Politicians Fail to Plan for Population Growth

Sacramento Bee Columnist Dan Walters examined politics and population and reaches an important conclusion:

The Department of Finance Demographic Research Unit estimates that during the 2003-04 period, 551,000 births and 283,600 in net immigration, offset by 235,000 deaths, produced a net growth of 599,000, bringing the state's population to 36.6 million.

There are several ways to put that number in perspective, but two of them sharply illustrate its dimensions: It's roughly 20 percent of all the population growth in the United States, and over just one decade, it would be the equivalent of adding the entire population of Indiana, the 14th-most-populous state, to California.

What it means, most of all, is that we would be very foolish to repeat the mistakes of the 1970s and fail to adjust public policy to the simple fact that every year we can expect 600,000 more people. They will need 200,000 more units of housing and a quarter-million more jobs, will add about 500,000 more cars and trucks to already crowded highways and roads, send tens of thousands more kids to school, and will demand retail stores, water, health care and recreation.

Political action to meet those demands is more than overdue - especially since politicians have so often ignored the effects of the 50 percent increase in population we've already experienced since 1980. Our increasingly congested highways are just the most obvious example of how growth's impacts have been sidestepped.

The odd thing is that individually, California politicians know that population growth and its effects, including ever-greater levels of cultural diversity, are the most important challenge facing the state. They wax nostalgic about how their predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s faced similar pressures and met them with historic infrastructure improvements, including hundreds of miles of new roadways, vast new water projects and school-and college-building on a massive scale.

The same can be said about the need to build critical energy infrastructure--such as electric generation and receiving terminals for liquefied natural gas.