Like nothing else on this fall's ballot, Proposition 1A asks voters to confront California's past, present and future. The proposal to borrow $10 billion to start construction of a sleek, high-speed railroad connecting Northern and Southern California will be a test of how far we think the government should go in joining the risk-taking, entrepreneurial culture that has long defined the state's private sector.
Since the days of the Gold Rush, California has seen itself as the place where America's future begins. The automobile wasn't born here, but our legions of suburban drivers quickly became its biggest market.
The Wright brothers invented the airplane back East, but the aerospace industry found its stride in Southern California.
Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Lab helped send rockets to the moon and beyond. Silicon Valley's garages and office parks gave birth to computers, personal computers, online auctions and search engines. And laboratories in San Francisco and San Diego have become incubators of the latest medical technologies.
When venture capitalists want to invest in the next big thing, they look to California first.
California's government, through the years, has helped enable this economic engine. It built roads and ports to help move people and goods around the state efficiently. It built massive dams and an aqueduct to ship water from the north, where it was plentiful, to the thirsty south where most of the people lived. It nurtured an elite system of higher education, the University of California, which became the envy of the nation. And, most recently, voters decided to invest $3 billion in stem cell research to try to jump-start research and development into potentially lifesaving therapies.
High-speed rail isn't as revolutionary, from a global perspective, as any of that. But it does not yet exist in America. And more important than the technology or the maximum speed of the trains (which planners hope will exceed 200 mph) is the social statement. In deciding to build this railroad, California would be betting on the decline of the automobile, and to some extent the airplane, as the dominant mode of transportation for mid- distance travelers.
Once built, the train's stations would be magnets for high-density development that would help reduce dependency on the car and enable a lifestyle more reliant on walking and public transit than driving.
Especially in the Central Valley, which is where most of California's future population growth is likely to occur, the bullet train could help prevent a repeat of the sprawling suburban pattern that characterizes our more developed cities along the coast. This transformation in turn would help reduce pollution from automobiles, including the emission of greenhouse gases.
This is just the kind of daring gamble on the future that Californians have been known to make. But will they this time? Will they risk $10 billion, which translates into $650 million a year in debt-service payments, on an unproven idea at a time of great personal, societal and governmental financial stress?
The state Legislature, amid much political dysfunction, just pieced together a budget which, even according to its drafters, leaves the government facing a multibillion-dollar deficit in the coming year. With incomes, retail sales and corporate profits plummeting, it looks as if tax revenues will be more than $10 billion short of what Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature would need just to keep all current services running at this year's levels for another year. Next year's budget battle could make this year's fight look like a kindergarten scrum in comparison.
And even in good times, $650 million a year is not chump change. To put that number in perspective, consider that it is equivalent to 20 percent of what the taxpayers spend now on the California State University system, which has become a giant assimilator taking working-class kids, many of them from poor immigrant families, and turning them into successful players in an ever more technological economy.
To comment on this article, go to www.sacbee.com/conversation
