Gov. Gavin Newsom may have to step in to resolve a dispute between a state agency and a high-profile lawmaker over “Complete Streets” – a core concept of modern “smart growth” planners that holds streets should provide safe access and use not just to vehicles but to pedestrians and those using other types of transportation.

Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, says Caltrans is trying to sandbag his “Complete Streets” measure, Senate Bill 127. While it doesn’t impose any formal requirements on Caltrans, the bill does require the agency to study adding improvements that accommodate pedestrians, bicyclists and transit when fixing an existing road or building a new one.

The bill has passed the state Senate, the Assembly Transportation Committee and, last week, the Assembly Appropriations Committee on largely party-line votes. It seems likely to reach Newsom’s desk after the full Assembly approves it within the next two weeks.

Caltrans sees proposed rule as very costly

But Wiener was unhappy enough with a Caltrans communication on the expected cost of his measure that he depicted the agency as underhanded in a recent interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Caltrans said compliance costs would be so high – $4.5 million per mile of blacktop and more than $1 billion a year – that it would be unable to meet its road improvement obligations that are part of the 2017 law increasing the state’s gasoline tax. The agency also said Wiener’s measure would make it impossible to satisfy the conditions of grants from the Federal Highway Administration.

Wiener wrote two weeks ago to David Kim – secretary of California State Transportation Agency, which oversees Caltrans – that this cost estimate was so “severely inflated” that it “undermines the agency’s credibility.” He said evidence from local governments suggested that SB127’s costs would be from $20,000 to $600,000 per mile, depending on the nature of the project.

Wiener also told the Chronicle that Caltrans appears to think it would be obligated to put up bike lanes on all its projects when in fact the main priority is the “little towns all over California where their main street is a state highway. … That’s where businesses are. That’s where people are walking around. That’s where the school is. Some of them don’t have crosswalks.”

Caltrans an early fan of ‘Complete Streets’

But Caltrans’ history undercuts Wiener’s claim that its high estimates are being driven by outdated views that see roads as being for cars and cars only. Caltrans was one of the first state transportation agencies to embrace “Complete Streets” in 2008. In a 2015 interview with Governing magazine, Malcolm Dougherty – then Caltrans director – touted the agency’s commitment to the concept.

And in 2017, Dougherty used a Caltrans news release to tout the exact sort of “Complete Streets” project – on State Route 62 in Joshua Tree – that Wiener called his priority.

The news release quoted Dougherty as saying the project “used funds from a current construction project to restripe the downtown section of Joshua Tree with bike lanes and diagonal parking in order to more safely move vehicles, pedestrians and bicyclists through the downtown business district … [providing] meaningful improvements that create streets which move all users safely and efficiently along and across the roadway.”

Dougherty resigned his Caltrans post last year. His replacement, Caltrans engineer Laurie Berman, is a strong proponent of “Complete Streets” as well. She told a Streetsblog writer in November that while she had worked at Caltrans, her agency had “gone from being heavily criticized for not knowing anything about ‘Complete Streets’ to establishing a Center of Excellence, and providing tools that we can all use, statewide, to move forward together and build facilities that are useful to everyone.”

Berman reports to Kim.

The California Highway Patrol’s overtime scandal – in which more than 100 officers from its East Los Angeles branch may have inflated their overtime while helping Caltrans workers stay safe while doing freeway maintenance work – could explode into a statewide scandal. That’s contrary to claims made when the scandal first emerged in February, when CHP officials said a survey of other commands turned up no similar false claims.

Former Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley and a team of attorneys are representing more than 30 of the accused CHP officers. According to a Los Angeles Times report, 14 accused officers are facing termination while 90 more are still being investigated. Cooley says about 40 in total are at risk of being fired.

The main allegation facing officers: That they would seek eight hours of overtime pay after only being needed by Caltrans to work half that many hours or less on protection details.

Overtime spiking called common across state

But in court documents and in comments to the Times, Cooley says he can establish several points countering the CHP’s claims about the case. The most serious: The practice of padding such overtime is common in many of the 103 CHP commands around the state, according to former CHP officers. This would mean that Caltrans was overcharged by far more than the $360,000 that CHP has already documented.

Cooley also alleged that several middle- and upper-level CHP officials, including one who helped launch the East L.A. probe, engaged in the same questionable overtime billing practice when they were lower-ranking officers from 2007 to 2009.

The CHP is so far resisting releasing related documents requested by Cooley’s team and the media, saying the information is related to the ongoing investigation of the scandal.

But the involvement of another state agency with its own reputation to protect makes it seem unlikely that CHP can keep the lid on the scandal, as it tried to do on other internal problems earlier this century.

In February, Caltrans Director Laurie Berman announced that the agency’s inspector general would do a thorough audit of the CHP-Caltrans relationship.

“Caltrans takes violations of the law very seriously and illegal activity of any kind is not tolerated within the department,” Berman said in a statement to the Times. “If it is determined there was Caltrans employee misconduct, disciplinary action will be taken.”

Caltrans has not disclosed a timetable for when the inspector general’s audit will be released.

Scandal echoes those seen in Schwarzenegger years

The scandal marks the end to a decade of relative quiet for California’s largest law-enforcement agency. Among the allegations against the CHP during the Schwarzenegger administration:

• In 2009, the Ventura County Star reported that there was strong evidence that CHP officials impeded a hate-crimes investigation of a local CHP officer involved in a racially charged incident after officers held a party at an Oxnard hotel.

• In 2006, the Sacramento Bee reported that the CHP spent nearly $50 million on helicopters and motorcycles that were not open to competitive bidding. The companies given the contracts – Eurocopters and BMW, respectively – had courted top CHP officials with gifts and meals.

• In 2004, the Bee reported on the “Chiefs’ Disease” phenomenon in which 80 percent of top CHP officials filed for medical disabilities in late career, enabling them to get much more generous pensions. Because police discipline records were then confidential, Bee reporters confirmed the scandal through worker’s compensation claims filed by the CHP executives.

A CHP attorney threatened the Bee with a lawsuit if the records were used in the Bee’s reporting, saying the records were confidential. The Bee went ahead with the story, prompting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to eventually force out then-CHP Commissioner D.O. “Spike” Helmick.