Pollster Blames Politicians for Problems of Rapid Growth

Fifteen years of failed political leadership, especially at the state level, has spurred recent citizen unrest over rapid growth in California, pollster Mervin Field said Thursday at a Costa Mesa conference on growth.

That unrest has led more and more to local ballot initiatives to control growth, such as the one that may appear on the Orange County ballot in 1988, Field said.

Field, who has been sampling California public opinion for more than 40 years, said growth had been for many state residents merely a “euphoric term”--until the impacts of increased population began to ruin, rather than improve, their quality of life.

He blamed three governors--Ronald Reagan, Edmund G. Brown Jr. and George Deukmejian--for failing to exercise the vision and leadership needed to keep California’s roads, schools, sewers and other services ahead of the huge infusion of people since about 1970.

Other politicians, he said, contributed to the problem by ignoring the state’s needs--forcing citizens to resort to the ballot initiative and local, piecemeal solutions that have only pushed growth from one area to another.

“Instead of consensus politics, we have a fractured and fragmented political system based on individuals and small special-issue groups, which work only for their own narrow causes and to further their own individual careers,” Field said. “We have politicians preoccupied with raising incredibly large, obscene amounts of funds for their own and their friends’ never-ending campaigns.

“They measure their own political stature in how immovable and intractable they can be and less on how much good can result by understanding all sides of an issue and compromising. Stubbornness and obtuseness instead of insightfulness and accommodation are too frequently considered today’s political verities.”

This year’s rebate of $1.1 billion to California taxpayers, which Deukmejian has said was required by the state’s constitutional spending limit, was the most recent example of shortsighted leadership, Field said.

“This money was rebated by a weak-kneed, pandering group of politicians in a gross misreading of the public’s mood,” he said. “The taxpaying public . . . in a variety of surveys (said) that the surplus would be better spent on public schools or other services that had a demonstrated need.”

Field was the bluntest of several speakers at a conference sponsored by state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) to examine the problems caused by growth and discuss possible solutions. The conference focused on the increased popularity of local growth-control initiatives such as one that a group is trying to qualify for the June, 1988, ballot, which would link future development in Orange County to builders’ willingness to pay for new streets and highways.

Others who addressed the group of about 150 business people, planners and local officials used statistics and charts to show that conditions in Orange County and throughout the Los Angeles basin will probably get worse before they get better.

The region’s population is expected to grow from an estimated 13.4 million today to 18.3 million by the year 2010, according to Mark Pisano, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

Yet the region’s ability to move people and goods on roads, to process waste water, dispose of garbage, keep the air clean and supply fresh water to residents is barely adequate today and far from prepared for such an influx, he said.

Worse, Pisano added, the region has fallen behind its levels of five years ago, when his agency last made a major assessment of the region’s ability to cope with its future.

Despite all this, Pisano said he was confident that the area will find solutions to its problems once “the issues are on the table so the community can understand them.”

But Field wasn’t so sure. He described Pisano as an optimist: “Someone who still thinks the future is uncertain.”

Field, founder of the California Poll, spoke more on the past and present than the future.

He said Californians, in the 25 years following the end of World War II, saw growth as a means to improving their own way of life because it brought new jobs, business and a comfortable, suburban way of life. The government was building a huge new freeway system, the State Water Project to bring water from Northern to Southern California, top-quality education systems for children and college students, and more.

“The public’s acceptance, if not overwhelming commitment to growth, was virtually absolute,” Field said. “If California had a religion, its basic tenet was growth.”

That mood began to change in the 1970s, when continued growth began to overwhelm basic public services. Problems that could have been solved relatively cheaply were ignored by a series of state politicians until they became crises, Field said.

“This inaction has forced citizens to resort to ballot measures pushed by “initiative promoters propelled by ego-driven notions that they are public saviors and whose sloppy, undisciplined legislative ideas too frequently address the wrong problems,” he said.

Growth management, which should have been addressed on a state or regional level, is increasingly being handled by local government or through citizen’s initiatives, which are often inadequate or flawed, Field declared.

Sen. Bergeson said afterward that she agreed with most of what Field said about the state’s political leadership. “Thanks, I needed that,” she quipped after Field finished his speech.

“The reason we’re having these hearings is because of the problems that have been caused by the inability of the state Legislature to respond,” she said.

But county Supervisor Gaddi Vasquez, who also spoke at the conference, noted that Orange County residents were offered the chance to pay for major transportation projects in 1984 but rejected a proposal to increase the sales tax a penny on the dollar. Now the county is struggling to pay for new roads, mainly by assessing fees on development.

“The voters set the parameters,” Vasquez said. “They said we’re not going to give you the money. We’ve had to be creative in identifying financing” to pay for new roads.