January 18, 1968
Page 314
JESSE UNRUH ON "THE STATE AND THE CITY: A PARTNERSHIP FOR THE FUTURE"
Mr. MUSK IE. Mr. President, for the past several years the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, of which I am a member, has been examining a considerable number of controversial issues of Federal-State-local relations. Serving as one of the State legislative members on the Commission is the distinguished speaker of the California Assembly, Jesse M. Unruh. Because of his frank appraisals of public issues in his State and in the Nation, Speaker Unruh has been acquiring a national reputation.
In a recent address to the League of California Cities, Mr. Unruh examined the role of the State governments in relation to our increasingly critical urban problems. Although I do not agree with all of Mr. Unruh's views, I think it is important that we take note of what this expert and articulate practitioner of the art of State government has to say about the State's role in urban affairs.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of Speaker Unruh's address be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the address was ordered to be printed in. the RECORD, as follows:
THE STATE AND THE CITY: A PARTNERSHIP FOR THE FUTURE
(By Jesse M. Unruh, speaker of the assembly, at the annual conference of the League of California Cities, San Francisco, Calif., October 17, 1967)
I certainly welcome the opportunity to speak to you today. Discussing the "urban crisis" has become the sine qua non in the modern political repertoire. So I appreciate your invitation to air my thoughts.
Of course, when there are so many public officials all interested in the same subject, it becomes sort of a competition to see who can come up with the most startling ideas. I think that, quite possibly, Senator Abraham Ribicoff may have stolen the march on all of us early this year. In January, the Senator described his action program for urban America, and it contains many provocative ideas. But easily the most provocative remark the Senator made was his estimate that rehabilitating America's cities would cost one trillion dollars.
Most of us consider ourselves fiscal sophisticates if we can grasp the fringes of an idea of what one billion is. Incidentally, I must observe here that our new State administration seems to have reached this level of sophistication with regard to taxes rather early.
Senator Ribicoff's cost estimate, though probably accurate, is nonetheless breathtaking. He has made it unnecessary for the rest of us to emphasize that our modern urban complexes need money and a lot of it. But recognition of the cost of solutions is only the beginning of an understanding of the problem.
With this awareness must come an increasing concern with the validity of ideas intended to solve urban problems. Money and manpower alone are not enough. Money and manpower must be invested in the right programs, or the result will be cynicism among those people whose taxes pay the bills and frustration among those people whose problems are not being solved.
My general criticism of our present approach is that the domestic programs of the central government over the last thirty years have become so pervasive and so dominant that other problem solving resources are discouraged and even prevented from creating and implementing solutions. Much recent federal legislation reveals a general lack of confidence that state and local governments can respond to the needs of their citizens.
The fact is, of course, that federal laws are passed by one group of politicians and state and local laws by other groups of politicians. I don't think any group has a corner on compassion or brains. The main difference is usually in their distances from the problems.
My reason for making these comments is that I believe a study of the federal role in urban affairs is desperately needed. Some of the recent federal programs dealing with health, education, welfare, housing and other urban problems have not been very effective, have often been contradictory, and – although I am sure they were well motivated – have at times even intensified the very problems they were purported to solve.
In discussing all these matters it should be clear that I have no desire to engage in the cynical game of shifting the blame. The power that we politicians enjoy is only deserved if we produce satisfactory answers to the problems we are employed to solve. We are not elected to provide excuses. In different ways we are all responsible for what happens in San Francisco, Los Angeles and the other cities of our State and Nation. The job facing every level of government today is to find ways of executing our various responsibilities so that the laws we pass and the programs we enact will really work.
As Walter Lippmann observed, "While the great society can be authorized and, in part, financed in Washington, it will have to be worked out and paid for and administered and enforced in the great urban conglomeration where an increasing majority of our people live."
It is fundamental that we understand our own capacities at whatever level of government we serve. It is all very well to issue the ideological call for a return to "home rule" and local democracy, but if this is to be more than empty bombast, we must develop a clear system of priorities.
We not only need to know what services are needed to cope with our problems, but also who should provide the services. We need to know, not only how to raise revenue, but also who should raise it. And this effort to identify our proper governmental roles must be a continuing one in our constantly changing society.
I would like to illustrate this point by describing one of my pieces of legislation this year. You will forgive me, I hope, if I use this forum for personal aggrandizement. Inevitably when I discuss good government, I find that my own accomplishments come most readily to mind. I suppose I should make the extra effort to find other examples, but as one of my colleagues in the Assembly keeps telling me, "modesty in the face of ability is hypocrisy."
You are all familiar, I am sure, with the local matching requirement for receipt of Collier-Unruh Act gasoline tax funds. In the abstract, this matching provision seemed to make sense in that it geared State funds to local effort. But in practice, this system was not quite what we intended.
We found that the matching requirement created a definite hardship on the property taxpayer in many communities, and that it has generated unnecessary and excessive paperwork and street project delays in all cities and counties. Under the old law, State and local governments spent over four million dollars a year submitting budgets and detailed plans and specifications, and checking and rechecking work done by competent city and county engineers.
My bill eliminated the local matching requirements for Collier-Unruh funds. This will have the effect of lifting a burden of from thirty-five to seventy-five million dollars annually from property taxpayers. But just as important, I think, this bill redefines the State's role with regard to local streets and roads.
The bill places full responsibility for administering the expenditure of gasoline revenue for local use with local governments. The State finally and officially recognizes the fact that city and county engineers are as capable and well-trained as those employed by the Division of Highways, and that local engineers are in a better position to determine how funds should be spent within their own communities.
I think our attitude is a refreshing contrast to the federal approach to transportation problems. The federal program, with its insistence on its own system of priorities, actually intensifies some of our difficulties and diverts our resources to secondary uses.
The largest of the current federal highway projects is the 41,000 mile Interstate Highway System, estimated now to be completed in 1973 at a cost of something around fifty billion dollars. It will provide a defense highway system, connecting all of the major cities in the United States by high speed freeways. I am not challenging the need for the system.
But look at what it does to cities. These super highway routes come together in cities and even include routes within the cities to link the freeways for through traffic. They will be of limited use in relieving intra-city traffic. They make it easier for many more automobiles to get to the city and then increase the burden on the urban streets.
In California we need all of the Interstate Highway System and then some, so that is not the issue. There is the issue, however, of priority. Because the Interstate System had to be completed originally by 1972, it has drained State resources. The more than 2,000 miles of the Interstate System in California have had priority even though there have been many instances where greater traffic deficiencies existed. Because ultimately California needs all of the proposed Interstate System, in order to get the federal funds, the State effort has been shaped to the federal priorities rather than to solving more critical problems.
There is probably no more damning example of arbitrary federal attitudes than the recent bill establishing federal smog control standards. As you no doubt know, that bill in its present form will prohibit California from establishing control standards that go beyond the federal standards. Our twenty years of leadership in this field will be rendered meaningless, and California will be condemned to suffer the effects of our uniquely high levels of automobile smog without the power to act.
Of course there are also examples of federal programs that are imaginative. But no matter how good the program may be, we must always bear in mind that we are dealing with a Congress which is extremely erratic if not downright whimsical. We have seen this year what such a Congress can do to the most promising urban programs.
Under the circumstances, it would appear to be unrealistic to expect any changes in federal fiscal policies with regard to State and local government in the near future. There will be no Heller- Pechman plan this year or next, in all probability. But what can change is our approach to both our problems and the federal government.
We must remember that state and local governments stand in the same waiting line for federal funds. When you stand as far back in that line as we do – behind the generals, the diplomats and the astronauts – there just isn't that much competitive advantage to be had. It make little sense to jockey among ourselves for tenuous and temporary advantage.
Distant though it may be, it is obvious that there will have to be some system of revenue transferral across jurisdictional lines to meet urban needs. Our present methods will not meet the needs of the next decade.
Dr. Joseph Pechman has estimated that by 1970, general expenditures by state and local governments will rise to about one hundred and three billion dollars, while general revenues including federal grants will only amount to eighty-eight billion dollars – creating a deficit of some fifteen billion dollars. Revenue sharing is not so much a question for philosophical debate as it is a matter of fiscal necessity.
The question now becomes: who should control and direct this effort to meet urban needs?
When we speak of urban needs we are not, unfortunately, speaking of the needs of any one, clearly identifiable level of government. I am sure you need no explanation from me of our problems of municipal organization, overlapping jurisdiction, transportation, the organization of delivery systems for various services. Clearly we must go beyond the local level to solve problems of such scope, but we need not turn to a complete dependence on the federal government. In my opinion, the State is ideally suited to the task.
On the whole the State has a much better picture of urban problems and their cross-jurisdictional implications than the federal government does. And I cannot overemphasize the importance of this point. An intimate knowledge of local conditions is essential to the design and operation of successful programs.
The State is also in a much better position to operate programs effectively. Federal administrators tend to develop uniform regulations and guidelines on a national basis, whether or not they are best for a particular situation. California cities differ from eastern cities and a single set of rules designed to satisfy the varying conditions of both usually serves neither very well. But the State has the needed flexibility. Indeed, all local government in California is a creature of the State and is largely subject to State law.
In addition, the State is in a prime position to insure a more equitable redistribution of income which, as we all recognize, is at the heart of urban problems. Only the State – because of its control over both property taxes and the income tax – can insure that the surrounding suburban communities pay their share of the cost of rehabilitating urban slum areas. State property tax policy will have a substantial impact on the future of any rehabilitated area.
Finally, our State, because of its sophistication in handling diverse data and its pioneering efforts to adopt systems analysis to governmental use, would be in a much better position to determine and to assign priorities to various problem areas. The federal government on the other hand, seems to lack a statewide viewpoint from which to determine priorities. Many federal projects are authorized on the basis of which local agency got its application in first.
I know that history has given many of you reason to doubt the State's willingness and ability to respond to your needs and cooperate imaginatively in the solution to your problems. Nor am I above pointing out that some of the actions of the present administration may, from time to time, reinforce your misgivings. But on the whole, I think you will agree that a state-local partnership is a pretty good idea, considering the alternative.
And although we tend to describe our problems in terms of their cost, I think we should all understand that our real need is to make more and better thinking available in finding solutions.
State and local governments now have a unique opportunity to fulfill their roles as "laboratories of the federal system." If the trend toward governmental centralization in this century has weakened state and local government, it has also freed us of responsibility for the past.
State and local governments have no need to justify the present financial and bureaucratic investment in existing programs which have, for the most part, been developed and sustained at the federal level. Indeed, the need for us to break with the past is urgent.
I detect a growing cynicism in this land – a lessening of confidence in our ability to solve our domestic problems. We cannot forever layer one ineffective program onto another and hope to maintain public support for our efforts.
We have promised much to the people of our cities. We have produced an atmosphere of rising expectations among the poor. We must deliver on those promises soon with a massive mobilization of the knowledge and resources of government at every level.