California Homebuilding Foundation. That was the lowest total in at least 45 years and a far cry from the average of 1,900 single-family homes built in Sonoma County annually in the two decades before residential construction took a nosedive in 2008.

The paltry construction numbers have contributed to a tight housing market and some of the biggest apartment rent hikes in the nation.

In response, both business and civic leaders this year have begun calling for action. Without more housing, they warn, local companies will have trouble hiring new employees, the economy will suffer and lower-income workers will find it increasingly difficult to remain here.

When families have two incomes and still can’t afford to live in the region, “we have big problems,” said Cynthia L. Murray, president and CEO of the North Bay Leadership Council, a group of private and nonprofit employers. She called the situation “a crisis” and said the council will host a housing summit in Petaluma in May.

Sonoma County Supervisor Shirlee Zane and the mayors of Santa Rosa and Rohnert Park will jointly host a workshop next month with local builders to examine ways to increase the stock of affordable housing.

“We simply cannot afford to not address this problem,” said Zane, whose district includes Santa Rosa.

Building industry officials expressed support for such efforts but also cautioned that it will take years to reverse the current shortage.

“For the housing market, this is going to be a long, slow recovery,” said Keith Woods, CEO of the North Coast Builders Exchange, a Santa Rosa trade group.

The dilemma comes down to “pure economics,” said Woods. “It’s a limited supply and increased demand.”

It also will take time to build new affordable housing units, said Chuck Cornell, executive director of Burbank Housing, a Santa Rosa nonprofit that has built nearly 3,700 housing units here over the past three decades.

“We have a fairly long pipeline to produce housing, and there’s been a giant gap in that pipeline since the financial crisis,” Cornell said.

A ‘need for millions’

The main reason for the slowdown is that state and local governments suffered severely in the downturn and had to cut back the financial aid needed for such housing projects. And the price tag to build more housing will be large, he said. A typical apartment can cost $350,000 or more per unit, a significant amount considering that the county’s median price for an existing single-family home in December was $515,000.

“There’s a need for millions (of dollars),” Cornell said.

For decades, home building was a major engine of economic growth in the county, employing thousands of construction workers and providing business for scores of home furnishing, appliance and landscaping companies.

But the construction industry was battered by a world financial crisis sparked by risky residential lending in the United States. In the past seven years, county builders have obtained permits for just 2,441 single-family homes, fewer than were built here in 1990 alone. And the county’s construction sector now employs 4,400 fewer workers than it did a decade ago, a decline of 30 percent.

Since the recession ended in 2009, the county has added 22,000 jobs across all industries. As employment has increased, so have rents.

Leading in rent increases

Apartment rents climbed nearly 30 percent in three years to $1,567 in December, according to Real Answers, a Novato-based rent research firm. Last year Santa Rosa ranked fifth for the nation’s biggest rent hikes.

At year’s end, 97.2 percent of the county’s apartments were occupied, a level that property managers consider essentially the same as full occupancy.

Apartment-building down, too

In 2013, home builders briefly saw a bump in apartment and condominium construction. That year builders received permits to construct more than 700 multi-family housing units — mostly for two apartment projects in Rohnert Park and Santa Rosa that are expected to open in the coming months.

But a year later the numbers fell. In 2014, the county and its cities issued just 214 multi-family permits, the lowest level in three years, according to the state homebuilding foundation’s CIRB Construction Data Report.

For 2014, Mendocino County reported permits for 72 single-family homes, a decline from 92 in 2013. For Lake County, the single-family permits totaled 42 last year, compared to 50 the year before. Neither county had any multi-family construction.

Sweat equity difficulty

In today’s housing environment, even when a solution seems in hand, difficulties can still arise. At its 60-unit Catalina Townhomes ownership project, Burbank Housing has been able to qualify only two families for the 28 available units in the second phase. The families must not only be willing to help build their homes, but they also must have an annual income of between $48,000 and $65,000 for a family of four.

To date, many of the otherwise eligible applicants can’t qualify for loans because they already have too much debt, said Pascal Sisich, Burbank’s director of housing development.

Looking ahead, Rohnert Park is anticipating new home construction this year, said Marilyn Ponton, the city’s development services director. Two developers have long been preparing projects in the east and southeast portions of the city that are slated to one day hold 2,000 new homes.

However, Ponton referred questions on the timing and scale of the construction this year to the developers. And spokesmen for both companies, Brookfield Homes and Redwood Equities, this week either declined or didn’t respond to requests for comment.

This year, two new rental complexes will open for their first tenants. Both are characterized as “luxury” apartments and will charge rents above the county’s current average.

The 244-unit Fiori Estates complex in Rohnert Park is advertising rents starting at $1,730 for a one-bedroom unit and $2,255 for a two-bedroom place, according to the project’s website. A spokesman for the 270-unit Annadel complex in Santa Rosa said rent will start at $1,700 for a one-bedroom unit and $2,100 for a two-bedroom. The first Annadel units are expected to be available by the end of April, if not earlier.

Proposals in Santa Rosa

In the effort to build more housing, both builders and local officials already are discussing possible approaches. In Santa Rosa, the City Council last month directed planners to consider a request by developer Hugh Futrell to defer approximately $2.2 million in development fees on a 141-unit building for low-income seniors. Futrell is seeking up to 16 years to repay the principal, plus interest at an annual rate of 3 percent.

Another effort involves possible joint funding by the city of Santa Rosa and the county for a 79-unit rental project by Burbank Housing in southwest Santa Rosa.

The local governments that get housing built in the future will be those that are “willing to partner” with developers, pointing them to areas of town where projects can get more easily approved, said Greg Owen, CEO of Blue Mountain Enterprises. His company is building 12 single-family homes at its Spring Brook subdivision off Fulton Road in northwest Santa Rosa and next hopes to build a 110 townhome project in the southwest section of the city.

Before the downturn, builders could afford to spend five years bringing a project to fruition, but “you can’t do those anymore,” said Owen, whose company first made headlines here three years ago when it bought and flipped scores of foreclosures and other existing homes. Projects don’t make financial sense now unless work can start after eight months in the regulatory process, he said.

Bob Glover, executive officer with the Building Industry Association of the Bay Area, said tighter lending criteria and increased regulations are making all building projects difficult today.

“Even the quote ‘easy ones,’ what used to be called easy ones, they’re not easy,” he said.

NBLC Policy Watch: California’s Fiscal Outlook Remains Positive

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The California Legislative Analyst (LAO) has prepared his Fiscal Outlook for the Budget Year 2014-2015.

The LAO found that “Under Current Policies, $5.6 Billion Projected Reserve at End of 2014-15. The state’s 2013-14 budget plan assumed a year-end reserve of $1.1 billion.

“Our revenue forecast now anticipates $6.4 billion in higher revenues for 2012-13 and 2013-14 combined,” the LAO said.”These higher revenues are offset by $5 billion in increased expenditures, almost entirely due to greater required spending for schools and community colleges. Combined with a projected $3.2 billion operating surplus for the state in 2014-15, these factors lead us to project that, absent any changes to current laws and policies, the state would end 2014-15 with a $5.6 billion reserve.”

The LAO said, “We assume continued economic growth in future years. In such a scenario, we project that, under current laws and policies, state General Fund revenues will grow faster than expenditures through 2017-18, when the state’s projected operating surpluses reach $9.6 billion. The state’s temporary personal income tax rate increases under Proposition 30 (2012) expire at the end of 2018, resulting in a more gradual ramping down of these revenues over the last two fiscal years of our forecast. This helps prevent a ‘cliff effect’ in our forecast, as our projected operating surpluses remain stable at just under $10 billion per year in 2018-19 and 2019-20.”

There was more good news for the state given the healthy local property tax growth.

The LAO said, “Proposition 98 funding for schools and community colleges is provided by a combination of state General Fund spending and local property tax revenues. Throughout our forecast, healthy property tax growth — a byproduct of the recovering housing market — helps moderate the growth of required state General Fund spending on schools and community colleges. In addition to normal property tax growth, the state’s fiscal situation is helped by additional increases in school property taxes due to the dissolution of redevelopment agencies. … Both of these factors play a significant role in keeping annual state expenditure growth below revenue growth for much of our forecast period.”

The LAO urged continued caution noting that “the state’s continued fiscal recovery is dependent on a number of assumptions that may not come to pass. For example, our forecast assumes continuing economic growth and slow, but steady, growth in stock prices. As we discuss in this forecast, an economic downturn within the next few years could quickly result in a return to operating deficits. Further, the normal volatility of capital gains could depress (or boost) annual revenues by billions of dollars. In addition, our forecast assumes that the state repays liabilities with payment schedules set in current law. Other liabilities, including some items on the Governor’s wall of debt and the state’s huge retirement liabilities (particularly those related to the California State Teachers’ Retirement System), remain unpaid under our forecast. If additional payments are made in the future to repay these liabilities or to provide inflation adjustments to universities, the courts, state employees, and other programs, the operating surpluses in our forecast would fall significantly below our projections.”

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Cynthia Murray is the president and CEO of the North Bay Leadership Council. PolicyWatch is published regularly by the NBLC. You can sign up to receive the full report atnorthbayleadership.org. Email Cynthia at cmurray@northbayleadership.org or call 707-283-0028. The full report is available at lao.ca.gov.