Regulations Are a Blessing in Disguise to Business : Economy: Today’s gripes and dire warnings are as valid as those of 1948 when the first smog controls were imposed in L.A.

Although Southern California business leaders continue to complain that government regulations--from air-pollution control to excessive fees--make California less competitive than other parts of the nation, the time has come to stop the crying and to learn to live with the situation.

State, county, city and special-district regulations imposed on business are tough. But these regulations are here to stay, and will probably increase in number and strength as citizens become ever more concerned about their environment and the welfare of their families.

This is not to say that business organizations ought to stop their lobbying efforts to reduce existing regulations. While these attempts aren’t likely to result in a reduction of regulations, they will serve to slow the arrival of additional and tighter regulations--which are inevitable.

A good example is the control of air pollution, which began in Los Angeles with the establishment of the county Air Pollution Control District in 1948.

The APCD promptly introduced regulations to control smoke and other particulate matter spewing into the basin’s air, and industry shouted foul. Iron foundries flatly announced that they would have to go out of business if their furnaces had to be controlled. Oil companies warned that gasoline would become unaffordable if hydrogen-sulfide emissions had to be limited.

A few years later, when hydrocarbons were identified as a source of smog, the oil industry really rebelled. There was no economic way to seal storage tanks, it was claimed. And talk by the APCD of eventually taking lead out of gasoline, requiring vapor-return lines on filling hoses at every gasoline station and requiring control devices on automobiles was laughed at.

APCD assertions that future industry would have to be zoned and automobile traffic reduced through ride-sharing were considered daydreams, and the concept of controlling vapor loss from paint processors and dry cleaners was regarded as a pie-in-the-sky impossibility. Counties surrounding Los Angeles only smiled.

Today, of course, there are more and stricter air-pollution control regulations than were even dreamed of by the APCD in those days, despite all the opposition that business and industrial leaders could muster.

Regulatory controls cannot be turned back.

But they can be worked with.

And they even have advantages.

What kind of air would Los Angeles and surrounding counties have today if not for the APCD, and its successor agency, the South Coast Air Quality Management District? It’s not likely that we would have sustained the record-shattering growth of population, business and industry that marked Southern California over the past 45 years, were it not for the ongoing battle against pollution.

The answer is that Southern California business leaders have to work with this region’s strengths--just as the automobile industry is learning to live with safety regulations.

Do automobile ads tell us that car manufacturers lost their hard-fought, years-long battle against passenger air bags? No. They boast that their cars feature not only driver-side air bags but passenger-side bags as well.

In 1973, the head of Orange County’s Irvine Industrial Complex was asked whether his company’s self-imposed CC&Rs; (covenants, conditions and restrictions), the tightest industrial land-use regulations in the nation, would keep industrial firms from buying sites in his development.

His response was just the opposite--that companies would locate there because of the CC&Rs.; The success of that development has proved him right.

Competition from other states without our stiff regulations? Sure. There will always be companies that move to regions that lack regulatory controls--for now. Even Houston, long an example of how a city can survive without zoning regulations, is now instituting zoning controls.

I don’t mean this to be an environmental, bleeding-heart argument with an anti-growth, anti-business slant. Rather, this is a pro-growth, pro-business position.

Southern California’s economic future can be better served by business leaders who proclaim the region’s many strengths, rather than wasting their efforts in futile and counterproductive attempts to reduce regulations.