Coming Soon: Regional Power

Regional government. More and more you hear the phrase as an answer to every problem in Southern California, whether hardening of traffic arteries or air ever-thicker than bad wine. But regional government (a vague term meaning some form of organization that’s bigger than your local city council but not as big as state government) would not in itself guarantee decent public services. More than anything at this point, the basic idea may be mainly a reflection of despair--an angry reaction to the failure of local governments to cope with overwhelming problems, a sense that we’ve got to get better organized.

Of course, at its worst, a Soviet-style regional government might prove to be a whimpering giant superimposed on a collection of whining pygmies. At its best, regional approaches to specific problems may be a way to unjam political gridlock. No city council or board of supervisors alone can solve traffic or pollution problems whose dimensions exceed their political borders. That’s why last year’s report by the LA 2000 Committee--widely viewed as the most comprehensive survey of the growing Los Angeles area to date--found that one local challenge after another was “a regional problem requiring regional solutions.”

Unfortunately, local governments resist the move to regional methods of problem-solving because they feel threatened--even unloved. Only the wrath of a citizenry increasingly upset over so many unresolved problems is likely to move them. A 1988 Rand Corp. report on Southern Californian attitudes toward regional problems concluded that “the majority of the people of (the) Los Angeles (area) are concerned about the possibility that the quality of life will deteriorate in the next decade. They want--and would support--changes in the way the region’s problems are handled.”

Regional-government bills surface from time to time in the state Legislature, but so far little has come of them. The latest would create a new regional agency to develop and enforce a transportation plan for the six counties in the L. A. basin.

Pros in the state capital describe the bill, sponsored by Sens. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) and Robert Presley (D-Riverside), as dead on arrival. Local governments from Los Angeles to San Diego are seeing to that. The Torres-Presley proposal is not without its flaws, but not all the opposition is grounded in reason. Often “regional government” is simply a red flag for the local bulls, who hope that its time has not yet come.

On this one the people are ahead of the politicians, as usual, so the time may not be so far off when many more regional political entities come into being to deal with specific regional problems. On a much different scale of politics and response but very much like the people in Eastern Europe, Southern Californians are not going to stand much longer for political business as usual.