No Infrastructure Bond a ‘Capitol Crime;' ‘3-15 Commission' Needed to Investigate

As a chair of both LAEDC's Critical Infrastructure Council Transportation Committee and CCA's Transportation Committee, you and many other state business, labor, education and environmental stakeholders, have tirelessly contributed to legislative deliberations (some might say, "sausage-making") in the Capitol regarding the governor's proposed strategic infrastructure bond package for the June ballot. That a bill failed to pass the legislature on March 15. Elaborate on what the public lost as a result of this legislative failure.

It was a very fluid situation, but as of my last involvement with the bill/bond that was to be put before the voters in June, significant sums of money were to have gone towards paying back the dollars taken – "stolen," if you will – from the transportation account over the last several years due to the state's budget deficit. The money taken from infrastructure has resulted in a statewide transportation program now barely treading water. No new projects have been added to the program for the last four years.

Secondly, a significant amount of money included in the proposed bond just hours before legislative adjournment would have gone to the maintenance of the state transportation system. We have a $300 billion asset in our transportation system – it makes good sense to try to maintain what we have as well as provide for mobility and congestion relief today and in the future – and we lost money that would have gone to pay for the maintenance, safety, and upkeep of our existing system.

We also lost over $3 billion for trade infrastructure and air quality – a couple billion dollars for goods movement and trade infrastructure and $1 billion for air quality. A lot of programs that we lost were related to the environment -- cleaning up and focusing on the dirtiest transport -- for example a small percentage of the trucks coming out of the ports of L.A. and Long Beach. A provision in the bond measure would have provided for engine retrofits designed to be much more clean-burning.

And another $4.5 billion for public transit would have been available if our elected representatives had simply focused on the "people's business." That could have made a huge difference here in Southern California for Metrolink, in terms of their system's capacity, safety, and their system operations.

To be blunt, we're all just in shock that an issue of such critical importance to people throughout the state is dead in the water. Based on what other states, and even nations, have done to provide for their citizen's environment and economy, what is unacceptable is what didn't happen on March 15th.

Although MIR is read statewide, can you focus in on what the L.A. area lost by way of an opportunity to respond to the need to plan and intelligently build our way out of gridlock and economic stagnation?

I can try. Were it not for our local agency, the MTA, I don't think any transportation project in LA County would have moved forward at all in the last four years. The MTA has done an outstanding job of "propping up" the state by funding many of the projects that the State couldn't pay for because Sacramento officials took the money to fund the General Fund deficit.

That said, the MTA has leveraged itself to a maximum degree these past few years to keep transportation programs going – programs like the I-5 HOV lanes, the Orange Line in the Valley, and the Eastside Light Rail extension.

But one of the biggest impacts to our region from legislature's failure on March 15 was to our commuter rail system, Metrolink. Metrolink serves more than just L.A. County, but in L.A. County some of the safety and double-tracking improvements planned --improvements which could have and should be made to help balance our metropolitan transportation system-- will not be made.

In terms of highway projects, attention has focused on the 405, but the I-5 that runs south of Downtown through the eastern portion of our county desperately needs work too. The I-5 in Orange County now has many lanes and a relatively well-functioning freeway because Orange County invested billions of dollars a few years back. But when you enter L.A. County, you funnel into an antiquated, narrow roadway all the way into Downtown.

The "Golden State Freeway," which stretches from the Mexican border to the Oregon border is in major disrepair, has major goods movement challenges, interchange challenges, old bridges, and too many other challenges to mention here. This facility is a priority for both MTA and Caltrans in our region and, had March 15 produced a positive outcome, could have been upgraded.

I would estimate that about $9 billion of new money would have come on to the table with this measure as I last saw it, and the California Transportation Commission would have had the ability to program that. If you take into account the north-south split, 60 percent would have come south, and of that 60 percent, a large percentage would have some to L.A.

In addition to the demands for funding for mobility, what provisions and funding for air quality, livability and smart growth were also lost as a result of the failure of the legislature to pass a strategic infrastructure bill?

They were very important. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was very strategically targeted money that would have gone to reduce some of the most egregious air pollution problems in our basin. $100 million was put in the bill to give the Air Resources Board the money necessary to pay for retrofitting some of the trucks as well as equipment to reduce particulate matter.

About 25 percent of the trucks running in and out of the ports create two-thirds of the pollution. They're old trucks; they're mom-and-pop operations without the resources to retrofit their trucks, and this would have provided those resources. Also, there was $100 million for school bus retrofit. Those are just two examples of air quality resources. Transportation and air quality are linked, and it's uncertain where we go from here, given the failure of our leaders in Sacramento to get this before the voters.

The print and electronic media have largely covered, since the day the governor proposed his ambitious Strategic Growth Plan, the infrastructure bond negotiations in Sacramento as a simple political story. What are the practical and political consequences of framing the public coverage in such a manner?

It made it seem like it was merely politics as usual, and there was really very little coverage of the day-to-day impact on people. The transportation system could have been improved. This was money that would have come into play right away to augment other sources of funds that are depleted. Projects are ready to go that could have improved people's quality of life from both environmental and mobility perspectives.

The coverage here in Southern California never really focused on what was at stake. It focused on "who is this important to?" and why it was important to them from a political standpoint, but it really never talked about what the opportunity was and how depleted the transportation coffers have been over the last four or five years. Here we rank in the top five or six in the world economy, but we rank 49th among the 50 states in transportation spending and delivery. Come on! – this was a story about you and me and every other Californian. Not just our commute, our congestion, our air quality and environment, but our children's. We've been riding around on our parents' and grandparents' investment. This was the first meaningful increase in transportation funding in the last 15 to 20 years. That whole perspective was completely either missed or ignored; I'm not sure which.

To quote from a column by Dan Walters in the March 17 Sacramento Bee: "If nothing else, the comic opera collapse of the two-month political quest for a plan to improve highways, levees, and other strained and deteriorating public facilities should finally convince Californians that their Capitol is a broken institution, endemically incapable of dealing with major policy issues." Do you have a reaction to his assertion?

I reluctantly and sadly have to agree. I think that it is well-documented that over the past few years, congestion has polled among the top two or three issues – no matter what community, no matter what county, no matter what part of the state you go to, it's a big issue. If there were ever a no-brainer to bring to the people of California the opportunity to improve that situation, this was it. I would have to say that, given the inability to improve something so important to all Californians, both current and future generations, I would suggest that things are broken.

Walters goes on to write, "...simply put, California's dizzyingly dense mélange of ideological, geographical, cultural, and economic subgroups interacts with a political structure that in effect gives every stakeholder virtual veto power over the product. Under these circumstances, there are only two possible outcomes, both of which are bad. Either the product is a monstrosity that accommodates all demands but collapses of its own weight, or there's a stalemate and no product at all." Do you agree?

In this case, I would suggest that the latter applies. There was a lot of criticism that the governor was "over-reaching," that it was too big, etc. Quite frankly, I think a lot of Californians saw the articulation of a vision for the future as positive thing. It hadn't been done for quite some time. And if you really get down and analyze the measure that was in front of the Assembly, the Senate, and the governor, there are substantive components that suggested that some positive things could and would happen. It didn't solve everything, but it sure was a move in the right direction, and it was a large vision. It was not all things to all people, but, frankly, because of the system at play in Sacramento, we ended up with a stalemate and no product at all.

What insights should be drawn about the capitol's true priorities from comments made by the legislature's leadership in the hours before the deadline for placing a bond on the June ballot?

I had spent the day on Wednesday, March 15 – ironically, the Ides of March – at a California Transportation Foundation forum, and the whole statewide transportation community sat for four or five hours very hopefully. There were a lot of speeches and commentary as to the fact that across the street at the Capitol people were hammering out a solution. A few hours later, I received a call, and I was stunned to hear that the powers that be were about to propose a package that took transportation out of any prospective June bond measure. To me, it was beyond comprehension. How could you take the one element that was the focus of a lot of activity on the Senate side and the governor's initiative?

The focus was greatly on mobility and congestion – the very hard work put into this over the past few years by Senator Perata and Secretary McPeak– it was all focused greatly on transportation infrastructure, and yet Sacramento was going to strip that measure out for another day and focus on water and education. It was absolutely deflating. It suggested that all the hope and hard work we had put into this issue was swept away in a few hours. It was unbelievable, and very, very discouraging.

Picking up on Dan Walters's conclusion that our state government is broken, what were the behind-the-scenes political battles for bond dollars, and the conflicts between transportation and educational interests (Prop 42 and Prop 98) that made compromise and passage of an infrastructure bond all but impossible in the Assembly and Senate?

Prop 42 – which the voters of California approved in 2002 – places the sales tax on gasoline directly into the transportation trust fund. When we fill our gas tank we are paying three different taxes, federal, state, and sales taxes. Prior to Prop 42 the sales tax on gas went into the general fund, but voters said – by almost 70 percent statewide – that this tax must go to improve transportation. These revenues, therefore, are part of the transportation trust fund, not the general fund. But there was a loophole in the law that allowed the legislature and governor to divert these funds to the general fund during a declared fiscal emergency.

One of the provisions of the various infrastructure funding bills that were merged into an overall bond package was a provision to "fix" the loophole in Proposition 42 to prevent the legislature and governor from taking transportation funds anymore. Yet, the education lobby set up a false argument that suggested that Proposition 42 couldn't be protected without hurting education.

The two issues are unrelated and derive from two different sources of revenue: Proposition 42 from gasoline sales and Proposition 98 from the state's general fund. California voters said they wanted the sales tax on gasoline to help fix transportation, and said that a portion of the general fund should be dedicated to education.

We have many, many problems, and education is certainly one of them. But it is a disservice to all Californians to suggest that funding and fixing our aging, crumbling transportation infrastructure is somehow putting the education system at risk. Sadly, there are interest groups influencing our elected officials that are setting up a "win/lose" scenario, and the real loser here is the average California citizen that has to slug it to work every day. On March 15, we didn't do anything to advance education, and we sure didn't do anything to fix transportation.

What might we expect from the state's frustrated stakeholders now that this strategic infrastructure bond package has failed to make the June ballot? What, for example, is LAEDC planning?

A lot of us are trying to regroup and trying to understand. There's a lot of anger and disappointment. There's a sense of despair that no matter how hard we try, no matter how much we focus attention on this, we just can't seem to get a logical program out of our elected leaders. I think we're all going to try to regroup, but speaking for myself, it's very hard to do that without really taking a hard look at the systems of government in Sacramento. I question whether we can just pick up and start over again in the same vein, and I'm having a hard time concluding that that makes sense.

Today, the LAEDC Transportation Committee voted unanimously to recommend forming a "3-15 Commission" to both diagnose the system failure and prescribe a realistic plan for placing a comprehensive bond package on the November ballot. A 3-15 Commission must be positive, and prescriptive on substance. It also must demystify the legislative process and press for reform of state governance to encourage consensus.

The failure to give the voters a June bond never should have happened. For our children's sake, we cannot let this happen again. My ten-month-old son deserves a better future than that provided him by our state leaders this past March 15.