Mayor Pro Tem and fellow CEHD council member, other council members and the wonderful staff of Thousand Oaks. My name is Rocky Rhodes and while I am a sitting City Council member in Simi Valley, the hat I really like wearing and I'm talking about tonight is your representative on SCAG for District 46 which was just explained by the mayor. Because some of you might not be familiar with SCAG, we're going to do a little history recap of what the organization is and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we do.
The goal at SCAG is to unite cities and counties across geographic, social and political divides around a common vision to improve quality of life in Southern California. We do this through the development of a comprehensive regional plan and more targeted planning studies and strategies focused on specific policy issue or priority. Our work is supported by both federal and state funds, and of course member dues that each of our cities pay in to be a part of SCAG.
Most of the plans we develop are required under either federal or state law, or both, and aimed at ensuring policies and investments across all levels of government are coordinated to achieve federal and state goals related to transportation, housing, and the environment. SCAG is led by a regional council comprised of 86 local elected officials representing member cities like Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley.
It represents counties, county transportation commissions and tribal governments. The SCAG region includes six counties of Imperial, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties. It also includes 16 federally recognized tribal governments in a region of 18.7 million people which is about 47.6% of the entire state population. It's one of the most diverse, both demographically and geographically. And there is no way that any one person could really see what everyone is doing here and that's why a regional collaboration becomes so important.
Connect SoCal is our regional transportation sustainable community strategy plan or blueprint and it's one of the primary documents that SCAG, as the Metropolitan Planning Organization of Southern California, is responsible for preparing. And this document defines the collective vision and goals of the region. And based on engagement with the stakeholders like our cities and the public, we developed a vision for Southern California through 2050. And that simple vision is a healthy, prosperous, accessible and connected region for a more resilient and equitable future.
This includes goals across four main pillars of mobility, communities, environment and the economy. This plan is updated every four years with policies and strategies added and revised based on our progress towards the regional goals, as well as to address emerging issues like the fires that we just experienced. This slide reflects the major policy areas in our current plan under the four planning pillars.
The policy that you see here, those that are emphasized in bold and italics or with an asterisk, they reflect the new policies that were just added into the 2024 plan. In the area of mobility, we are increasingly focused on technology and technology integration ensuring safe and equitable deployment of transportation technologies and services. Everything from autonomous vehicles to e-bikes fall in this category With housing, with the housing crisis continuing to be a primary concern across the region our last plan placed a significant emphasis on both understanding development trends but also incorporating best practices to accelerate local housing production. The plan also emphasized the need for housing development not to just be dropped into a community, but for there to be focus on creating complete communities and increasing access to parks, child care, retail and daily needs through a more holistic planning and investment in local infrastructure.
When it comes to the environment we're increasingly focused on the impacts of climate change and the strategies to make our communities more resilient In terms of the economy, we looked at the impact of new technologies in transportation and the growing need to build a workforce to support the clean transportation technologies and the transition to a zero emission fleet goal.
The plan also considered the growing cost of transportation as a barrier to economic growth in our communities. We are looking at unexplored opportunities to increase access to jobs and schooling through programs like universal basic mobility, which bring us also programs like fare-free transit, which seem to be popular particularly among students. So let's talk about scope. Through the regional planning policies, or though the regional planning policies have expanded over time, the core investments in the plan remain focused on transportation because of our role our plan plays in accessing federal funds. That was the original intent of SCAG, was basically if you had a freeway that needed to go from Ventura to Riverside, you need all the players in place that can work together to get it done.
So transportation's at our core. Here's a quick look at the revenues and expenditures included in ConnectSoCal 24 which total over $751 billion dollars. On the revenue side, most of the funding comes from local and state sources with a smaller share from federal funds and other new opportunities. On the expenditure side, the largest share goes to operations and maintenance which means keeping our transit systems roads and highways running. And that leaves about 40% of the resources for new capital projects building and expanding infrastructure.
The plan is always in progress and we're now working on our next Connect SoCal update. And this slide's telling you that we have a continuous improvement process going through, we work on updates to the model first Then we look at our planning policies and priorities. We do deep data collection process where we work with cities and the public, and we're doing public research outreach. And then we draft the plan – we're planning on drafting the plan in 2027 with a finalization in 2028.
A concurrent with this update that we're working on for connect SoCal is the update to the RENA process. And we're all familiar, I think, with the RENA process which is the regional housing needs assessment I'm happy to say that the committee that I sit on, the subcommittee that I sit on with Mayor Pro Tem Engler is the Community Economic and Human Development Subcommittee. And that's the committee that Rina runs through.
So we're working hard now planning and trying to get a process in place that would allocate from the state more equitably to our cities, and then we as a committee are going to come up with a recommendation of a methodology for distributing those numbers. So if you want help with RHNA talk to Bob. The implementation of the plan is not the responsibility of a singular entity or agency. Rather, the plan is implemented through actions taken across federal state and local governments serving Southern California.
SCAG is primarily a planning and funding agency. Our role is to collaborate and support our partners, the cities in Implementation so that we can all achieve the regional vision. And there are four primary ways that SCAG does this implementation. First, a critical element of implementing our plan are efforts through policy leadership and we advocate in Sacramento.
Our priorities in Sacramento to achieve goals that include advocating for SB 375 modernization to better link the work we do on climate planning with implementation resources and advocate for project funding as part of the cap-and-trade renewal. Another priority for us at state and federal level is to leverage the upcoming 2028 games to accelerate implementation of mobility innovations in region and bring more funding to SoCal projects. The games are expected to track both public and private investment And this is a tremendous opportunity to accelerate the implementation of Connect SoCal. Every time the Olympics comes to a city, there's lasting infrastructure that is put in place and SCAG is in charge of mobility and the transportation of people and goods.
And so we're going to try and leverage that opportunity to move those programs forward. Our team also works to implement the regional plan through administration of federal funding programs Federal funds in the region include, are included in the Connect SoCal but they also have to be part of the Federal Transportation Improvement Program or FTIP. Just to give a sense of scale our most recent 2025 FTIB details $38.8 billion dollars in multimodal investments for a four-year program of projects The largest funding program we administer is the Surface Transportation Block Grant, or STBG, and Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement, or CMAQ.
SCAG recently awarded $1.25 billion in federal funding through the Federal Fiscal Year of 28 to 132 transportation projects that will make it easier and safer for people to get around, reduce traffic and improve air quality across the region. A smaller but significant funding program is the Active Transportation Program, or ATP. It has funded active transportation plans and safe routes to school programs across the region as well as critical infrastructure projects.
And heads up to staff, the ATP cycle eight covering fiscal years 27-28 through 30-31 will offer an estimated $550 million in funding across the state with 114 million of that for the Skagg region. And for our regional active transportation program. The guidelines at both the statewide and regional levels are anticipated to be adopted in March 2026, and that'll open up the call for projects. So get your projects out, get ready.
In recent years we've also benefited from additional state support through the REAP 1 and REAP 2 programs to facilitate both housing and transportation funding programs, and implement our plan through a series of programs aimed at increasing capacity for housing on infill available lands and large corridor lands. We created and financed funding strategies like housing trusts, land trusts and catalyst funds. We're funding the utility infrastructure capacity expansion to support housing development. Can't build a house if you can't get electricity to it.
And we provide funding to support transportation infrastructure In addition to direct grants, SCAG offers a suite of local technical assistant resources to our cities to support local planning efforts. This slide highlights a few that might be of interest to your community. First, SCAG is actively participating in planning for the LA-28 Olympic and Paralympic Games in conjunction with LA- 28 City of L.A., Metro, Metrolink and Caltrans In addition to planning for mobility needs of athletes and spectators, SCAG is also responsible for the regional transportation demand management strategy. This is that thing that will live long past the games on how we move goods which means we'll be partnering with cities like yours and counties across the region to reduce travel on our roadways To support this work, we're developing a series of tools for cities including local activation toolkit with a focus on helping communities deploy community hub and fan zone activations to celebrate games closer to home.
I know in Simi Valley because we have the skateboarding museum, we're actually making a push to brand a community hub to center around that activity So come on over, it'll be fun. And keep people in Simi Valley as opposed to commuting to try and get downtown and by dispersing these things out into the communities they reduce traffic miles on our freeways Following the devastating wildfires last year, SCAG expanded its efforts to support our communities in preparing and responding to natural disasters and other shocks and stressors to become more resilient.
This spring we will release the Regional Resilience Toolkit which is a resource to help jurisdictions to identify resilience challenges then plan and fund and implement these strategies to address them. In addition to the technical assistance resources, we also have data analysis tools available on our website and in reports released throughout the year to support better planning and policymaking at the local and regional level.
Three of those are highlighted here. Through our regional pilot initiative program, SCAG has procured a technical consultant to provide direct technical assistance to public agencies like Thousand Oaks to refine research and answer key transportation and planning questions using big data analytics at no cost. So the work is already done, the consultant is paid for, and you guys can use it.
So we have, we also have safety planning resources on our website including a link to access the transportation safety predictive modeling and analysis platform which supports local and regional traffic safety planning and data focused investment decision making. And finally, I want to highlight the release of our 2025 Southern California Economic Update. Using SCAG's economic roundtable, the report came out in December and presents a snapshot and outlook for the region's economy with additional analysis and anticipated impacts by the LA-28 games.
The Economic Update is one of a series of data reports that SCAG releases throughout the year to understand trends, and progress on regional goals to inform regional and local policy making. And if all of that wasn't enough, if all of that information data and money wasn't enough we give you Rachel Wagner the senior government affairs officer that represents this area and she's your direct liaison and I'm sure staff knows her well And of course, you have Bob Engler who is on the CEHD committee with myself.
And we have Al Adams who is gonna be your delegate to the conference this year for voting on these things and so I appreciate all of you being involved. SCAG's an important part of our region. And with that, I am done with my presentation and I'd be happy to take any questions.
