Transportation, economic equality, earthquake retrofits among priorities for incoming SCAG President

Goods movement, multimodal transportation, earthquake retrofits and economic equality top the list of priorities for the incoming president of the nation’s largest metropolitan planning organization.

Michele Martinez, a Santa Ana City Council member, will be sworn in today for a one-year term as President of the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) at its 2016 Regional Conference & General Assembly in La Quinta. At 36, she is the youngest President in the 51-year history of SCAG and the first to hail from Santa Ana.

Martinez has spent the past year as Vice President of SCAG, during which the organization approved its 2016-2040 Regional Transportation Plan/Sustainable Communities Strategy (RTP/SCS). The plan, which serves as a blueprint for meeting the six-county region’s growth over the next quarter-century, identifies $556.5 billion in transportation investment during that period, including $70.7 billion in goods movement strategies. Freight, logistics and related industries represent one-third of all jobs and economic activity in the SCAG region.

“We need to have the broader conversation of what goods movement means for our economy and our quality of life,” Martinez said. “Ours is the largest container port complex in the country. Making sure we’re all working together and have the pieces in place to maximize that opportunity is critical for our region.”

As a Santa Ana council member, Martinez has been a leading advocate in the area of active transportation, and, in particular, bike and pedestrian safety. On Wednesday, she helped lead a pre-Conference symposium on this topic as part of SCAG’s organization’s Go Human campaign.

“Active transportation gives people greater options and its healthier,” Martinez said. “But as I’ve said about my own community, we need to be known as a region that promotes not just bicycling and walking, but safe streets for everyone.”

Walking and bicycling is part of a broader multimodal strategy for the six-county region to reduce congestion and improve air quality amid growth projections that call for 4 million additional people in Southern California by 2040.

“Multimodal is equitable and it creates economic development opportunities. We need that. One in four children in our region live in poverty,” Martinez said.

She believes SCAG can be a regional leader on other topics of importance to our region, such as earthquake retrofits.

“To have a discussion on best practices would be valuable for all of our communities,” Martinez said.