The Lois Wolk Interview: Land Use, Housing, Seniors, Health Insurance, and Her Legislative Accomplishments and Goals

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Doug Paul Davis
People's Vanguard of Davis

On Friday April 18, the Vanguard sat down and spoke with Assemblywoman Lois Wolk, candidate for the State Senate, 5th District. In November she will face Republican Assemblyman Greg Aghazarian. This is the final of a three-part interview. In this segment, the Assemblywoman discusses land use, housing, seniors, health insurance, and her legislative accomplishments and goals.

[For the earlier and extensive portion of this interview, see yesterday’s article, including Part 1: University workers, education, the delta, and transportation and Part 2: Transparency in government, flood protection, her record working in a bipartisan manner, and the needs of local government.]

How can the 5th Senate District balance the need for housing and jobs to accommodate huge projected growth with the need to preserve agricultural land and environmental protection?

That’s a tremendous challenge and it’s a challenge we feel throughout the central valley. People are looking for housing, they’re moving to these areas, they haven’t stopped moving to these areas and we need to do a better job of planning. We need, and I hope we would have a resurgence of what we had years ago when we looked at regional planning, strong regional planning.

The blueprint was a good example, but that’s only for the Sacramento region. We need that for the entire Senate 5th District. San Joaquin has done a very good job as well of beginning the process of a blueprint. They have strong transportation organization, but there needs to be an overall planning effort that connects transportation, land use, planning, all the agricultural preservation, and environmental preservation. All of the pressures that come from growth have to be looked at in a connective fashion—and we don’t do that. We don’t do a good job of that. We need to do more of that.

It is very difficult, but now is probably the best time to do that. The reason I say that is when you are in a recession that you are right now, and you don’t have the pressure of housing on you, the overheated market, you have an opportunity to take a step back if you are in local government, and look out several years. Look out five to ten years. Look out twenty years. Preferably, look out thirty years or more and do some fundamental planning for your region. We don’t do a good job of that in California. We should do more.