By RICHARD LITTLE
To fix the Delta and get Southern California’s water flowing reliably, or to build the Fresno Aquarium that is the question. Or at least it should be among California policymakers.
Last year about this time, the Legislature was fretting about getting an infrastructure bond on the November ballot. Everyone was worried about failing levees and what to do about the mind-numbing congestion that afflicts most of us who venture out of doors. Fortunately, we did get a bond package and the voters spoke loud and clear that infrastructure does, indeed, matter. Included on the ballot was Proposition 84, a measure purported to provide $5.4 billion in bonds for critically needed investments to ensure safe drinking water, improve local water supply reliability, strengthen flood protection, and preserve California’s natural landscapes. Little more than a year after Katrina wasted New Orleans, these funds were sorely needed and long overdue.
What a difference a year makes! Now awash with new money, there’s a bit of a scrum under way to add a little cultural foie gras to go with the meat and potatoes of flood control and water supply as proponents try to carve out funds for assorted museums and other decidedly local projects. Are they good projects? Who knows unless you’re intimately connected with them? Should they be funded with statewide bond dollars? Good question. Perhaps we need a little public discussion before the final decisions are made.
Project list
Faced with a similar challenge, the Transportation Commission went on the road to hear from people around the state about how to divvy up the discretional funds in Proposition 1B. The final package probably doesn’t please everyone but at least people had the opportunity to speak for or against pet projects and at the end of the day, the CTC was able to draw up a project list that people can live with. It may not be pretty but it does tend to spread the wealth tolerably. More importantly, people can see the connection between the headline and the fine print. It will be more than a pity if the Proposition 84 funds don’t follow a similar path.
One of the reasons we needed the bonds in the first place was almost 40 years of chronic disinvestment in infrastructure. In the aftermath of Proposition 13 and other taxpayer initiatives, the state and local governments have been hard pressed to find money for transportation, water, and flood control. It took yet another initiative (1A) to guarantee that the sales tax revenues generated by Proposition 42 (passed in 2002) would actually be used for transportation and not to balance the budget. And all the while, state highway maintenance was put off, so now we have some of the worst pavement in the nation. At the same time, the levees are still a mess and we need to look long and hard at the impact of global warming on the mountain snowpack that provides so much of our drinking water. Needless to say, the November bonds didn’t fix anything, they just provided some catch-up money. Absent some real windfalls, we’ll need to call on the voters again to pass more bonds.
How will they react? Another good question: If they think the package is just a cover for local earmarks, chances are they’ll just say “no!” We can’t afford to let that happen. Regardless of whose numbers you use, California will need almost $200 billion just for transportation in the next 10 years. Existing funding sources don’t come close to raising that amount. Even if the Legislature reverses its antithetical position on public-private partnerships and embraces a new generation of toll roads, we’ll still need more bond funding (and voter approval). When you throw in bonds for water, flood control, schools, prisons, courthouses, etc., the queue gets really long. So, what to do?
As a first step, the Proposition 84 appropriation process needs to hear from people around the state, both pro and con. It may be that the Fresno aquarium is the right thing to do in the interest of boosting the state’s economy when weighed against a reliable water supply for Southern California. However, this tradeoff needs to be vetted through more than a bureaucratic grant application process. Longer term, the state needs to stop playing what amounts to “whack a mole” with infrastructure funding,beating back problems one at a time as they arise. Instead, we have to develop a long-term funding strategy that matches needs with revenue to guide a statewide and bipartisan approach to addressing the state’s infrastructure investment deficit. This will be hard, but putting off hard choices today only means we’ll have harder choices tomorrow.
The voters have shown that they’re willing to pay for reliable service at a realistic price. We can’t abuse that trust.
Richard G. Little is director of the Keston Institute for Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy at the University of Southern California.
