Metropolitan Transportation Commission board members, including Marin County Supervisor Damon Connolly, are meeting at the swank Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn this week to discuss a blockbuster new plan for addressing the Bay Area’s critical shortage of affordable housing.

The plan calls for generating $1.5 billion per year in new revenue over the next 20 to 25 years to achieve its goals. It would include new taxes and fees affecting property owners, developers, employers, local governments and taxpayers.

Marin critics of the MTC and its initiatives, such as Plan Bay Area, see the choice of venue as indicative of the commission’s hauteur.

“It smacks of decadence,” said Richard Hall of San Rafael. “While working to house people with low incomes, we have a group of politicians living it up at a wine resort in Sonoma.”

Some members of the commission will be staying overnight at the inn while attending the retreat, which cost the commission $29,000. Mission Inn’s amenities include a spa and a Michelin-rated restaurant; the Sonoma Golf Club is next door. The commission had Connolly on a list of attendees planning to spend the night, but he said Tuesday that was incorrect.

A Bay Area News Group editorial in Thursday’s Independent Journal questioned why the commission didn’t hold the 7-1/2 hours of planned meetings over two days at the commission’s new $256 million regional government building, which it moved into two years ago. The editorial noted the building was funded largely with bridge toll money and that tolls are scheduled to go up another dollar on Jan. 1.

The board members’ first order of business on Wednesday was to receive an update on the Committee to House the Bay Area (CASA) compact. Connolly, Marin’s representative on the MTC board, says he doesn’t support the compact in its current form.

“The basic idea behind CASA is that the region has a roughly four decade-long housing crisis that has really accelerated in recent years,” said Ken Kirkey, planning director at Association of Bay Area Governments, who made the presentation at the retreat.

On Tuesday, Kirkey said that while nearly everyone agrees the housing shortage is dire, there have been different perspectives on how to address it.

“Developers would come and say if we would just build more housing that would solve the problem,” Kirkey said. “Folks who had concerns about displacement said housing production was actually the problem. Affordable housing folks would say there isn’t enough money to build affordable housing.”

Led by MTC’s executive director Steve Heminger; Fred Blackwell, CEO of the San Francisco Foundation; Leslye Corsiglia, executive director of Silicon Valley at Home; and Michael Covarrubias, CEO of TMG Partners, CASA is an attempt to bring leaders from across the Bay Area together to forge a consensus on what should be the path forward.

The 50 some individuals who serve on CASA’s steering and technical committees include elected officials; market-rate and affordable housing developers; representatives of nonprofits, labor, and business; social equity and environmental organizations and transportation providers.

The “grand bargain” that CASA is attempting to hammer out is still a work in progress. The current schedule, however, calls for a compact to be finalized by mid-December and for both the MTC commission and the ABAG executive board to consider authorizing the signing of the compact by January.

CASA has three main objectives: to increase housing production at all levels of affordability, preserve existing affordable housing, and protect vulnerable populations from housing instability and displacement.

The committee has come up with 10 actions to achieve these goals: a just-cause eviction policy, an emergency rent cap, access to legal counsel and emergency rent assistance, removal of regulatory barriers to accessory dwelling units and tiny homes, minimum zoning for housing near transit, improvements to state housing streamlining laws, public land for housing production, streamlining of the local housing approval process, new revenue to implement the compact, and creation of a “Regional Housing Enterprise” to manage and allocate the new revenue.

Under the current version of the plan, taxpayers would contribute $400 million in the first year through a new quarter-cent sales tax and another $100 million by approving a five-year general obligation bond.

Property owners would contribute $100 million through a new vacant homes tax of 1 percent of assessed value and another $100 million through a new $48-per-year parcel tax.

Developers would contribute $400 million through two new fees linked to new construction. Employers would contribute $200 million through a new gross receipts tax and another $200 million through a new employee head tax.

Local governments would contribute $100 million through a 20 percent revenue sharing agreement from future property tax growth and $200 million through a 25 percent contribution from revenue set aside for redevelopment.

MTC critics are circulating a video outtake from a CASA meeting in October that has MTC’s Heminger saying, “I doubt that you could put five of these suckers on the same ballot and expect to pass any one of them. So I think No. 1 we’re going to have to be selective. No. 2, as I said earlier some of these may not require voter approval. That is indeed helpful if that is true.”

Hall said, “They’re boasting they can do this without putting it to a vote, and then they’re meeting at a luxury resort to talk about it. I find it counter to democratic values and transparency.”

Susan Kirsch of Mill Valley, founder of Livable California and a vocal critic of Plan Bay Area, said, “CASA is not a group that has had representation from community leaders.”

Kirsch said during a CASA board meeting she attended on Nov. 15 local mayors and city council members expressed concern about how the various revenue-generating proposals might affect their jurisdictions.

“With this much money being drained away from what they have for their own city services, they were clear they wouldn’t be able to support this proposal,” Kirsch said.

She sees CASA’s call for the creation of a “Regional Housing Enterprise” to manage the new revenue as MTC “mission creep.”

Kirkey said the revenue plan was designed to spread the pain so no one group would bear the brunt.

“There is a substantial revenue need; there just is,” Kirkey said. “The region has a huge shortfall in terms of the funding needed to build affordable housing, very little to preserve affordable housing, and there is no current funding around some of the ideas that would support protection.”

As currently envisioned, the Regional Housing Enterprise would be an independent board consisting of members from MTC, ABAG and potentially key stakeholders related to the environment, equity and business, Kirkey said.

In emails, Connolly wrote that while the compact contains some good ideas, “there are significant problems with the approach.”

Connolly wrote that the creation of a Regional Housing Enterprise would be “a further step down the road toward regionalization in land use at the expense of local planning.”

“Residents have made it clear that they do not want a ‘top-down approach’ dictated by regional bureaucracies as to the future of our communities,” Connolly wrote, “and I agree.”

Connolly added, “The compact emphasizes rehashed versions of previously rejected legislative fixes such as SB 827, which would significantly hamstring local control over zoning and land use decisions. These efforts continue to be deal breakers for our residents.”

Susan Adams, who Connolly defeated to become supervisor in 2014, was pilloried by critics of Plan Bay Area for not opposing that initiative when she served as one of Marin’s representatives on MTC.

Kirsch, who failed in a bid to unseat Marin Supervisor Kate Sears in June 2016, said many Bay Area representatives who lost their seats in the Nov. 6 election did so because they were supporting higher housing densities.

But Mary Murtagh, CEO of EAH Housing, who serves on CASA’s technical committee, said, “I don’t think anyone is planning on dictating to anyone locally. However, CASA is seeking solutions, trying to shift the balance so that something can actually get done.

“We’ve had 40 years of local control and look where that has gotten us. We’ve never seen homelessness like this or displacement like this or rents spiraling like they have over the last six or seven years. It’s obscene,” Murtagh said. “Why in god’s name do we think local control is the answer?”