The Feather Trail : Sacramento Cries Fowl after Quake Bond Measure Fails

If you San Fernando Valley residents have heard more than a few clucking noises lately, or have noticed the nearby settling of piles of a particularly non-aerodynamic form of feathers, we have reassuring news. Relax. You’re not losing your mind. It’s just those chickens coming home to roost from Sacramento after the Northridge quake. They don’t fly, so it’s taken this long for them to arrive. To explain, a chronology is in order.

Gov. Pete Wilson and the Legislature had a sound way with which to raise state funds for earthquake recovery. As had been done for San Francisco after the Loma Prieta quake, a temporary tax increase could have been enacted. It could have taken the form of a quarter-cent boost in the sales tax, and/or a temporary rise in the gasoline tax.

That pay-as-you-go method would have been eminently efficient and fiscally sound. It would have served California well in providing its 10% share of the cost of repairing or rebuilding schools and other public buildings, utilities and roads damaged in the temblor, and in providing its 25% share of the costs of upgrading public buildings in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties. The federal government is providing the rest.

But Wilson and the Legislature cut a wide berth around the temporary tax idea, relying instead (and without a Plan B to fall back on) a much less fiscally sound and more expensive bond issue called Proposition 1A. You could rightly ask how reasonable it was to expect folks in the far reaches of this huge state to vote in favor of such a thing. (They didn’t. It failed.) You could also question the mathematics, as perhaps the voters did: That $2-billion bond issue was going to cost taxpayers as much as $3.6 billion over the 25-year life of the bond.

Now, the fallout, or the chicken feathers, if you will, are landing all over the place.

Consider that Caltrans Director James van Loben Sels was already confiding to people in January that insufficient revenues were going to send the state’s transportation program “off the cliff” in 1995.

Well, the failure of Proposition 1A “shoved the program over the precipice and into a free fall about six months sooner than expected,” according to Arthur Bauer, executive director of Californians for Better Transportation.

We are referring, among other things, to the most recent estimate of the number of highway overpasses around the state that will have to be retrofitted to withstand the next major earthquake. The cost is currently believed to be $1.05 billion. Sixty-one of those bridges are on the Golden State Freeway, and another 20 are on the Antelope Valley Freeway.

Gov. Wilson has now said that such retrofitting will get first priority on the already scarce transportation funds. Well, that’s not exactly reassuring. Even on an accelerated basis, the retrofitting isn’t expected to be complete before 1997, and other road and rail projects will have to be delayed to make way.

What types of things figure to get delayed? Oh, just the kinds of projects we’ve been touting as necessary for the creation of a regional transportation system that is less vulnerable to natural disasters, the kinds of projects that are more environmentally sound and more oriented toward mass transit, the kinds of projects that will make life easier on commuters.

In our region, for example, one project that might get delayed is the widening of a 36-mile stretch of the Antelope Valley Freeway from the Golden State Freeway in Santa Clarita to the Avenue P-8 overpass in Palmdale. Even funding for the planned east-west San Fernando Valley rail line could be postponed, especially since no decision has been made on where that line is going, and in what form. Estimates of the delays range from one year (very conservative) to much, much longer.

When it finally comes to the hard choices of what must be put on the back burner in terms of funding, just remember that trail of chicken feathers. It leads back to Sacramento, and the failure to enact the minor tweak of a temporary increase in the sales tax or gasoline tax.