Dick Spotswood: Mishandled Ross Valley flood response felled by ‘vetocracy’

It’s become apparent that America has lost its way when it comes to building things. The problem isn’t lack of construction know-how. It stems from the process we’ve enacted with the best of intentions that’s made improving our infrastructure unnecessarily time-consuming and expensive.

We’re witnessing that here in Marin with stymied efforts to control historic Ross Valley flooding. Californians know the problem well. The effort to build a high-speed rail line linking the Bay Area and Sacramento to Los Angeles and San Diego is a comic punchline. Due to skyrocketing land, labor and material costs, in addition to environmental red tape, building affordable housing now can cost up to $1 million per unit.

Author and political scientist Francis Fukuyama coined the term “vetocracies” in which wide swaths of society have veto power over the construction of new public infrastructure including transit lines, housing and even essential efforts to address climate change and flooding.

The result is inaction. It arises both from a political left that seemingly embraces bureaucracy and complicated regulations and a political right that so distrusts government that it presumes inaction is safer than action.

In San Anselmo, Fairfax, Ross and parts of Larkspur, the New Year’s Eve flood of 2005 shocked residents and small business owners. Under proactive leadership by the late Marin County Supervisor Hal Brown, funding was enacted to address the reality that another Ross Valley deluge was inevitable.

A communitywide consensus developed to do something. There never arose a broadly agreed upon definition of what flood control meant in the real world. Every sector of Ross Valley knew what it didn’t like. The resulting failed process was inevitable in Marin where the unifying instinct is resistance to change.

The federal, state and local bureaucracies, each with competing missions, all had veto power. Affected citizens pursued lax rules which guarantee almost unlimited public input which effectively torpedoes action. Vetoes occur when almost anyone can file litigation to tie up even well-conceived plans in a judicial limbo. The vetocracy is exemplified by the perversion of the California Environmental Quality Act to concentrate on the relatively trivial over the big picture.

The result is frustration. Only marginal improvements to curb the destructive power of water have been implemented in the ensuing 24 years.

High-speed rail is open and running all over the developed world. Japan was the pioneer. In recent decades China, France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Saudi Arabia are operating fast trains brimming with passengers.

In 2008, California voters passed Proposition 1A with a 53% majority to partially fund 21st century trains linking northern and southern California by 2020. Today, no one has any idea when the entire line will open. The first section through the rural San Joaquin Valley is projected to be finished in 2033. California high speed rail has become more about creating union construction jobs than moving people.

The delays and uncertainty caused by our cumbersome process are why we’ve lost the ability to build big. We don’t even know the true costs of these projects since inflation does its dirty job when projects are delayed for decades.

Americans managed to build the transcontinental railroad during the Civil War from Omaha to Sacramento. It started with the Railroad Act of 1862 and ended with the driving of the golden spike at Promontory, Utah in May 1869. The original public-private partnership was accomplished with rudimentary technology and labor from Irish and Chinese immigrants over the Sierra and the deserts of the West in just seven years.

If we reform the process and curb the “vetocracies” we might again be able to satisfy the needs and desires of a supermajority of Americans who don’t believe inaction is always better than action.

Columnist Dick Spotswood of Mill Valley writes on local issues Sundays and Wednesdays. Email him at spotswood@comcast.net.