Deukmejian’s Summit Meeting on Highway Financing

What Gov. George Deukmejian has done is call a summit meeting of some 26 persons to discuss a state gas tax and financing highway construction (Times, Jan. 23). While it’s useful to involve leaders in such matters, the summit seems seriously twice flawed: appointees and the agenda itself.

It’s all right, I suppose, for Republicans to appoint Republicans, and Democrats, Democrats. (Especially when this promises a public good). But there’s more to this summit than simply picking friends to run it. Or people of same politics, bad as that is. Master politicians are usually concerned with more than their image. They frequently look at the public good. Not this time, it appears.

Here’s where the summit fails. The agenda is antediluvian. The inevitable Orange County traffic reliever--built now or later--is of course mass transit, elevated rails. But here comes the governor muddling away. A summit with heads turned backwards, women and men muttering about financing highway construction. A flapping of tongues of people programmed to look only into the past; a wasteful, futile and certainly anachronistic exercise. Some might not agree. Like those eyeing profits from “new highway construction” (new freeways to serve new tract developments).

The summit is further doomed, it seems. Look who Deukmejian invited to the summit from Orange County. Supervisor Thomas F. Riley. Despite his record for new freeways and more development, nothing wrong with that appointment. He’s a county supervisor and chairman of the Orange County Transportation Commission.

But Deukmejian really tells us where he’s coming from in the appointment of Irvine Co. Vice Chairman and arch-developer Thomas Nielson. Nielson comes representing the “Orange County Roundtable business organization.” One whose legitimate objective, and job description, is to ensure that future residents of the Irvine Co.’s projected tract developments have access (roads) to their homes. (You can’t sell houses if you can’t get to them, can you?) Summit panelist Nielson a summit man? Yes. But a professional traffic planner? A financier? A tax expert?

It’s natural for a political party to crony up with fellows who think their way. And these summit gentlemen are certainly honorable people. And fit the litmus test. All Republicans.

No. The fault lies with a governor of a great state who seemingly fails to rise above mean-spirited political counterproductive behavior in order to advance his own agenda, not the public good. He arranges an activity that not only seems to pander to cronies but ignores the potential values of a balanced panel. Where’s the environmentalist? Or even, God love us, a Democrat? He apparently has structured the committee with those whose principal aim is transportation, not for itself but to serve new housing development.

TOM ALEXANDER

Laguna Beach