SACRAMENTO IS INVITING A DISASTER.

Byline: Jill Stewart 

I'M almost tempted, given the bad behavior of politicians in Sacramento over whether to upgrade California's decaying levees, roads, reservoirs and other infrastructure, to just sit back and hope a nasty 500-year flood inundates the Capitol with thick muck.

Too bad few politicians would suffer. Instead, thousands upon thousands of far-too-blissfully ignorant residents would lose their homes, and even their lives, if a catastrophic flood should strike Sacramento a city which experts agree faces a far worse flood threat than badly ravaged New Orleans.

This is due to the fact that the city, county and state have never built up flood barriers to withstand a 250-year or even 100-year flood. As if taunting the heavens, local Sacramento politicians have insanely allowed developers to construct thousands of residences on the bottomlands of flood plains.

You probably don't live in Sacramento, but you should listen up anyway. Its plight is a dramatic metaphor for California. You can rely upon the fact that your own city council, county board of supervisors, state legislators and members of Congress have shirked the most basic responsibility of any elected leader.

That duty is to build safe, basic infrastructure to withstand the floods, earthquakes, traffic and water demands we know are still to come.

The wealthy and "progressive" state of California has a Byzantine, roughly 6,000-mile-long badly compromised levee system that "protects" endless stretches of lands. New Orleans claimed to have built levees to withstand a 200-year flood. In California, some parts will barely stand up to an 85-year flood. New Orleans levees protected a single city. California's levees, if laid end to end, would stretch across the United States roughly twice.

We are also unprepared to supply water to our exploding population if a major earthquake wipes out the supply system. Nobody in Sacramento has felt like spending the billions needed to bring our waterworks into the 21st century. Hundreds of the state's bridges are positively Appalachian in modernity. They have been left in their old, unreinforced condition by the cities and counties responsible for them.

It's not a lack of money. Over the past 25 years, there's been scads of taxpayer money. Politicians spent it on ritzy wage and retirement deals for grumpy government workers, on ineffective social welfare schemes, on endless pet projects.

To be fair, the state has fixed all but 11 of roughly 2,000 bridges that it maintains. But that was a reaction to the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989, which badly whacked San Francisco and collapsed an Oakland freeway, claiming dozens of lives.

Did you notice the operative word in that last sentence: disastrous? We like to wait until disaster strikes, then act. California politicians, by dithering for decades, have invited much bigger potential tragedies.

When a society concentrates its people in towns and cities, and then fails to protect them from fully expected disasters, is that any different from a Third World country where throngs of sports fans trample and suffocate one another every few years because the civic leaders don't want to pay for decent crowd control?

Just asking.

So it's been fascinating to see our badly divided state Legislature fighting in recent days over whether to thwart or back Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed $222 billion infrastructure plan, which would include $71 billion in publicly approved bonds.

What's needed is a measure that focuses like a laser on infrastructure, such as the cracked and scary Highway 99 in the San Joaquin Valley.

But no. Republicans oppose the latest plan because it is a costly and strange compromise, filled with projects that have nothing to do with public works or infrastructure. Democrats, perhaps not wanting to hand Arnold a successful bond measure as he approaches his re-election bid later this year, have insisted on poison-pill social engineering including low-rent housing constructed on "transportation corridors."

The "infrastructure" bond package contains so many pet projects that it violates the state Constitution by jamming disparate issues in one ballot measure. So the Legislature has even proposed a constitutional amendment, Assembly Constitutional Amendment 10, to make it this crazy-quilt measure legal.

Like I said, it's tempting to wish a major disaster upon our Capitol. Funny thing is, the Legislature is managing to achieve that all by itself.