ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Half a Loaf on Federal Courthouse

A query for the California congressional delegation: Would you prefer to have all the federal funding upfront for an important project in your home state, say, a federal courthouse in Santa Ana? Or would you go along with having half the money now and the promise of the rest later?

It seems obvious that bringing home the bacon sooner is far preferable to getting a promissory note. With the shifting sands in Washington driven by deficit concerns, one never knows which way the budgetary battle is going to go, even a year from now. But putting the money right in the state’s pocket is not what happened in the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday.

It appears that politics may have clouded the judgment of Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who went along with a funding arrangement that allocated less than the full amount for the new courthouse and office complex in downtown Santa Ana in 1994, with the provision that the rest would be available in the 1995 fiscal year. The committee adopted legislation that would provide only half the $168 million that the Clinton Administration had asked, after the House already cut $20 million from the President’s figure.

The courthouse has been a pet project of Republican Rep. Christopher Cox of Newport Beach, who has told supporters that he intends to seek his party’s nomination to run against Feinstein when she comes up for reelection next year.

If the project were brought in quickly, conceivably Cox would receive full credit for it. Feinstein denies a political motive on her part, and argues that there is hard and fast language in the bill that will make the money available when the General Services Administration is ready to proceed with construction. She asked for the written promise, as she put it, “to avoid any political issue that is to be made out of this.”

Money presumably will be there down the road. But, Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), the chairman of the subcommittee that finances courthouses, emerged from the deliberations with $200 million for a new courthouse in Phoenix, even though construction on that building will not begin until fiscal 1998. There was no halving of the funds for his project, or, for that matter, for a $162-million appropriation for a second federal courthouse in Sacramento.

Either Feinstein is playing politics after all or she is a bit unrealistic in holding that what is written in Washington today cannot be unwritten tomorrow. It’s too bad either way, because the project promises to be an important boost for Orange County in a time of recession. Santa Ana expects, realistically, its 348,000-square-foot facility to be a catalyst for economic activity in a struggling urban center.