Report Urges New Regional Problem-Solving Agencies

If the California dream is not to become a nightmare, new regional forms of government will be needed to solve the state’s problems, according to an Assembly Office of Research report made public Thursday.

The report recommends that regional agencies, with sweeping powers to plan and regulate, be established in seven areas of the state.

The new agencies--with authority in the fields of air quality, transportation, water quality, water supply, housing needs, solid waste and land use--would replace existing groups such as the South Coast Air Quality Management Board and the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

“We can’t continue with business as usual,” said Todd Kauffman, the report’s author.

Problems like smog and traffic congestion cannot be solved by city or county governments alone, nor even by large regional single-purpose agencies like the Air Quality Management District, the report contends. New regional, multipurpose agencies are needed to “make the difficult trade-offs inherent in decisions about growth,” it says.

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who requested the report two years ago, said Thursday that he will introduce legislation to implement some of the report’s recommendations.

City and county governments are “territorial and parochial in many respects,” Brown said in an interview last fall. “So even if we (in the Legislature) come up with the most brilliant ideas, we’re not able to carry them out because of opposition from these parochial groups.

“We have to have regional government,” Brown said. “There’s just no other way.”

The new Regional Development and Infrastructure agencies proposed in the Assembly report would be established in all of the state’s urban and urbanizing areas. Each would be run by a governing board with a majority of members elected at large in the region. Each board also would include county supervisors, City Council members and representatives of special districts.

The report recommends substantial amounts of property and sales tax revenue be funneled to the new agencies, which would redistribute them so that poorer communities would get new roads, water facilities and other infrastructure they cannot afford now.