NEWS ANALYSIS : Did L.A. Get Shortchanged After Quake?

After the Loma Prieta earthquake hit the Bay Area in 1989, Gov. George Deukmejian urgently summoned the Legislature to a special session, legislators declared that all Californians would help pay for rebuilding with a temporary tax, and generous state housing assistance loans were extended to quake victims.

None of that happened after the Northridge earthquake.

Despite its emergence as the most destructive urban disaster in the nation’s history, last year’s quake did not spark the same outpouring of aid from state politicians that was delivered in Northern California five years ago.

Sacramento shortchanged the hard-hit Los Angeles region as the Southland reached out for leadership, financial aid, consumer protection and tough new seismic safety standards, critics say.

A Legislature that publicly boasted of stringent new bills sometimes allowed companies or groups with a stake in the policies to mold legislation to their liking, according to records and interviews.

Industry opposition to bills, for instance, resulted in delayed deadlines for seismic safety upgrades in hospitals, portable classrooms and mobile homes.

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State officials also withdrew a housing assistance program that could have benefited the owners of 15,000 homes who were not eligible for the vast amount of federal money pumped into the region. The state had previously used this program to assist victims of the Loma Prieta quake, the 1991 Sierra Madre quake and the 1987 Whittier Narrows quake.

Sean Walsh, the governor’s spokesman, defended Gov. Pete Wilson’s Administration and the record of the Legislature, which he said wisely avoided reacting to the quake crisis in a “knee-jerk” fashion.

“For people to criticize certain elements around the fringes of the earthquake recovery effort is irresponsible,” Walsh said. “Pete Wilson was a one-man force for an effort that was a model for the nation,” he said. “Critics are playing back-seat driver but--unfortunately for them--they are driving across freeways that Pete Wilson repaired in record time.”

Wilson’s office oversaw the speedy reopenings of crumpled freeways, the offering of loan guarantees for small businesses and a commitment of tens of millions of dollars in state matching funds to free up federal emergency aid.

California inched closer to its decade-old mandate of significantly improving earthquake safety by 2000, mainly by getting a stalled freeway and bridge retrofitting program back on track.

Wilson signed bills to improve hospital and mobile home seismic safety. He reversed his Administration’s position against a bill to prohibit price gouging in the wake of a disaster. And a new state program paid contractors tens of millions of dollars in bonuses to encourage them to make fast work of repairing Los Angeles’ shattered freeways.

But the picture that emerges from examining state government’s response since the quake is often one of politics triumphing over policy-making in an election year when no one much wanted to challenge special interests and voters were not inclined to put the state further in debt.

For example, Wilson, whose largest campaign donor for the 1994 election was the insurance industry, vetoed two significant measures to enhance homeowners’ rights when disputes arise with their insurance companies.

Even the Seismic Safety Commission fell short of some key legislative goals last year and is planning to return to the Legislature this year with a wish list containing some bill proposals that failed.

“There has not been great leadership on any front,” said Harry Snyder of Consumers Union, an advocate for quake insurance policyholders.

Some legislators privately acknowledge that they were distracted by the election year and neglected to turn their full attention to quake issues as they struggled to meet the demands of fund raising and campaigning.

Many believe that a lackluster response to the quake--and the state’s willingness to assume a backstage role to federal and local aid efforts--was an inevitable result of the message voters sent.

“The reason we weren’t able to do much was that people turned down the bond issue,” said state Sen. Herschel Rosenthal (D-Los Angeles). Without that extra funding, Rosenthal said, “We had nothing to be able to help businesses or homeowners.”

The Wilson Administration defended its decision to shut down the California Natural Disaster Assistance Program for Northridge quake survivors.

H.D. Palmer, assistant director of the state Department of Finance, said the governor had no choice. When the Legislature created the housing assistance program for survivors of the Loma Prieta temblor, it failed to budget extra money.

Over its five-year life span, the program, designed to aid people who were turned down for loans by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Small Business Administration, distributed $104 million.

John Frith of the state Department of Housing and Community Development said there are no immediate plans to revive the housing aid program even though the governor is projecting a robust economic recovery and enough revenue to fund a tax cut.

“California still has so many needs and CALDAP (the housing assistance program) was in so many ways a program that was not particularly cost-effective,” Frith said.

Many other quake-related problems competed for the attention of state government leaders perhaps numbed by the unprecedented string of costly disasters that have hit California in recent years.

Building code inspection was found to be in need of improvement. Policyholders reported nightmarish dealings with insurance companies. Inspectors discovered that portable classrooms needed greater safeguards. Cracks in steel-framed buildings alarmed engineers.

Momentum for reform in the Capitol, however, dropped off quickly, surprising many observers who believed that the opportunity for change would never be better than after the quake.

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“We did very, very little,” said one legislator who asked not to be quoted by name. “And a lot of the legislation that we did do was the kind so people could put their names on it to say they did something.”

Many Capitol observers say it was the governor who set the tone by deciding against calling a special session of the Legislature in response to the quake.

Instead, Wilson called a special session on crime, an issue his campaign handlers had identified as a hot-button topic in the election year.

Again contrary to past state responses, Wilson ruled early on that there would be no special tax increase to fund Northridge quake repairs. After the Loma Prieta quake, consumers from all corners of California pitched in to pay slightly higher sales taxes to fund the Bay Area recovery.

No one did the same for Northridge quake victims. This, combined with the closure of the state housing loan program, raised fundamental questions of fairness, said Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar).

“The people of San Francisco benefited from the (San Fernando) Valley’s sales taxes, but when it came down to helping Valley residents, the governor just walked away,” Katz said.

“One of the key areas where he abandoned the San Fernando Valley was in suspending the housing program,” Katz said. “Having been stung by the defeat of his bond, he said ‘tough luck’ to the people of the Valley.”

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) believes that his colleagues were negligent for not championing stricter seismic safety standards, not standing up to lobbyists and not pressing for a temporary quarter-cent sales tax he and other Democrats favored.

“We failed. We didn’t even come close,” Hayden said. “The fiscal crisis has deepened. And there have been no credible solutions from the governor’s office for the next earthquake, which is inevitable.”

Others are not so quick to judge so harshly.

“I felt we were very successful in accomplishing what we were after,” said L. Thomas Tobin, executive director of the Seismic Safety Commission, who worked with the Wilson Administration and the Legislature in pursuit of new laws to strengthen earthquake safety.

After the Loma Prieta quake, Tobin said, the Legislature made significant strides in updating earthquake safety requirements. Consequently, there was less of a need for urgent measures after the Northridge disaster, he said.

The commission is poised this year to ask the Legislature to strengthen requirements for quake-worthiness of hospitals and mobile homes. And it plans to call for more attention to be paid to seismic safety in its upcoming recommendations to the governor, which have been delayed for several months.

“We are arguing that it be given a proper priority and not be forgotten in time and ignored,” Tobin said. “We’re going to argue that the state take the leadership.”

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The 1989 special session produced 137 new quake-inspired laws. Last year, by comparison, Wilson signed 18 measures stemming from the Northridge temblor.

Along the way, some proposals were watered down or killed by businesses or groups that opposed the cost of complying with tougher standards:

* Declaring that building codes were ill-enforced, the Seismic Safety Commission backed a bill by Hayden to require architects and engineers to inspect a building they designed. Currently, the law allows inspectors with high school educations to do the work.

But the measure would “serve to increase the cost of building code enforcement,” Donald Wolfe, president of California Building Officials, objected in a letter. The bill died.

* Three-quarters of the 172 mobile homes that burned after being shaken from their foundations Jan. 17 did so after shifting and shearing off utility lines. Based on these and other findings, the Seismic Safety Commission recommended bracing mobile homes.

A bill to require bracing systems was tailored to the wishes of the politically powerful Golden State Mobile Home Owners League, which opposed broad new requirements as too costly.

So the legislation signed into law applies only to mobile homes purchased after July, 1995. A Senate subcommittee heard testimony that, at this pace, it will take 106 years to bring all mobile homes into compliance with the new law.

* Two bills addressed bringing hospitals up to current code after a number of facilities buckled in the Northridge quake. One required all California hospital buildings to comply with modern earthquake building codes within 10 years. The other required the same thing to happen in 35 years.

The California Assn. of Hospitals and Health Systems favored the longer timetable as more affordable.

By the time the second bill was signed into law, its deadline for specifically upgrading acute care facilities had been pushed back 10 years, from 1998 to 2008.

Roger L. Richter, the hospital group’s lobbyist, said he plans to work closely with the Wilson Administration over the next year to develop guidelines to implement the new law.

* Portable classrooms found a place on the Seismic Safety Commission’s checklist after some were severely jolted Jan. 17. A report by the Division of the State Architect says some classrooms “fell off their supports and in some instances the jack stands penetrated the flooring.”

But when the commission proposed a bill amendment laying out tougher standards for portable classrooms, the state’s largest supplier of rental portable classrooms opposed it.

Robert McGrath, president of McGrath Rentcorp, said the Legislature was meddling where it had no business. “Legislators try to pass things overnight, and most of it’s rhetoric anyway,” he said.

McGrath’s opposition killed the amendment, according to legislative sources. He says private industry will accomplish on its own what government tried--securing more of the classrooms to their foundations.