Does California Have Too Much? : Time to manage growth is fast running out

The latest U.S. Census figures are a wake-up call for California.

The finding that California’s population is very close to 30 million came as no particular surprise for anyone who spends hours a week trapped on roads where traffic ran free a mere decade ago.

But it is one more shrill and valuable warning--especially for the state’s politicians--that the time for learning to manage this incredible growth is fast running out.

Times writer Alan C. Miller reports that jealousy has Washington trashing California the way major league baseball fans once vilified the New York Yankees. On committees that allocate federal funds among the states, he wrote, the word is that “California has too much.”

Californians know better. California certainly doesn’t have too much clean air. Water needed to sustain the kind of growth of the last decade--5.6 million more Californians than in 1980--is barely adequate. Nor does the state have enough prime schools and outstanding teachers, let alone “too much” of either.

Most of all, the wake-up call says that neither Californians nor the people they elect to public office can afford another decade of letting public works, public education and other public programs drift as they did during the 1980s.

Miller warns of possible organized efforts to whittle down California’s share of billions of dollars of federal funds. That, combined with more paralysis in Sacramento, could be deadly for the state.

Start with water. For the first time in this century, nobody knows whether there is enough water to support future growth on the scale that Southern California experienced during the 1980s.

One thing the region does know is that the days of solving water shortages by building huge dams to capture huge amounts of water that once ran off to sea are over. There is no money for huge dams. There are no huge amounts of water to capture.

It is precisely on the water question that the census findings deliver a special warning to Southern California: The region must reorganize its haphazard governments to take care of problems that are of no particular concern to anyone else in the state.

Nowhere has Sacramento broken down in the past 30 years as completely as in a search for ways to protect the north’s environment and still meet the water needs of the south. Southern California must make its own judgments about the adequacy of water and shape its own policies on growth if it turns out there is not enough.

But the legal authority to rearrange governments in the region--if they are to coordinate public programs that make it possible to live decently and work effectively despite rapid growth--must come from Sacramento.

After that it will be up to the region to organize itself to deal not only with water, but with smog and traffic, and also find better ways to deliver the best possible education to the most ethnically and culturally diverse students in the nation.

What the census says is that California may never have too much. And only by heeding the warning can it be certain to have enough.