A Good Era, but One That Can’t Be Revived

Not so many years ago men hunted ducks in the sloughs where the bustling city of Lakewood now stands. That was before and a little after World War II. There was a place closer to home, right here where I’m pecking away at a computer in the Orange County offices of The Times, that grew a tremendous crop of beans. You could look across the fields for miles, right over where South Coast Plaza stands, and see beans and more beans. That was only a little more than two decades ago.

Back then, and just after World War II, the guiding principle that wagged Orange County was growth and development. It was a force that spelled doom to the citrus groves wafting the heavenly aroma of their blossoms into downtown Santa Ana, but it meant more businesses and jobs, more cultural advantages, along with more noise, congestion and pollution.

And so, a few years ago, quite a few of us who remember when Orange County was predominantly a rural, politically conservative community, and those who came a little later to escape megalopolis, concluded, to our collective dismay, that the optimism that furthered the county’s growth and development was taking us where we didn’t want to be.

We expressed our dismay by voting for the Coastline Initiative, which established both state and regional coastal commissions and raised them in authority over other planning and zoning bodies of the cities and counties. We believed that public policy for the public good could be spread evenly from above like margarine over the landscape and all would be well.

In many ways the Coastal Commission was good, in that it strongly influenced a better coastal environment, chiefly in the ecological sense. In other ways, how we bridled under its dictates. It took away our freedom to develop, build and remodel as we pleased within the laws and regulations of our own communities. I think it was this sense of loss over local control, this violation of the historic ideal of the old democratic town meeting, that pretty much scuttled the pervasive power of the Coastal Commission. It failed because we, the people, learned that no powerful planning organization in a relatively faraway place is able to cope with its proclaimed public responsibility. This is because it cannot (except in instances of environmental pollution and resource management) impose sets of conditions beneficial to all, or much liked by the majority, for that matter.

I sympathize with Assemblyman Gil Ferguson’s libertarian approach to planning and zoning. However, I was unsettled by his proposal to restrain, statewide, local planning bodies and citizens from arbitrarily denying, limiting, slowing or stopping growth. A part of me wishes we could turn back the clock to those free-wheeling, heady days of growth and development after World War II. The public attitude was upbeat and expansive. We needed lots of housing then, and we got it, and businesses flourished in that wonderful period of environmental unrestraint.

Alas, I’m afraid Ferguson is thinking today of the past and attempting to legislate its return, yearning for it as much as I. Those were good times. But we are in another era. Centralized control of our lives is stronger than ever before. Computers have seen to that. And yet we are a freedom-loving people. When we can, we like to use what means there are at hand to control our community’s destiny. The recent public mandate to restrain the Irvine Co.’s urban expansion in Newport Beach, right or wrong, was an expression of that desire.

That mandate said as clearly as possible that the Irvine Co. can do as it pleases, but not so big, not so fast. It said that the local planning body has a right to exercise its autonomy, to be stupid and short-sighted, to be anarchistic, if you will, to be wisely far-sighted, and, as a consequence, to rise and fall politically on whether its members meet their community’s variety of emotional, intellectual and environmental human needs.

And that’s how it should be, because that approach to planning and zoning puts it right where it belongs--in the lap of the people.