Wedaa Has ‘Gone Native’ on Regulation

While Henry W. Wedaa is no doubt well intentioned (“Letting the Agency Take Care of Business Is Good Economics,” Commentary, Sept. 13), he has made the classic mistake often made by otherwise business-oriented Republican politicians when put in charge of a regulatory agency like the Air Quality Management District: He has gone “native.”

A few books have been written commenting on this phenomenon, such as the retrospective on the Reagan Administration titled “Steering the Elephant.” What “going native” means is that, after a short period of service as a policy-maker at an agency, the otherwise business-oriented Republican politician becomes comfortable with the bureaucrats at the agency, gets to like them, and eventually can’t say no to them. This is what has happened to AQMD Chairman Henry Wedaa.

The root of our current recession rests in unbridled taxes, spending and regulatory policies by government on all levels. Focusing just on regulatory costs, as early as 1988, the office of Management and Budget estimated that the cost of federal regulatory policy to the nation approached $150 billion annually. Today, we must add to that the growth of regulation at the federal level, and new state regulations such as Proposition 65 and the expansion of the regulatory staff, power and jurisdiction of AQMD.

Aggressive implementation of these regulations, without appropriate concern for the costs and overall benefits to society, has taken its toll in the well-known form of capital flight and business relocations out of California.

The AQMD and its leaders do bear a degree of responsibility for our current economic mess, and no promise of “creating new industries and jobs through new clean-air technologies” is going to bring the jobs and investment we have lost back to Orange County, no matter what the regulatory bureaucrats say.

JAMES V. LACY

Yorba Linda