Adrift in Political Sewage

A Los Angeles City Council limit on construction is not to be confused with a slow-growth policy. It is not to be confused with any policy at all, being no more than a response to yet another failure of government in California.

This most recent consequence of the hands-off governance practiced these days in Sacramento and in Los Angeles County and the city is that the Los Angeles sewage system is overflowing into Santa Monica Bay. Planning procedures have been so slack that nobody made that most basic connection between population increases that result from promoting growth and the carrying capacity of a sewage system.

Similar consequences of letting dust gather on reams of detailed warnings that growth must be carefully managed from the Southern California Assn. of Governments and others can be seen at virtually any downtown intersection and on most freeways at rush hour. But because freeways are not as well protected by environmental law as are coastal areas, the beaches and an overloaded sewage treatment plant are where governance first got caught napping.

Under a plan approved by the City Council on Tuesday, building permits will be rationed to about 70% of the current total at least until 1992 to slow the growth in pressure that new housing and new commercial construction puts on the sewage system. Another program to relieve pressure on the sewage system is a water conservation plan signed last week by Mayor Tom Bradley; the hope is to cut water use by 10% over five years.

In the best of circumstances, a breakdown in planning that forced Los Angeles to risk losing some business and some jobs during the next few years would concentrate the minds of politicians on a search for ways to avoid such failures in the future. It would produce leaders for an effort to involve state and local governments in efforts to provide rational alternatives to a grass-roots no-growth movement that seems only a few organizational meetings away from being a statewide crusade.

The chances of that kind of leadership emerging from the various gangs of five that are adrift in Sacramento are about nil. Last year the Legislature caved in to Gov. George Deukmejian, who was determined to give back $1 billion to taxpayers despite warnings that forecasts of the state’s 1988 revenues were at best unreliable. As a result, Sacramento has all that it can handle, what with the desperation of the state’s political giants to prevent the reform of campaign financing and its need to make up a $1.2-billion shortfall of revenue that it was warned might be coming.

They seem not much better in Los Angeles. The council made certain that it will have an opportunity in a matter of months to find some sort of environmental grounds to dump the entire plan to keep the Hyperion waste treatment plant from pouring raw sewage into Santa Monica Bay.

Some of the language makes it obvious that the council does not even intend to wait the matter of months to disengage itself from the permit program, case by case. The new ordinance would not apply equally to all applications for building permits. Permits for projects that “provide a public benefit” would be exempt--language broad enough for a skyscraper to wriggle through.