Construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and its more famous cousin, the Golden Gate Bridge, began in 1933, and both were carrying traffic by 1937.
The 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake severely damaged the Bay Bridge, leading to a decision to replace its eastern section rather than merely repair or refit it.
However state and local politicians argued for more than a decade over design of the new section and how to pay for it. Construction finally began in 2002 and was finished 11 years later — nearly four times as long as the entire bridge took — at a cost of $6.5 billion, the costliest public works project in California history.
The Bay Bridge saga exemplifies how California, which once taught the world how to build things, lost its mojo by erecting so many political, legal and financial hurdles to getting things done.
Sixty-plus years ago, the state’s water managers proposed a canal around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to complete the state project that carries water from the northern part of the state to the southern.
As the years rolled by, the project languished. Eventually it was revised to twin tunnels and more recently to a single tunnel, but construction, if it ever occurs, is still many years away.
Lesser projects suffer from the same political and procedural sclerosis. It can take years, or even decades, for large-scale housing projects, electric generation facilities and desalination plants to traverse the thickets of permits from federal, state and local agencies. Even small housing projects are subject to lengthy entanglements in red tape as costs escalate.
A newly released report from a special legislative committee declares that to deal with housing, homelessness, water supply and climate change issues, California “will need to facilitate new construction at an unprecedented scale.
“This includes millions of housing units, thousands of gigawatts of clean energy generation, storage, and transmission capacity, a million electric vehicle chargers and thousands of miles of transit, and thousands of climate resiliency projects to address drought, flooding and sea level rise, and changing habitats.”
However, it continues, “each of these projects will require a government-issued permit before they can be built — and some will require dozens! Therefore, only if governments consistently issue permits in a manner that is timely, transparent, consistent, and outcomes-oriented will we be able to address our housing and climate crises. Unfortunately, for most projects, the opposite is true. They face permitting processes that are time consuming, opaque, confusing, and favor process over outcomes.”
The Legislature itself erected many of these procedural barriers — most notably by passing the California Environmental Quality Act more than a half-century ago — and the Legislature is controlled by regulation-prone Democrats, so it’s remarkable that such a report would be issued.
The California Assembly Select Committee on Permitting Reform spent months talking to those who have been affected by California’s permit-happy system, as well as experts on specific kinds of projects, before reaching a conclusion that sounds like it came from conservative Republicans.
“It is too damn hard to build anything in California,” Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat who chaired the committee, said in a statement. “Our broken permitting system is driving up the cost of housing, the cost of energy, and even the cost of inaction on climate change.
“If we’re serious about making California more affordable, sustainable, and resilient, we have to make it easier to build housing, clean energy, public transportation, and climate adaptation projects. This report makes it clear: the system isn’t working, and it’s on us to fix it.”
Yes it is — and we’ll see whether the report has legs or winds up in the discard bin like so many other governance reform proposals.
Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.
