AGENDA 21 RADIO

BY CHRISS STREET

Jerry Brown in his first year as Governor began the trend to slash California infrastructure spending from a national high 20 percent of the state budget when he took office in 1975 to the nation’s second worst at 3.4 percent this year, an 83 percent cut, according to a study by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that California has accumulated a $65 billion deficit to adequately provide and maintaining its public infrastructure. As ASCE warned in 2013, “Investment in infrastructure is vital to our state’s productivity, competitiveness and economic well-being.” In a warning that should have been heeded, ASCE highlighted levees and flood control as the sector of California infrastructure that was most neglected.

Given that Governor Jerry Brown famously said: ‘Inaction may be the biggest form of action, state and federal officials are desperately spending tens of millions of dollars on crisis repairs to Oroville Dam hoping to prevent America’s tallest dam from suffering a catastrophic collapse as a new pineapple express is expected to bring heavy rains and mountain run-off.

During his first 8-year stint as governor (1974-1982), Jerry Brown flipped-the-script from the pro-growth infrastructure building initiatives of Governor Pat Brown (1964-1972), his father, to a radical environmentalist agenda that sought to restrict new infrastructure to constrain growth.

One of newly-elected Governor Jerry Brown’s first initiatives in 1975 was the passage legislation to establish the California Air Resources Board, and then appointing his campaign manger, Tom Quinn, as its first chair. Brown and Quinn worked to pass numerous laws and implement onerous regulations that consciously sought to make the time and costs to build new state infrastructure projects prohibitively expensive.

In 1976, Governor Jerry Brown appointed John Broyson, a founding member of the Natural Resources Defense Council, as chairman of the California State Water Board. Broyson was instrumental in stopping construction of the $847.5 million Auburn Dam and rewilding 1,200 miles of Northern California rivers dedicated as part of the federal Wild and Scenic River System. Brown appointed Broyson in 1979 to chair the California’s Public Utilities Commission, where he deliberately drove up electricity rates granting subsidized fixed-rate contracts that made building wind energy projects more lucrative than developing inexpensive and sustainable hydroelectric power.

One of the first things Jerry Brown did after being elected Governor for a third term in November 2010, was eliminating the state appointed watchdog for California’s $30 billion share of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus program, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Although the non-partisan Legislative Analysts Office had expected $4.6 billion of ARRA to be spent on California flood control in 2009, the money appears to have been reprogramed by the Brown Administration to support high-speed rail.

In Governor Jerry Brown’s first four years of his third term (2010-2013), California’s spending on infrastructure as a percentage of the state budget fell to 1.93 percent, its second lowest level in history.

In response to the new Trump Administration’s request for each state to forward priorities for a $1 trillion of federal infrastructure spending, CNBC reported that Governor Brown’s three-page list of $100 billion of “key” infrastructure projects mostly “involve transportation-related projects, such as highways, bridges rail or transit.”

Due to warnings from ASCE and others that the state’s infrastructure was deteriorating rapidly, Governor Brown pushed to increase infrastructure spending as a percent of the state’s budget to 3.4 percent, but that is still 86 percent below the levels when his father was governor.