CLOUDS OF DISPUTE COVER WORLD WARMING : POLITICAL HEAT VS. SCIENTIFIC LIGHT : Needed: Strong Governor to Solve Growth Gridlock

Last winter, after the deluge of local growth-control initiatives on California ballots, state legislators flooded the Capitol in Sacramento with a record number of bills supposedly designed to deal with growth pressures in the state. By the time the Legislature adjourned in mid-September, however, only a trickle of bills made it through to the desk of Gov. George Deukmejian. And with one exception--the gas-tax bill, designed to provide $18 billion for transportation and encourage local traffic-reduction programs--none of these bills really address the question of how California will handle its astounding growth.

California once led the nation in innovative and aggressive land-use planning. The state’s stable of talent in this area-- planners, lawyers, designers and consultants--is still regarded as by far the best in the country. But the state remains unable to deal with the side-effects of growth--in particular, high housing prices and severe air pollution created by an auto-oriented society--because of the political gridlock surrounding growth and development.

On the local level, this gridlock is by now familiar. Developers want to build buildings with a minimum of fuss. Neighbors don’t want the buildings at all. And politicians walk a tightrope between them because they need both developer money and neighborhood votes to win reelection.

The truth is, however, that this gridlock exists because nobody in California is willing to make the sacrifice required to solve the problem. In a way, the solution is simple. It is true growth management, which means finding ways to accommodate further growth of all sorts (population, commerce, industry) while using fewer resources (cars, land, water) in the process. And nobody really wants to do this. Developers already feel that all of society’s problems are being blamed on them. Neighborhood slow-growthers don’t want to surrender cars and back yards. Politicians don’t want to alienate constituencies.

What happens in Sacramento is important because the growth conflict is not going to be resolved on the local or regional level. Local politicians can’t really deal with the problem because ultimately they are responsible to parochial constituencies. Look at Ruth Galanter, now at odds with Venice-area residents who helped elect her to the Los Angeles City Council. Galanter was elected largely on her promise to cut the gigantic Playa Vista project down to size. No matter how well she does that, however, if she votes for the project at all she’ll be pegged as “pro-development”--and maybe booted out of office.

Regional solutions probably won’t work either--at least not bottoms-up, L.A. 2000-style solutions. Bottoms-up regional solutions depend on the support and political courage of local politicians committed to them--and such politicians usually don’t survive. The Los Angeles area is littered with former city-council members who were defeated for reelection because they spent too much time away from their core constituency, dealing with regional issues at meetings of the Southern California Assn. of Governments. (They’re not hard to find; most of them work for SCAG now.)

When the solution to a problem is this politically unpopular, the only way to solve it is from above--by a political figure with a broad-enough constituency to take the heat. In the area of growth management, there is only one possibility: a strong governor willing to take risks in order to seek the broader political advantage that real problem-solving might bring.

Here California can learn important lessons from two other states that have experienced similar growth problems in recent years: Florida and New Jersey. Both have dealt with growth aggressively at the state level. And in each case, a strong, committed governor has played a pivotal role.

Florida has the strongest growth-management role in the country. The state has a few clearly stated goals--housing, environmental quality, compact urban development, coastal protection. Local governments do most of the planning, but they are held accountable to state goals by the state Department of Community Affairs. If local plans don’t measure up, they are rejected and development permits issued by local governments are no longer valid.

This harsh but effective system was established by a strong governor, Democrat Bob Graham, and is now being carried on with surprising aggressiveness by his Republican successor, Bob Martinez.

Martinez is currently sponsoring a legislative proposal to establish an urban-growth boundary around every large metropolitan area in Florida--in essence, a dividing line between city and countryside that developers cannot cross. It is hard to imagine a Republican governor of California taking such a strong position.

In New Jersey, regional planning was originally imposed by the state Supreme Court, which forbade suburban townships from zoning out low-income housing in a 1975 case involving the community of Mt. Laurel. But when the state government finally did take control of the issue and passed a Florida-style growth-management law, it was largely due to the efforts of a Republican governor, Thomas H. Kean, with help from Democrats in the state Legislature.

In contrast, California suffers legislative gridlock, not only at the local level but in Sacramento as well. As in local politics, important interest groups in the capital all say the problem should be solved, yet none are willing to give up what they have.

Local governments, with strong lobbying presences in Sacramento, are embroiled in growth issues all the time but their concerns are parochial. They fight among themselves, jealously guard their own power and don’t want to be accountable to the state for housing, air quality, traffic congestion or anything else. The last thing they want is some bureaucrat in Sacramento telling them they have to permit more apartments and fewer auto malls.

Builders, also a strong lobbying force, are not interested in projects that will permit people to use fewer resources, for example by encouraging more dependence on public transit and using land more efficiently. For one thing, they perceive a market risk. But beyond that, it would mean more governmental interference; builders already feel they are taking a beating at the local level.

And the slow-growthers, despite all their talk about solving the problem, are rarely able to translate their rage about a new neighborhood building into effective political force at Sacramento. The only issue they really seem to care about is protecting their virtually unbridled ability to place any local land-use issue on the ballot. Only when this power is threatened do slow-growthers forge useful alliances with environmentalists and, therefore, manage to influence legislation in Sacramento.

Deukmejian has never really grasped the exercise of leadership, especially on the issue of growth. After six years of ignoring it, the governor finally backed a gas-tax increase this year, mostly for road construction. But building more roads is not the same as managing growth--in fact it may encourage more land-gobbling and auto-dependent development, diggingCalifornia even deeper into the hole.

The only interesting and potentially useful piece of legislation to come out of Sacramento this year was the so-called “congestion management” portion of the gas-tax deal, sponsored by Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar). The Katz bill makes some $3 billion in gas-tax money available to local governments for transportation purposes--but only if these cities and counties embark on “trip-reduction” programs to reduce the auto travel to and from new developments. If properly implemented, the Katz bill would constitute California’s most important step so far toward true growth management, as opposed to simply building more roads.

But local governments don’t really like Katz’s plan (he cut them out of the negotiations), and builders, who signed off on it earlier this year, are trying to get Deukmejian and Katz to weaken it. This political victory for growth management may soon vanish.

So gridlock continues. Local politics remains a hopeless stalemate. Regional planning solutions are useless if they depend on the courage of local politicians. And in Sacramento, the process is dominated by interest groups that won’t give anything up to solve the problem.

But it is possible to break the gridlock. The California middle-class may seem reluctant to sacrifice much of anything, but it is still pretty riled up about traffic, housing, smog and the other side effects of growth. In a recent Field poll, 68% of those surveyed favored controls on “the spread of urbanization into undeveloped areas of my county.” And while a majority said they want slower population growth, most still favored economic expansion. In other words, here is a populace that could be moved by political leadership.

A strong gubernatorial candidate from either party should be able to take this clear public sentiment and turn it to his or her advantage. As in Florida and New Jersey, such a politician could make growth management a campaign centerpiece, break the gridlock of interest groups and reap the resulting political rewards.

The political opportunity is there. The question is whether anyone will be shrewd enough to seize it in the campaign--and strong enough after the election to break the gridlock.