Brown’s Blueprint Puts It Together

Would traffic jams, smog and the other curses of life that mock the neat boundaries of city and county government give way more easily to bigger regional governments? Assembly Speaker Willie L. Brown Jr. (D-San Francisco) thinks so. Based on the arguments to date, we tend to think so, too.

For one thing, the regional governments Brown has in mind would be large enough to make massive public programs work more smoothly, yet close enough to home for voters to get their arms around them. For another, Brown’s blueprint offers an opportunity that may not come again for Southern California--a chance to plan for a future that is both livable and growing, especially the business growth so essential to the region.

The bill that Brown introduced Wednesday would weld 58 counties and hundreds of cities and special districts in urban and suburban California into seven regional development and infrastructure agencies. The seven regional governments would not start functioning until 1992. And how those operations would be financed and whether regional elections would be partisan are still unresolved questions. Brown’s bill is more a blueprint than a done deal.

But it would work to consolidate regional planning and quality control of air and water into one regional agency for six Southern California counties--Imperial, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura. San Diego County would stand alone as a regional agency. Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties would form a south-central-coastal region. All nine counties clustered near San Francisco would make another. Each region would have an 11-member board--six elected by voters and five chosen by cities, counties and special districts--to referee development plans. Because it involves the hot potato of managing growth, Brown’s proposal is sure to stir fierce debate. As a taste of what’s to come, some opponents are warning that developers would co-opt such agencies, others warn that such agencies would co-opt development.

Development is the bill’s magic word because so many problems created by growth--traffic jams on city streets, for example--only seem to be local in nature. But stifling growth in one locality does not stop the growth; the growth just trots off to another locality in the region, taking its attendant problems along with it. As Brown’s researchers noted in the superb report that was the basis of this bill, growth is not a technical problem but “an inherently political issue.”

What Brown is proposing is that the politics be resolved on a broader base than neighborhood by neighborhood. He has issued an invitation to think hard about the future that demands involvement from the best thinkers--from business, from the campuses, from everyone and every place with a stake in California life. That leaves nobody out.