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Monitoring the Monitor – Urban Ag, Bike Planning, Solar Ordinances, & Green Infrastructure

Keeping tabs on some of the Monitor‘s recent articles…

Late last month, Governor Brown signed Assembly Bill 465 (Ting), extending to 2029 the state’s Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones program, which Aleta George wrote about in the June/July edition. Previously authorized through 2019 by 2014’s Assembly Bill 551 (Ting), the program offers a property tax reduction to landowners who commit their land to urban agriculture for a minimum of five years. Valley Verde, a program participant featured in Aleta’s article, held a grand opening for its legislatively-enabled garden and greenhouse site on September 23.

 

As it rolls into the home stretch of developing its new bike plan, Caltrans District 4 is hosting a final series of community workshops to solicit public feedback. Covered by Cecily O’Connor in the April/May edition, the plan is meant to make the Bay Area’s bicycle network more connected, comfortable, and safe. Caltrans District 4 held an initial round of workshops last spring, and conducted an online survey to which 4,721 people responded. The latest workshops are set for November 9 in Petaluma, November 14 in Menlo Park, and November 15 in Oakland, with a webinar offered on November 30.

 

Efforts to support the Bay Area’s 2017 Clean Air Plan, the focus of Leslie Stewart’s June/July article, continue to move forward, including the Bay Area Solar Photovoltaic Ordinance Toolkit, which provides guidance for Bay Area cities and counties interested in requiring solar photovoltaic systems on new single-family and low-rise multifamily residential units. The Bay Area Regional Collaborative and BayREN launched the toolkit with a September 22 webinar, the slides from which are posted online.

 

Readers who enjoyed Robin Meadows’s December 2016/January 2017 article about capturing stormwater with green infrastructure should check out an upcoming talk from Peter Schultze-Allen. The former sustainability coordinator for the city of Emeryville will address the issue on the evening of Tuesday, November 14 at St. Alban’s, 1501 Washington Avenue in Albany, as part of a lecture series convened by the Friends of Five Creeks.

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