100th Birthday Is Time to Plan New Century

On Tuesday, Orange County will mark its 100th birthday, and the yearlong centennial celebration will come to an end. It was a year of special events including a bike tour, fireworks show, music and dance festivals and baseball’s All-Star Game held in Anaheim Stadium earlier this month.

But when the festivities formally end Tuesday and the county takes its first steps towards the bicentennial celebration in 2089, you must wonder what the county will be like then.

Will a Board of Supervisors be ordering still another study to help decide where it will locate a second commercial airport to ease the overcrowding at John Wayne Airport?

Will traffic be gridlocked because residents have kept their pocketbooks zipped tight and still refuse to vote money needed to build more freeway lanes, keep streets in good repair and to provide rail lines and transitways for buses and car pools as alternates to road-hogging one-passenger autos?

Will prisoners still be jammed into cells, sleep in shower areas and be released early by the thousands because the county still cannot find a location or the money for a new main jail?

Will the homeless and hungry still roam the streets because housing is too expensive and communities, clinging to their NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) attitudes, keep rejecting aid services, even the nonprofit private ones, in their neighborhoods?

Will our children and children’s children have clean air, water and open space? Or will pollution foul the environment, even destroying the earth’s protective ozone layer?

Will poor women in labor still be turned away from public hospitals and too many babies needlessly die because their mothers are not getting the prenatal care that will save their lives?

Will refugees and immigrants seeking religious and political freedom and economic security be welcomed in an atmosphere that truly accepts diversity and celebrates rather than segregates our differences?

Will care homes and detox centers finally be provided to help our ill, aged and addicted?

Answers to those questions depend on how farsighted, unselfish and responsible we are today.

In its first 100 years Orange County went through massive growth. It changed from a lazy, rural region to a bedroom community and finally into one of the world’s economically strongest urban areas and high-tech centers.

But it could not avoid today’s main problems: traffic and growth. It hasn’t been able to solve them, either. Tuesday, the county’s 100th birthday, would be a good time for the community to rededicate itself to solving its nagging problems, becoming more compassionate and caring and to begin making the hard decisions that must be made. The best way to prepare for the future is to take care of the present.

Despite today’s unsolved urban ills, in Times’ polls 1989 Orange County residents overwhelmingly say that they are happy here. Most would rather live here than anywhere else. The community will have met its responsibility and kept faith with the future if a pollster gets the same answers in 2089.