SJ business group calls for changes to city's lobbying priorities
Image by State of California Resources Agency
The Silicon Valley Business Alliance, a new business advocacy organization aiming to decrease cost of living and cost of doing business in the area, is asking the city to get behind reforms to CEQA and to back off on lobbying efforts to dismantle Proposition 13's taxpayer protections. Below, comments from SVBA head Johnny Khamis in public comments to council.
Dear SJ City Council:
It has come to our attention that the Council will be reviewing the 2025 Intergovernmental Relations Group's (IGR) priorities on January 14, 2025. We ask you to consider the following recommended changes:
Please add CEQA reforms to the IGR priorities because they will reduce costs, wait times and frivolous lawsuits on housing developers and create opportunities to build more housing supply.
The following specific recommendations have been studied and written about by many experts:
1. Requiring all entities that file CEQA lawsuits to fully disclose their identities and their environmental interests. Currently, claims can be filed anonymously.
2. Disallowing procedural gamesmanship that pushes CEQA proceedings past a year and beyond.
3. Ordering the losing party to pay court costs on CEQA lawsuits.
4. Making infill land development in urban non-riparian areas exempt from challenges.
Council should delete the priority of:
"Decreased Voter Thresholds: Support efforts to reduce the approval threshold of taxes and bonds for transportation and infrastructure funding measures, including those for affordable housing, to less than a two-thirds majority vote. Support efforts to protect the approval of general-purpose funding measures by a simple majority."
Given the majority rejection of Proposition 5 in the last election at the county and state level--as well as substantial opposition to Prop 5 within SJ City (final tallies not yet public)--this priority clearly has no citizen mandate and does not reflect a broad consensus among local residents, as should be the basis for any citywide recommendation from Council.
Additionally, we request that you start monitoring the More Homes on the Market Act sponsored by Reps Panetta and Kelly that would double the capital gains tax exemption on the sale of a primary residence and index future gains for inflation. We believe this Federal tax reform can create more inventory of larger family homes and help increase local property tax revenues by moving these homes with 1960s tax bases into current tax rates.
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