SCAG’s Role in Transportation in 4 Minutes

This article provides an overview of the SCAG and its current functions pertaining to transportation. It is part of a series that provides short guides to different governmental transportation organizations in LA and CA.

Formal Name: Southern California Association of Governments

Year Formed: 1965

Budget: $65.3 million

Staff: 130

What SCAG Does: SCAG does regional land use and transportation policy for six Southern California counties. (See the map below on the left, and note that the map on the right further breaks the six counties into 14 sub-regions. To understand sub-regions, go here.)

History

Here is SCAG’s birth compressed into three bullet points:

• In the 1960’s, the federal government began requiring regional planning as a condition for receiving federal funding for highways and transit.
• In 1963, the state of CA passed similar legislation calling for required regional planning as a condition for receiving state funding for transportation
• SCAG emerged in 1965 as a voluntary association of cities in the Southern California region. The organization was a result of this push away from top-down planning at the state level and towards a type of planning that would be more context-specific and responsive to local needs. SCAG now has the formal governance structure of a Joint-Power Authority.

Current Operations

Though SCAG does regional “policy”, SCAG is a technically regional “planning” organization. This means that similar to municipal planning departments, SCAG does not build, operate, or maintain any transportation facilities. But unlike municipal planning departments, SCAG does not have the ability to make specific land-use decisions for cities.

Some may differ, but I believe it is more helpful to characterize SCAG’s planning activities as taking the form of high-level, macro recommendations that can be considered “policy recommendations.”

SCAG has a broad mission that extends beyond transportation to incorporate housing, economic development, infrastructure, and sustainability. Transportation still touches almost all of what they do- for example, their housing and sustainability plans encourage building housing and jobs near public transit.

SCAG is governed by an 86-member Regional Council that includes representatives from 67 different districts in the Southern California region (but not the San Diego area).

It can be hard to talk about SCAG without getting mired in two sets of weeds: politics and acronyms. Very briefly: SCAG is recognized by the federal government as the Southern California region’s official Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), and it is recognized by the state of California as the region’s official Council of Government (COG) and also by the state as a Regional Transportation Planning Agency (RTPA).

While the federal government passed legislation over several decades designed to strengthen the power of MPO’s like SCAG to direct transportation funding decisions, the CA state legislature consistently opposed such efforts and in turn passed laws that directed funding and decision-making away from MPO’s and COG’s. State law instead directed funding even more locally to the county level and empowered County Transportation Commissions (CTC’s) like Metro in Los Angeles. The consequences are that SCAG has less authority than it otherwise might, and less power than other MPO’s across the nation.

That said, SCAG is heavily engaged in the transportation space- see here for a sampling of their many transportation endeavors. SCAG carries out certain federal and state-mandated plans, such as the the Regional Transportation Plan (RTP), the Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS), the Federal Transportation Improvement Program (FTIP), and the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA).

SCAG also does very good stuff to promote active transportation, as can be seen in their Go Human campaign and their effort to foster a more productive discussion about traffic congestion (100 Hours Project).

Perhaps what SCAG does best is provide a forum for “regional problem-solving” via convening meetings and forums that allow elected officials from different parts of Southern California to discuss their common challenges.

SCAG tries to solve high-level problems that extend across different cities and counties, like traffic, public transit and air quality, but they can only do so much through plans and recommendations. In practice, SCAG operates within fairly strict constraints, since ultimately the real power to do land use and transportation planning and spending lies with both local cities and County Transportation Commissions.

This dynamic could change in the future if the state decides to empower SCAG in the face of continued inaction on the part of local municipalities when it comes to tackling serious housing, transportation, and environmental issues.

Go here for the main page of this transportation series.