SACRAMENTO — Whether commuters snared in traffic, farmers worried about water supplies, exporters fretting over shipping delays at congested ports or parents distressed by the rundown school buildings, Californians daily endure problems that are direct results of decades of neglect of the state's infrastructure.
Everyone agrees the situation must be remedied before population growth completely overwhelms existing facilities, and economic expansion stalls. Why, then, do most efforts to address the problem seem as effective as pushing a rope?
With the cost of fixing up the state's transportation networks alone approaching 12 figures, funding is widely regarded as the primary sticking point. But so what? When money is short, businesses, as well as households, respond by adopting a budget. Not California, though. Despite its pretense of being one of the world's largest economies, the state does not have an infrastructure budget or even a method for defining and managing its public-works agenda.
Given the stakes, one might expect that such an egregious lapse in public administration would have been redressed. Not so. Because so much public largess is up for grabs, impartial assessments of infrastructure priorities have historically given way to the exigencies of old-fashioned pork-barrel politics, in which such things as technical expertise, hard data and sound planning are commonly regarded as inconveniences.
Fortunately, elected officials and civic leaders occasionally experience an epiphanies. So it was when Gov. Gray Davis named 48 prominent citizens to a Commission on Building for the 21st Century in January 1999. Charged with devising recommendations for improving the way the state handles its public-works requirements, the panel is due to issue a report by December. Not content to await a commission's judgments, state Treasurer Phil Angelides jumped into the debate last June when he issued his "smart investments" manifesto setting out a number of inventive ways of better utilizing scarce infrastructure funds.
Although the governor's commission and the treasurer's proposals have garnered most of the extremely limited attention infrastructure planning normally receives, a much less conspicuous step toward infrastructure-planning reform may hold the greatest promise.
