Slouching Toward Regional Solutions

A road repair project in Alhambra backs up traffic in San Gabriel and San Marino.

Water runoff in the Pacific Palisades pollutes Santa Monica Canyon.

Acrid smoke from the refineries in Torrance drifts over Carson and Lakewood.

An office tower in West Hollywood shades residences across the street in Beverly Hills.

Increasingly, the arbitrary nature of political boundaries is being exposed as the region’s 168-and-counting municipalities and special districts continue to grow and crowd each other.

The result is that regionalism is beginning to be taken seriously as a concept of government to deal with the critical problems of air pollution, water quality, traffic congestion, waste disposal, growth management and the jobs-housing balance.

And that is no joke for this April Fool’s Day.

For years, mentioning regionalism in planning, development and political circles, entwined as they are like an Olympic symbol, was sure to generate snickers and laughs. “Local government give up some of its approval powers? You’ve got to be kidding,” the pundits would say.

But it has become apparent that the growing list of problems affecting the region’s quality of life is simply beyond the grasp of local governments.

And it is equally apparent that the various attempts to handle them so far on a county level have resulted in a bureaucratic gridlock that matches our traffic gridlock.

At the wheel in the middle of the mess has been a somnolent state.

We are not talking simply political theory here. This is about how government works, and doesn’t work.

For example, when Los Angeles County recently proposed to relieve rush-hour congestion on a major boulevard by simply synchronizing traffic signals, it found that the 75 signals involved were in nine cities, and that a few of the cities didn’t want them changed because it would inconvenience a few of their residents.

Or consider the continuing, nasty battle between the county Transportation Commission and the Southern California Rapid Transit District over the design and construction of rail projects.

The action of the agencies has been described as “two hogs pushing each other away from the trough.” They are spending millions in lawsuits against each other while squeezing dimes out of bus riders.

Then there is the current controversy over the Marina Place Mall proposed on a sliver of Culver City at the northeast corner of Washington and Lincoln boulevards, surrounded on three sides by Los Angeles. Culver City would get the taxes and Venice the traffic, so Los Angeles is rightfully complaining.

However, when Culver City complained a few years ago about a proposed mall a block away on Maxella Avenue just within the boundaries of Los Angeles, it was ignored. The mall has since been built, dumping traffic in Culver City. So turns the screw.

These protracted conflicts between jurisdictions were ruefully noted in the Los Angeles 2000 report issued last year.

To begin facing up to these conflicts, L.A. 2000 recommended a metropolitan growth management agency to set policy and provide guidelines for developments “with area-wide impacts.” Also recommended was a metropolitan environmental quality agency. They were the first shots in this latest barrage on behalf of regionalism.

Soon after, the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD), the one governmental body at present empowered to make binding regional decisions, issued a bold plan to deal with smog. The plan establishes a strict set of anti-pollution standards and a timetable for their implementation. Special districts and special interests squealed.

“What we are doing is overlaying local government with a set of constraints, not obliterating it,” said AQMD executive officer James Lents.

However, the AQMD has recognized that its goals will not be met if the region does not begin dealing realistically with traffic and growth issues.

This point also was emphasized in a recent Southern California Assn. of Governments report. Its concerns are prologues to a proposed state proposition (No. 111 on the June ballot), tying transportation to land-use planning within a regional framework.

“Let’s face it,” said Lents in a recent interview, “environmental and transportation problems are making regional government a reality. The question is not whether we will eventually have a regional government, but rather how extensive it will be.”

These are questions on the agenda of the recently established Lewis Center for Regional Studies at UCLA. The hope is that the center will not become yet another self-serving academic exercise, benefitting just the administrators and professors involved, and actually wade into the political muck composed of local and special interest groups where policy and public opinion is formed.

“We intend to be attentive and make a difference,” promised the center’s Allen Scott, a geographer.

Meanwhile, an interesting experiment in the nitty-gritty aspects of regionalism has been launched by the less academic and more reality-oriented UCLA Extension public policy program, headed by LeRoy Graymer. He is serving as facilitator to a landmark attempt by five Westside cities to coordinate traffic and growth management efforts affecting each other.

Putting these actions in a broader perspective, and stirring the hearts of regionalists, was a report a few months ago by the California Assembly Office of Research, entitled “Getting Ahead of the Growth Curve.”

The report cited the ineffectiveness of an array of governmental entities to deal with a range of issues, including air and water quality and traffic. The report concluded with a call for management on a regional level.

Soon after, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown introduced a bill, AB 4242, that would merge various air and water quality boards and transportation planning agencies into seven distinct regional governing bodies across the state.

The Los Angeles region would consist of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura and Imperial counties. Although the bill is not given much of a chance of passage at this time, it is seen as a sort of feather in the wind to test the political sentiments for regionalism.

Besides the traditional distrust of regionalism by conservatives and home-rule advocates, there is now the issue of emerging minority politics.

“Unfortunately, regionalism is rising just at a time when politically active ethnics are getting a local foothold,” observed Alan Kreditor, dean of USC’s School of Urban and Regional Planning. He expressed the concern that regionalism would sap local vitality.

Kreditor also commented that the assembly report, and the bill, were in effect admissions by the Legislature that the increasing problems associated with growth cannot be solved on the state level, and that it was proposing a new level of government, the region, to abdicate its responsibility.

Regionalism is no longer a joke; but then again neither is the condition of our air and water, our waste disposal methods, the lack of housing and a decent public education system, traffic and generally our diminishing quality of life.