COLUMN ONE : California in State of Fast Decay : The infrastructure is crumbling after years of neglect. But it’s difficult to see where the billions for repairs and new facilities will come from.

It took the fury of nature to drive home a harsh fact of life that Californians have been ignoring for years--the state is falling apart.

When the Nimitz Freeway collapsed and a piece of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge fell during the devastating Bay Area earthquake last Oct. 17, the notion of California as a progressive state that keeps everything shipshape was destroyed as well.

California is entering the last decade of the century with its “infrastructure”--roads, bridges, school classrooms, airports and sewer systems--in an advanced state of decay. Accelerating the decay are a rapidly growing population and voters and political leaders who show little interest in raising taxes to rebuild public works.

“You can make an argument that California is beginning to look like a Third World nation,” said Lewis H. Butler, president of California Tomorrow, a planning group that worries about the state’s future.

The most glaring case of neglect can be found on Oakland’s Nimitz Freeway, where last October’s quake killed 42 people because the California Department of Transportation did not have enough money to strengthen its most vulnerable structures.

But there is other evidence that the state’s infrastructure is crumbling dangerously:

In Orange County, where only two miles of new freeway were built in the 1980s, gridlock is a daily fact of life.

* Much smaller Stanislaus County, in the San Joaquin Valley, has enough money to resurface only 20 miles of its 1,600 miles of road each year. In addition, 50 of 250 county bridges need to be brought up to current earthquake safety standards, but there is little money to do that.

* Raw sewage spills are a common occurrence in San Diego, where city officials must find $3 billion to build a new treatment plant.

* The San Jose sewer system runs so close to capacity that city officials pleaded with residents not to use their toilets en masse during halftime of last year’s Super Bowl football game, for fear the system would overflow.

* In fast-growing Moreno Valley, in Riverside County, school enrollment has doubled in five years, to 26,800, and is expected to double again by 1994. Almost half of the pupils are in portable classrooms.

* Water officials fear breaks in the antique, leaky system of peat-and-sand levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta that helps to separate salt water from fresh and keeps the State Water Project flowing.

* More state prisons and local jails are needed; more schools and colleges; new airports and intercity transit lines; disposal sites for garbage and hazardous wastes; parks, libraries and flood control facilities.

The list goes on and on--and the price is high.

“It is a problem of dramatic proportions,” said Angelo J. Siracusa, president of the Bay Area Council, an organization of major employers in the San Francisco area. “I can’t quantify it, and I don’t know who can, but surely we’re talking about billions and billions of dollars” in new construction and repair.

California ranks near the bottom among states in per capita spending for highways. The state also stands last in percentage of per capita income spent for public schools, as calculated by the U.S. Department of Education.

“The buzzword for the ‘90s is competitiveness,” said Steven Levy, director of the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy. “How can you be competitive if your roads are falling apart and your schools are lousy?”

There are a few bright spots in this generally gloomy picture.

More than $3 billion has been spent on new prison construction in the seven years George Deukmejian has been governor, but even that is not enough to keep pace with the swelling inmate population.

Thousands of new classrooms were built throughout the state in the 1980s, though again not enough to meet the need. And new buildings are rising on University of California and California State University campuses, after several years of relative inactivity.

Finally persuaded that the state gasoline tax must be increased to pay for transportation improvements, the governor is pushing a state constitutional amendment on the June primary ballot that would lift the Gann limit on state spending and would generate about $18.5 billion for new highways and other transportation projects by raising the gasoline tax nine cents over a five-year period.

All three of the major candidates in next year’s gubernatorial election--Democrats Dianne Feinstein and John K. Van de Kamp and Republican Pete Wilson--support this measure, which will be listed on the June ballot as Proposition 111.

In addition, Feinstein has proposed a new state growth management commission that would try to direct California’s explosive growth into areas that do have adequate infrastructure.

And, last fall, Deukmejian also signed a package of bills that could help California cope with its staggering output of garbage.

But for most of the last 25 years--through the governorships of two Republicans, Deukmejian and Ronald Reagan, and one Democrat--Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr.--the state has failed to provide for the needs of its fast-growing and rapidly changing population.

“We’re facing the results of 20 years of negligence,” said Robert Cervero, associate professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley.

Joseph Bodovitz, president of the California Environmental Trust and former executive director of the California Coastal Commission, called it “a breakdown of the social contract.”

California is not alone in allowing its physical plant to deteriorate.

Federal spending for infrastructure has declined steadily since 1969--a victim first of the Vietnam War, then of inflation, and now of the staggering federal budget deficit.

Spending for public works has dropped from 2.3% of gross national product to 1% in the last 20 years, according to U.S. Department of Commerce figures.

“The budget deficit drives everything in Washington now, and the infrastructure problem has been tucked aside,” said Pat Choate, vice president for policy analysis at TRW, whose 1981 book “America in Ruins” stirred interest in the problem for a time.

The problem has been handed back to the states, “and they haven’t done much either,” Choate added.

Ironically, in California the decline in public works spending has coincided with a period of remarkable growth and change.

Last summer, the state’s population slipped past 29 million. It will climb to more than 35 million by the end of this century, if present trends continue.

Thickly populated new communities are springing up almost overnight. The city of Moreno Valley, 10 miles east of Riverside, was incorporated only five years ago but already has more than 100,000 residents. San Joaquin Valley communities such as Lodi, Modesto and Tracy--rural in nature not so long ago--now are filling with commuters from the Bay Area.

But many of these new residents must drive two hours or more, over congested roads, to reach their jobs. In many places, schools are overcrowded, local streets are jammed, sewer systems are inadequate, and water quality and quantity is questionable. Meanwhile, the cities these commuters left behind are filling mainly with ethnic and racial minorities who live in poverty.

A new study by the state Assembly Office of Research notes that minorities probably will account for almost 50% of California’s population by the end of the century.

The report warns about the “fracturing of California into a two-tier society of haves and have-nots,” as whites and Asians dominate the better-paying occupations while “Hispanics and blacks are limited to the lower-paying jobs.”

“Development and jobs follow the Anglo flight from the costly and crowded cities to the affordable, uncongested dream life on the metropolitan fringe,” the report states, “leaving the urban core to those who have the greatest need for public services but the least ability to pay for them.”

The state’s failure to respond to population growth and demographic change has produced a staggering bill for unmet needs in public works.

For instance, the unfunded portion of the five-year state Transportation Improvement Plan now stands at $3.5 billion.

In the big cities, this means potholes, road closures and traffic jams. In Stanislaus County it means a pitifully inadequate $7-million annual budget for construction and maintenance of roads and bridges.

At least $8 billion is needed statewide to bring California sewage treatment plants up to federal water quality and health standards by the year 2005, the State Water Resources Control Board estimates. Much more than that would be required to meet federal air quality standards in the state’s smoggiest communities--Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The state Department of Finance projects an increase in public school enrollment of 1.4 million between 1989 and 1998, and the state Department of Education said it will cost about $11 billion to house these additional students.

In Los Angeles alone, 50,000 more pupils are expected in the next five years, requiring construction of 35 new elementary schools, 10 junior high schools and five senior high schools, at a cost of about $500 million. Another $500 million is needed to repair existing schools.

That kind of money is not available, so class size will increase and all schools will be placed on a year-round calendar.

The University of California, the California State University system and the two-year community colleges say they need billions of dollars’ worth of new facilities if the state is to continue to offer higher education to all who seek it.

Additional billions are needed for airports, prisons, hospitals, port facilities, dams and a host of other projects.

All of this will cost at least $10 billion a year for at least 10 years, most experts believe.

Some in the Capitol quarrel with these estimates.

State Finance Director Jesse R. Huff, for one, said needs have been overstated as a result of “some pretty simple ways of projecting.” However, many of the forecasts--those for the public schools, for instance--come from his own department.

Others believe the numbers cannot grow too large or they will breed a public sense of helplessness.

“There is a major, a very substantial construction need,” said Kirk West, president of the California Chamber of Commerce. “But I don’t want to give the impression that the problem is totally overwhelming.”

“The problem can be made to sound so massive that it defeats efforts to deal with it,” West said. “That is not the case. It is affordable and it can and should be funded.”

Just how is not so clear.

If Californians and their political leaders retain their aversion to new taxes, the money to rebuild the state’s rickety physical plant must come from bond issues and from developer fees and user fees of various kinds.

But there is growing concern in Sacramento about the extent of the state’s bonded indebtedness.

Reflecting this concern, Deukmejian and legislative leaders agreed Friday to place only about $3 billion in new bond issues before the voters next June, out of a total of about $18 billion that had been proposed by individual legislators.

Another $2 billion to $3 billion probably will be approved for the November ballot.

If voters approve these measures, most of the money will pay for schools, prisons, higher education facilities and transportation improvements, but will make only a slight dent in the state’s overall infrastructure problem.

Fees are the other possible major source of infrastructure financing--user fees, developer fees, special assessment districts.

Mello-Roos districts, created several years ago by legislation authored by state Sen. Henry J. Mello (D-Watsonville) and Assemblyman Mike Roos (D-Los Angeles), permit property owners in a given geographic area to assess special fees to pay for roads, schools, sewers and other public improvements.

A few years ago these districts generated only about $20 million a year. Now it is close to $700 million.

Higher sewer rates are paying the interest on bonds that are financing a $3.4-billion upgrading of the Los Angeles sewer system. Higher rates also will help to finance the $3 billion in new treatment facilities needed in San Diego.

Charges for water in much of Southern California will rise sharply to pay for the Metropolitan Water District’s ambitious $3-billion expansion and renovation plan.

Fees paid by developers now account for about 25% of new school construction in fast-growing suburban areas. They also pay for parks, libraries, streets, traffic signals, even police and fire departments--services that were provided by local government before the passage of Proposition 13.

“That’s the biggest source of infrastructure financing we have and it’s largely invisible,” said Dean Misczynski, a principal consultant in the Senate Office of Research.

But developers pass most of these costs along to home buyers, which raises housing prices and forces many potential buyers out of the market.

Most fiscal experts agree that bond issues and fees cannot provide enough revenue to rebuild the state. New taxes are needed but they are also unlikely, except for the half-cent sales tax increases that now have been approved by 16 counties, mostly for transportation improvements.

Most politicians in both parties think the “tax revolt” that led to Proposition 13 in 1978 and to Proposition 4, the “Gann limit” the next year, is still very much alive.

They may rail against the “anti-expansion, anti-government attitudes of the last 20 years,” as state Sen. John Garamendi (D-Walnut Grove) does, but they are not about to propose higher taxes to rebuild the state’s infrastructure.

So the neglect is likely to go on and the quality of life for most Californians probably will continue its downward drift.

“People get the kind of government they deserve,” said Lew Butler of California Tomorrow. “The voters of California have wanted to believe they could have lower taxes and still have a clean environment, safe cities and the rest. Maybe now they’re beginning to see it can’t happen.”

REBUILDING CALIFORNIA Cost estimates for the rebuilding of California’s infrastructure vary widely. They depend on how infrastructure is defined, the time period being considered, whether deferred maintenance expenditures are included, the politics of the person making the estimate and many other factors.

Here are some of the key problems and possible solutions:

TRANSPORTATION: PROBLEM: Construction of new highways and other transportation improvements has lagged far behind the state’s booming population, creating serious traffic congestion in major urban areas and even in smaller cities. The five-year State Transportation Improvement Plan shows a $3.5-billion revenue shortfall. SOLUTION: Passage of a 9-cent state gasoline tax increase next June, which would make $18.5 billion available for transportation projects, if voters also agree to raise the Gann limit on state spending. County sales tax increases and fees on new development also will pay for some new roads and other transportation improvements. SCHOOLS: PROBLEM: Enrollment in kindergarten through 12th grade is expected to increase by 1.4 million in the next 10 years. Another 26,000 classrooms, costing $11 billion, are needed to accommodate these students. All of the money from past voter-approved school construction bonds has been spent. SOLUTION: More bond issues--$2 billion to $3 billion every other year--plus developer fees in fast-growing suburban communities. HIGHER EDUCATION: PROBLEM: The University of California, the California State University and the community colleges all expect large enrollment increases. UC wants more than $1 billion in state construction funds in the next five years, plus another $1 billion to build three new campuses by 1999. CSU is asking for $1.4 billion over five years, plus $2.5 billion to $3 billion for five new campuses. Statewide community college officials say $700 million is needed for building on existing campuses and $1.1 billion for 16 new campuses by the year 2005. SOLUTION: Bond issues. PRISONS: PROBLEM: Despite $3.5 billion worth of new state prison construction in the Deukmejian Administration, state prisons remain seriously overcrowded. The inmate population is expected to swell from 87,000 currently to 137,000 in 1994, requiring another $3 billion to $3.5 billion in construction. SOLUTION: More bond issues. SEWERS: PROBLEM: State officials say it would cost $5.6 billion to bring all sewage treatment plants in California up to federal health standards and that figure will grow to at least $8 billion by the year 2005. Los Angeles alone is spending $3.4 billion to upgrade its sewer system, while San Diego must build a new treatment plant that will cost at least $1.5 billion. The federal government is phasing out the grant program that once paid for up to 75% of these construction costs. SOLUTION: State loans and local bond issues, with interest on the bonds being paid by higher sewer fees. SOLID WASTE: PROBLEM: Californians generate 40 million tons of trash a year. The Little Hoover Commission reported last July that 15 counties will exceed their landfill capacity by 1996 and the entire state will run out of landfill space by the end of the century. Some communities burn their trash in large incinerators, but these are fiercely opposed on air pollution grounds. Recycling garbage is helpful but markets for the recycled cans, glass and paper products are limited. SOLUTION: Legislation authored by Assemblyman Byron D. Sher (D-Palo Alto), and signed into law by Gov. Deukmejian, requires local governments to reduce solid waste 25% by 1995 and 50% by the year 2000. This will cost cities and counties $4 billion to $5 billion, most of which probably will come from local bond issues, with interest repaid by higher garbage collection fees.