Top Concern Should Be Making the Valley Feel Safe Again : The familiar woes of urban life--crime, crowding, deteriorating schools--are becoming familiar aspects of an increasingly urban area.

The history of the San Fernando Valley is the history of Southern California.

Only a few generations ago what is now concrete was orange groves and ranches. The movie studios--Warner Bros., Universal, Disney--moved to the Valley for its wide open spaces. Calabasas was a dusty way station on the way to Ventura.

My parents came to Southern California in 1946, like thousands of other young couples looking to start families after the war. They drove down Route 66, and my mother says that when they came over the last pass, suddenly the air was filled with the cheap perfume of orange blossoms.

We lived in Glendale and Whittier, part of the vast movement of population that changed Southern California forever. The population of California then was about 10 million.

When I was a student at the University of California 20 years later, it was 18 million. Today, another 20 years later, the population is more than 30 million and growing.

Tremendous changes have come with that growth, perhaps nowhere more than in the Valley. It was backcountry when William Mulholland brought water south to supply a growing city. Farms and ranches gave way to houses. Moses Sherman platted Sherman Oaks, and Tarzana took its name from the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Valley became suburbia.

Over time, the Valley has become a substantial business and jobs center in its own right. Other, farther valleys have become tied to it by commuting patterns--Santa Clarita, Simi, Conejo, Antelope.

But as the Valley has become more urban, it is experiencing the familiar woes of older urban places--crime, crowding, deteriorating schools. Escalating crime and the collapse of real estate prices have made many feel trapped in their homes.

The challenge to the Valley is more sharply drawn but not dissimilar to that facing all California: In a globalizing economy, with a diverse and rapidly growing population, during a period of unparalleled fiscal and social stress, can we prosper and still maintain the quality of life that drew so many of us here in the first place?

The first issue is crime. No society can prosper, no business can operate, unless there is a basic level of personal security. Yet we are now seeing the full fruits of the liberal culture that values self-esteem more than self-discipline, diversity more than community.

Exploding violence and a gun culture have brought crime to previously safe suburban havens. Even the furor over the Los Angeles Unified School District is, at heart, about crime: The issue is not only educational quality but also the inability of the schools, like the rest of society, to provide a safe environment.

Public safety is the first and paramount duty of any responsible government. We must act at every level on this basic issue, including a renewed stress on teaching children right and wrong, discipline and responsibility for individual behavior. Our justice system should be reformed to minimize legal technicalities and eliminate multiple appeals. Juveniles should be treated like adults if they commit adult crimes, including being put away for a long time at the first serious violence.

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More police officers should be put on the street; Los Angeles is one of the most under-policed cities in the nation. Mayor Richard Riordan is absolutely right to stress this as his first priority. The state and federal governments should help him, including use of the National Guard until the police can be brought up to strength. Before we send the army to disarm bandits in faraway places like Somalia, maybe we ought to do the same here.

The second issue is the economy. California is in a difficult transition period, yet we have the talent and means to pull ourselves out of it if government will get the heck out of the way. At the state level, we have finally begun to understand this and saw significant progress this past legislative session on workers’ compensation, permit streamlining and treating other self-inflicted wounds.

Unfortunately the federal government is marching precisely in the opposite direction. President Clinton’s recently passed economic plan will substantially raise taxes and increase federal spending when we ought to be cutting back. It will drain billions of dollars out of our state after defense cuts, base closures and federal immigration policies, all of which already have disproportionate effects on Southern California.

Third, at the heart of many of the changes in California is the issue of growth. We can have a safe environment and a vibrant, entrepreneurial economy again, but it is very difficult to get there under the tremendous burden of rapid population growth.

Our state has 12% of the U.S. population, but we get three times that share of refugees and immigrants and fully half of all illegal aliens. It is time for the federal government to reform its policies and enforce the laws.

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California can turn it around, but we will need new thinking and fresh ideas. It is no accident that Dick Riordan was elected overwhelmingly from the San Fernando Valley, or that Ross Perot was particularly strong here. The people here are rejecting the professional politicians of both parties.

My wife, my baby daughter and I have moved back to Southern California. We will be proud to be calling the Valley home and to try to do our part to make it a better place to live, work and raise a family.