A Good Friend--or Big Brother? : Air-quality agency’s nosing around just isn’t very neighborly

The collection of information on some local officials that turned up in South Coast Air Quality Management District memos obtained by The Times surely add up to no local Watergate. The revelations show mostly that the air district has been involved in the usual jockeying for position characteristic of a government bureaucracy finding its way in the Hobbesian world of local government. Still, AQMD has to be aware that an agency charged with the nearly sacred duty to monitor the air we breathe must not contribute in any way to unintentionally befouling the political environment.

For example, there is nothing particularly sinister in the revelation that air-district executives were apprised in an internal staff memo that their board chairman, Yorba Linda Councilman Henry W. Wedaa, played golf with Santa Ana’s city manager. Nor does it seem all that terrible that the liaison officer who gathered such information analyzed campaign strategy in the race of yet another board member whose seat, like Wedaa’s, was being contested. Everybody knows that bureaucrats assess the political landscape all the time.

But AQMD has understandably been trying to do what it could to improve relations with local officials during the past year in a very trying environment. The shifting and jockeying of various levels of government--in this case, one super agency’s search to solve common regional problems without stepping on too many local toes--has made consensus-building a formidable task. AQMD must deal with governments across Southern California.

And those efforts to win acceptance for regional initiatives have come at an especially difficult time politically. The recession has many business and local government leaders extremely antsy about the perceived costs of government regulations and the burden on business in carrying them out. The AQMD clearly knows this and has done what it could to find out who its friends are in local government.

Even if there is no evidence that the air district attempted to influence board elections or do anything untoward, it did not necessarily keep abreast of things as diplomatically as it might have. For example, Anaheim Assistant City Manager Jim Armstrong is the very sort of official with whom AQMD must work compatibly. Imagine his surprise at learning that one air-district memo had him describing Wedaa as “cantankerous.”

If AQMD truly wishes to improve its relations with local officials, it must take some care to cultivate and retain their trust. And one perception that it very much should want to avoid is even a hint that Big Brother is watching.