David Gauny on traffic, homeowners and small businesses

I just watched David Gauny’s speech before the Canyon Country Advisory Committee last week.

Insofar as any City Council candidate has a plank, Gauny’s seems to be that:

1. Traffic is bad in SCV
2. The process at City Hall is broken
3. The City Council is weak
4. Small businesses and homeowners are getting screwed by the broken process
5. Illegal immigrants

There were a couple of things that interested me about this speech. First of all, Gauny, like so many candidates before him, says traffic sucks in the SCV. But he’s not promising to build more roads, he thinks the problem starts at City Hall:

We all sit in red light after red light and wonder how do we keep building here? And the answer is, we bury the numbers to our detriment. There is fuzzy math. I have spent a lot of time looking at how we are calculating traffic, and the numbers are skewed.

Let’s stipulate that traffic does indeed suck in the SCV (I don’t believe that but ok)- is he alleging dishonesty or incompetence on the part of the City’s traffic engineers and planners? That they are manipulating traffic counts or deliberately underestimating the amount of traffic that will be generated by development projects?

That’s a pretty serious charge.

Or is he just using the familiar traffic canard to browbeat the incumbents for letting development in the SCV grow too much?

He then goes on to say some smart things. The City Council, he says, should be focused on bringing high-quality, high paying jobs to the Santa Clarita Valley, not low-wage jobs.

70% of our economy are small business owners. We are three years into a down economy and not one of the incumbents has really stepped up with a plan to solve that problem. What we do have is we’ve got big box stores, we’ve got big companies coming here that are bringing low wage jobs that are benefiting from our tax incentive programs that we’re all paying.

In this, he seems to be questioning the effectiveness of some of the City’s business-friendly programs. Such programs are helping businesses, just not the businesses we need to make the local economy robust. He also says that many of the jobs in the SCV attract people from the SFV and Antelope Valley who increase traffic in our town then take their paychecks back home and spend there.

Perhaps he’s right about that but here’s the thing: how do you grow the SCV economy with high-quality jobs without building new business parks, office buildings and other developments that then result in more traffic?

Remember, this is the guy who lead the fight against Mayo Expansion because it wasn’t a true hospital expansion, rather it was just medical office space expansion. But couldn’t one argue that the Mayo Expansion project, as flawed as it was, will bring high-paying medical jobs to Valencia (recall Frank Ferry shouting “BRAINS!” while gesticulating wildly at an aerial view of HMNMH)?

Much better paying jobs than the Golden Valley shopping center or Bridgeport Marketplace at any rate?