Breakin’ Up That Old Gang . . .

SACRAMENTO —  As a child of the Fresno suburbs, early exposure to California’s wonders came largely through the back window of a family station wagon. From a Fresno perspective, wonders always seemed a ways down the road. So we’d travel, roaming what were then, in the early 1960s, a new wonder in their own right-- freeways . There was magic in that fresh coinage. In other states, people drove mere highways or toll roads. Only in California were we building--cue the poppy song, please--freeways.

Of course, they weren’t free. They simply were financed in a way that spared taxpayers the indignity of slowing down to hurl change at a tollbooth. Nonetheless, the notion that these concrete marvels--so clean, so wide, so aesthetically distinctive--constituted something special was not unfounded. California’s freeway designers in fact were pioneers, their masterworks copied by urban road builders across the land.

Last Thursday, a dozen or so Caltrans engineers sat around a large conference table here and told stories from the old days. They told of hiking on snowshoes in blizzards to mark the path of I-80 over Donner Pass; of assembling the freeway system across L.A., piece by piece, knitting it all together with that impossible four-deck interchange in Downtown; of looking up the then barren west side of the San Joaquin Valley and imagining a broad freeway that would connect the north state to the south.

“Engineers would come from all over the world to see what we were doing then,” recalled a 39-year Caltrans veteran. “They’d want to see the massive amounts of dirt we were moving, the incredible bridges we were building. It was a marvelous time.”

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Cut now to the more prosaic present tense. In his bid to look a bit more like Newt Gingrich each day, Gov. Pete Wilson has proposed laying off 1,200 Caltrans employees--for the most part, engineers. Let Newt sack Barney. Pete stalks bigger game, the freeway designers.

His reasoning in part is that freeway design and inspection can be done more cheaply and better by private contractors. One suspects our good governor has not read closely enough all the cost analyses that argue otherwise. Perhaps, too, he has not paid close attention to scandals involving Southern California defense contractors: It takes a leap of faith to assume that the private sector spends public money more prudently than government employees. Or maybe Wilson simply has chosen to follow the counsel of the contractors who contribute to his political campaigns.

In any case, the ax is out, and in places where Caltrans engineers gather, the chatter is of who will get whacked, who might be spared, and whatever happened to those good old golden days, when all California seemed but a giant wonderworks, awaiting assembly? Here will go the state college. There the aqueduct. Here the state park. There the freeway. All of it big, audacious, beautiful.

“In the ‘60s,” said Chuck Miller, who started with Caltrans in 1961, when it was still called the Division of Highways, “we had a mission. We knew what the hell we were doing. We knew where we were going and how to get there. We’d build that highway and build that freeway. We’d get it done and it felt good. It was great.”

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It’s no great mystery how Old Mo’ came to desert the Caltrans wizards. After the wonder wore off, freeways would be recognized as something less than perfect. There was congestion, split neighborhoods, fouled air. Jerry Brown’s era of limits first signaled that his dad’s freeway boom was done. The Republicans who followed preached the advantages of replacing in-house engineers with private contractors. Or, as one Caltrans vet put it, “out-house engineers.”

Also, in the crazy world of California politics, state employees through unions and professional associations feel compelled to become campaign players--a survival instinct. Thus, in the past election, Caltrans engineers supported Democrat Kathleen Brown, while prison guards backed Pete Wilson in a big way. Now Caltrans is facing layoffs, while prisons go up as fast as Californians can build them. Amazing coincidence!

More than anything, however, Wilson’s run on Caltrans engineers serves only to rub our noses again in what has been obvious for some time: Once, there was a California that thought big. Everything seemed possible, and on the grandest of scales. Those happy days ended more quickly than anyone could imagine.

And now come the downsizers, the cutback artists. With the exception of prisons, we don’t seem capable of building much of anything anymore. We can’t even imagine it. Last seen, our vision thing was headed down the fine, wide freeway, headed who knows where.