A Cure for the Bay Area Blues
Consider these issues now being faced by the sprawling, growing California metropolitan region: The economy is healthy, but its traditional base is eroding and changing in ways that are not well understood; there is concern about the quality of public education; housing and transportation problems are undercutting the area’s competitiveness; growth and slow-growth forces are clashing, and the high quality of life is threatened.
This litany should be familiar to Southern California officials who have expressed identical concerns but have found no effective, unified method of combatting the problems. This particular list of challenges, however, has been compiled by government, business and education leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area through a new entity known as the Bay Area Economic Forum. The forum is a public-private partnership formed late last year under the auspices of the Bay Area Council and the Assn. of Bay Area Governments.
In a 24-page publication, the forum addresses itself to critical questions that are strikingly similar to problems in the Los Angeles region. The approach is much like that taken by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s LA 2000 committee, which urged a regional attack on regional problems. In its concluding section, the Bay Area report says: “Parochial thinking is one of the Bay Area’s chief handicaps in dealing with the complex issues and difficult choices of the 1990s. A shared and realistic vision of the region’s problems, needs and potentials must become one of our chief goals.”
Significantly, members of the forum under the chairmanship of Robert T. Perry, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, represent the cream of leadership in the nine-county region, including the mayors of San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland; the president of Stanford University and the chancellors of UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, and top executives of industries including the Chevron Corp., National Semiconductor Corp. and Hewlett-Packard.
The forum is not just another discussion committee, Parry said in the forward to the booklet, but is a group designed to provide real leadership that crosses city lines and county boundaries. Considering traditional trans-bay rivalies, this will not be an easy task. But if the area’s leaders insist on success, they will succeed. Southern California should watch with interest.
