Consultant Services for Green Means Go Funding Strategy Exploration

The Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) is a voluntary association of governments and a Joint Powers Authority under California Government Code Section 6500 et seq. Member jurisdictions include 22 cities and six counties: the County of Sacramento (including the cities of Citrus Heights, Elk Grove, Folsom, Galt, Isleton, Rancho Cordova and Sacramento); the County of Yolo (including the cities of Davis, West Sacramento, Winters, and Woodland); the County of Sutter (including the cities of Live Oak and Yuba City); the County of Yuba (including the cities of Marysville and Wheatland); Placer County (including the cities of Auburn, Colfax, Lincoln, Rocklin, Roseville and Town of Loomis) and El Dorado County (including the City of Placerville).

SACOG is using an Informal Invitation for Bid process to solicit qualified bids for a consultant to design, facilitate, and summarize a focused regional conversation on a new funding strategy for Green Means Go, SACOG’s primary housing implementation program for its long-range plan, the 2025 Blueprint.

SACOG is a regional government agency governed by 31 board members who are local city and county elected officials representing the greater six-county Sacramento region. SACOG has played a role in regional land use planning, including housing planning, in the Sacramento region for more than 20 years. Under state law, SACOG develops and maintains a regional long-range integrated transportation and land use plan. The current draft plan is called the 2025 Blueprint and it calls for an additional 278,000 new homes to accommodate an increase of 600,000 new people in the region by 2050 (see 2025 Blueprint ). SACOG is also responsible for developing the Regional Housing Needs Allocation for the six-county Sacramento region, which is consistent with the 2025 Blueprint.

The primary mechanism by which SACOG has sought to implement solutions to key housing challenges is through the Green Means Go program, which was created as an implementation action of the 2020 MTP/SCS. Green Means Go attempts to incentivize infill housing in key growth areas called Green Zones , which were nominated by local governments across the region and include areas like transit station areas, downtown specific plans, and corridor plans.

It does this through a multi-pronged strategy aimed at providing technical assistance to local governments around meaningful policy reforms to make it easier and faster to build needed housing, funding for said policy reforms, and targeted infrastructure investments that both reduce costs for developers and stimulate development.

Technical Assistance for Local Policy and Process Reform

SACOG engaged local governments and the development community to explore housing barriers across several efforts, beginning with the Housing Policy Toolkit in 2020, which provided a roadmap to allow for more affordable housing product choices to be built in more locations, using a simple, non-discretionary approval process with streamlined environmental review, and reasonable fees. SACOG then developed The Commercial Corridors Task Force toolkit , which distilled a year’s worth of investigation and lessons learned to help jurisdictions revive commercial corridors. As a part of a consultant-led analysis on housing product type preferences and demand, SACOG also conducted focus groups with developers to identify other barriers. All this work was then synthesized into a regional housing initiative called Mind the Gap outlining six policy moves, each with several specific actions that local governments were encouraged to take: Facilitate Missing Middle, Strategically Allow for Higher Density Housing, Transition from Discretionary to By-Right Development Review, Reduce Government-Mandated Parking Requirements, Incentivize Accessory Dwelling Units, and Reduce Displacement: Protect Tenants and Fund Subsidized Affordable Housing.

Planning Funding

SACOG used Regional Early Action Planning (REAP) 1.0 and a portion of REAP 2.0 from the State to fund over $11.5 million of planning activities that use the resources above and fund planning efforts to accelerate the production of housing in infill areas. In REAP 1.0, each of the 28 jurisdictions received a formula-based grant, and another 12 grants were competitively awarded. Generally, jurisdictions used the grants for updating development and zoning codes, developing objective design standards, preparing plans and educational packets for Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), and conducting infrastructure and technical analysis of specific infill and corridor housing sites. REAP 2.0 included approximately 15% of funding for planning activities similar to REAP 1.0.

Capital Funding

SACOG has also provided direct funding for infrastructure and capital investments through Green Means Go grants, including $3.2 million on five “early activation” projects directly related to affordable housing projects, over $25 million of REAP 2.0 funding on capital projects in green zones, and $19 million to nine projects as part of the federal Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods (RCN) grant program. These planning and design projects are largely oriented around non-transportation infrastructure planning like sewer and water upgrades that are difficult to find outside funding for and are often significant barriers to new development.

As SACOG moves into the next phase of Green Means Go and the implementation of the 2025 Blueprint this summer and fall, there is a desire to better understand how SACOG can best continue this momentum in the potential absence of external funding opportunities. This is a direct commitment made in Policy Vibrant 2 in the Draft 2025 Blueprint, which says “Identify and secure stable sources of funding and financing to continue the momentum of Green Means Go and accelerate the construction of a range of housing options that are affordable in low vehicle miles traveled (VMT) areas of the region.”

SACOG started this conversation at the August 7 ^th Land Use and Natural Resources committee, where staff provided a presentation and facilitated a discussion with the committee on how the program could be funded. The staff report for that item can be found here and a video recording can be found here . The presentation was oriented around four overarching strategies for funding:

1. Continue to Pursue State and Federal Funding
2. Incentivize Using Existing SACOG Funding
3. Pursue New Revenue
4. Coordinate Existing Mitigation Funding

At the meeting, the committee provided input on these four options with the most engagement on the final option to explore a Regional Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) Mitigation Strategy as an alternative to the recent creation of a statewide VMT Mitigation Bank in July 2025. This scope of work is intended to provide targeted outreach on the potential for a regional VMT mitigation strategy as a means of funding Green Means Go projects.