Time and again, hard-working Californians have told their elected representatives to use their tax dollars to cut the red tape and ease traffic congestion.

In a 2005 survey, 93 percent of Placer County residents said that reducing traffic congestion is important. Their priorities were to ease the traffic flow on Interstate 80, widen the interstate and local freeways, and repair city and county roads.

Most Californians agree that easing traffic congestion is the No. 1 transportation issue. Not surprisingly, in November 2006, California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 1B to spend $19.9 billion to improve our roads and transit facilities.

The people spoke, but most politicians weren't really listening. The same state legislators who, year after year, can't balance the state budget, even when revenues are flooding into the state treasury like the American River during a March "Pineapple Express," want to enact Senate Bill 375 (authored by state Sen. Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento), which will force Californians who commute by automobile to waste even more of our valuable time and money sitting in traffic.

As a member of the Auburn City Council and the six-county Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG), our regional transportation planning agency, I've studied our local transportation system, and here's how I think SB 375 will impact us.

SB 375 is a follow-up measure to Assembly Bill 32 of 2006, which mandates that the state reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 169 million metric tons over the next 20 years – a 30 percent reduction from current 2020 projections. Absent a major technological breakthrough in producing a low-carbon fuel, meeting the AB 32 emissions limits will be almost impossible to achieve without destroying lots of jobs.

Even supporters of AB 32 know that implementing an experimental "cap and trade system" for greenhouse-gas emissions will significantly raise the cost of energy for residents and job creators. That's a politically risky move in the era of $4-a-gallon gas.

Supporters of the AB 32 regime also ignore the need for the thinning of our unhealthy forests and the fact that the last four major forest fires in California (not counting the 2,000 lightning fires of 2008) caused the release of 38 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere – the equivalent of emissions from 7 million cars a year.

The Assembly's bill analysis of SB 375 says, "According to the author's office, this bill will help implement AB 32 by amending programs that are beyond the current authority of the Air Resources Board (ARB)." SB 375 will mandate that SACOG and the other 16 regional transportation planning agencies around the state adopt, by Sept. 30, 2010, a so-called "sustainable communities strategy" that tells the state how the region will meet specific greenhouse-gas reduction targets for 2020 and 2035, as set by the 11 unelected members of the state Air Resources Board.

This unaccountable tribunal can set any greenhouse-gas target for the 17 regional transportation agencies that it wants. If this unaccountable tribunal decides that the "sustainable communities strategy" doesn't cut the mustard, then SACOG will have to submit an "alternative planning strategy" showing how the greenhouse-gas targets will be achieved in the region through alternative development patterns, infrastructure or additional transportation measures or policies. They want to change where we live and how we get to work.

We know what will happen next. The politically connected will lobby the ARB members behind closed doors. The ARB members will be tempted to take the easy way out by raising the greenhouse-gas reduction targets for regional transportation agencies and thereby make local officials rezone for much higher density than appropriate.

Ultimately, SB 375 will put a fat bull's-eye on future road and highway improvement projects in Placer, El Dorado, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties. The tourniquet will get tighter and squeeze the life out of major highway and road improvement projects. Traffic congestion will get worse because that is the goal.

This is all unnecessary. The Metropolitan Transportation Plan 2035, approved by SACOG members last year, increased the transit budget by 21 percent and financial support for pedestrian and bike routes by 56 percent. Steinberg thinks that local officials aren't quite smart enough to plan their communities.

SB 375 is not "smart growth" at all. It's just the typical top-down, "state knows best" approach that will erode the quality of life for hard-working Californians.

Kevin Hanley serves on the Auburn City Council and the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG), the region's six-county transportation planning agency.