New Crises Loom in Californias Aging Infrastructure
Quality of life: Power's the tip of the iceberg, experts agree, as the population
outgrows water systems, roads, schools and airports.
By MARLA DICKERSON and STUART SILVERSTEIN, LA Times Staff Writers
Amid the tumult of California's electricity ordeal, an important fact often is lost:
Energy is far from the worst of the state's long-term infrastructure problems.
Policy experts from all over the political spectrum agree that there are greater threats
to California's economy and quality of life over the next 20 years. Strained water
supplies, overcrowded airports, jammed freeways, poor schools and costly housing could
prove much more complicated to tackle than keeping the lights on.
The challenge will be enormous considering that, by an important federal measure, the
state ranks last nationally in infrastructure spending per capita. Though California may
be able to import electricity from other states or countries to ease its power squeeze, it
can't send its kids to classrooms in Oregon or divert flights to Arizona airports.
"Compared to our other infrastructure problems, the energy problem is easily
solvable," said Ross C. DeVol, director of regional and demographic studies at the
Santa Monica-based Milken Institute.
Accustomed to living on the edge, Californians always have proved to be an adaptable lot.
New technologies and wiser use of resources may allow the population to leverage its
existing facilities in innovative ways. Already, creative methods for financing projects
are emerging. Those changes could help avert doomsday scenarios of the Golden State
turning dark, dry and hopelessly gridlocked.
Yet the electricity debacle is a jolting reminder that California's failure to reinvest
in itself has very real consequences. Looming fallout from decades of disinvestment has
some legislators and business organizations urging the state to start spending big on
public works while there are budget surpluses available. The state's Department of Finance
estimates that California will need to spend $82 billion over 10 years to shore up its
aging infrastructure, though others put that figure at more than $100 billion.
Skeptics say private-sector solutions would better serve taxpayers. Still, the state's
power troubles vividly demonstrate the risk of inaction.
"The electricity crisis in the state is just a symptom of a more fundamental
issue: our lack of planning for the rapid growth and change which has been underway for
decades and is going to accelerate," said Mark Baldassare, a pollster at the
nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.
How did California, home of concrete-pouring visionaries such as William Mulholland and
Pat Brown, become the poster child for infrastructure neglect?
Observers point to a variety of nuts-and-bolts factors, starting with the way projects are
funded. With the exception of gasoline taxes for highways, there is no dedicated revenue
stream for infrastructure flowing into state coffers. The anti-tax revolution sparked by
Proposition 13 in 1978 still makes bond issues problematic. Some say term limits haven't
helped matters, encouraging legislators to think short-term.
What's more, public officials sometimes simply guessed wrong about the future. Gov. Gray
Davis' own infrastructure committee--the Commission on Building for the 21st
Century--neglected to single out electricity as a major trouble spot when it began meeting
in 1999.
But the biggest change in the last quarter-century, historians and policymakers say, is
the entire zeitgeist surrounding California's spectacular growth. After pouring vast sums
into public works well into the 1970s--starting with Mulholland's aqueducts and then Gov.
Brown's freeways--Californians saw their state being overrun and became ambivalent about
the path it was on. Officials scaled back spending on huge new projects. Postwar optimism
that spending on world-class universities and highways would benefit the economy and
society gave way to concerns about the population explosion that accompanied it. Now, amid
ever-present worries about overcrowding, some see little to gain by promoting costly
improvements that will only bring more development.
"There is strong feeling among many people . . . that we ought to not scale up
infrastructure as a way of putting brakes on growth," said Brian Taylor, associate
professor of urban planning at UCLA. "It's one of the fundamental dilemmas"
dogging new public-works projects and housing construction in California.
But as a strategy to put the brakes on growth, scaling back on infrastructure has been a
bust. Investment in infrastructure, as a percentage of state spending, has shrunk from
nearly 20% in the late 1960s to around 3%. By one estimate, the state's highway capacity
grew by only 7% between 1978 and 1998, yet the state's population jumped more than 40%
during the same period. Translation: a lower quality of life.
Trends Bode Ill for Southland
Meanwhile, the population clock is ticking. California's population is expected to swell
to 45 million residents--a 32% increase--by 2020.
Those who stand to profit from building more infrastructure have reason to hype the
potential for disaster. Still, the trends bode particularly ill for Southern California.
Steven P. Erie, director of UC San Diego's urban studies and planning program, calculates
that--if current growth trends continue--the region's roads could be so choked with cars
that to park them all would require paving over the equivalent of half the San Fernando
Valley. Based on similar growth projections, a prolonged dry spell would have some of the
Southland going thirsty within two decades.
Apart from the coming population pressures, maintaining existing infrastructure is
proving to be an enormous challenge. Spending of inflation-adjusted dollars to operate
state facilities has climbed from $100 per capita in 1930 to around $550 by 1996,
according to analysis by the Public Policy Institute.
But David Dowall, co-author of the study, said the investment isn't enough. The UC
Berkeley professor of city and regional planning calculates that years of deferred
maintenance have created a $500-million backlog of repairs on his campus.
He sees evidence of it daily. Sproul Plaza, birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, is
riddled with buckled pavement. Some classroom tools are more like museum pieces.
"I've been using the same overhead projector since 1976," Dowall said.
Such travails lack the high drama of the energy swoon. But the cumulative toll of
California's burgeoning infrastructure mess is substantial and climbing.
"Infrastructure first impacts the quality of life," said Stephen Levy,
director of the Palo Alto-based Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy.
"We know that through rising housing prices, long commutes, stress on families,
overcrowding at schools, delays at airports--all of the things we're experiencing in
2001--if we don't attend to the infrastructure, the first victims will be us, through the
degrading of our quality of life, and the second victim will be the economy because
eventually business won't want to locate in a region where their workers don't want to
live."
The Texas Transportation Institute estimates that traffic jams cost L.A. drivers more than
$12.4 billion annually in wasted time, fuel and other costs. That's nearly $1,400 for
every person of driving age.
The region's airports, whose cargo handling is crucial to the economy, face a crunch of
their own. Barring expansions, Southern California's commercial air hubs could be pushed
beyond their capacity sometime between 2010 and 2015, based on current projections for
growth in passenger and cargo traffic.
If you combined the seven major commercial airports in the Los Angeles and San Diego
areas, they would cover just over 8,000 acres--one-quarter the expanse of Denver
International Airport.
What's more, Southern California's historic bugaboo, the water supply, is dwindling.
Estimates show that if rainfall follows its normal pattern over the next two decades, the
reserves of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California--a cooperative
supplying 26 water districts in the region--will sink from 35% of current demand now to a
perilous 5%.
Environmentalists and their allies, particularly in Northern California, have repeatedly
blocked efforts to to build a peripheral canal that could benefit Southern California by
bringing water from above the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta into the California Aqueduct.
Most recently, in 1998, 15 state and federal agencies shelved a proposal for a
$10.5-billion canal project.
Shortage of Water
If California runs into another major dry spell and current consumption and growth
patterns continue, Southern California could suffer a shortfall of 310,000 acre-feet of
water--the amount that 600,000 families use every year. And that shortage comes even
before taking into account the problems posed by chromium 6 and arsenic in water aquifers
around the state.
These threats don't mean doomsday for California, experts say. Solutions to some
infrastructure shortfalls are beginning to emerge. If today's power crisis brings to a
head the question of what kind of future Californians want, they might find answers in
technology and other innovations.
When it comes to water, for instance, there is a long-term, albeit costly,
answer--desalinating water from the Pacific Ocean. On the transportation front, there are
new, privately built highway lanes in Orange County. And on overcrowding, the state has
begun expanding tuition aid to students at private universities, which could help ease the
space crunch at public institutions.
California historian Kevin Starr said the emergence of the Internet and other new
technologies may shift the state's infrastructure priorities. Instead of building miles of
new freeways, he said, perhaps the state should encourage new investments in high-speed
telecommunications.
"We're entering a whole new way of using space, of generating income and of
communicating, and that will have powerful effects on what the appropriate infrastructure
projects are," Starr said.
That doesn't change the fact that California is at the bottom of the heap nationally when
it comes to spending on infrastructure. The latest U.S. Census Bureau figures, which cover
1998, show that California spent $110.82 per capita on such outlays. The
second-lowest-spending state, Maine, spent 44% more than California.
Davis' Commission on Building for the 21st Century is due to deliver its final report on
the state's top infrastructure priorities within the next few months. It is expected to
outline an approach for dealing with those issues.
William Hauck, head of the commission's finance committee, said his group will try to
convince legislators to earmark 1% of the state's general fund not already mandated for
education to be spent to shore up California's aging public facilities.
Hauck, president of the California Business Roundtable, knows it won't be easy. His
organization previously proposed devoting a portion of the state sales tax to
infrastructure. That idea went nowhere. But Hauck said legislators are starting to
recognize the need to reinvest for the next generation.
"If you can't move people and goods, you strangle