The contest over Proposition 35 on the state ballot is a continuation of the perennial struggle over who should get what share of engineering work on California's massive infrastructure improvements.

State-employed engineers laboring primarily for Caltrans, buttressed by the state constitution and court decisions, want it all. Their private counterparts want a better shot at contracting with the state for a significant portion of the work.

The latter are behind the current initiative to give state and local agencies more flexibility in assigning the tasks to civil servants on their own payrolls or hiring outsiders.

Stripped of side issues, it's an old-fashioned turf war.

It's too bad the dispute was not settled by an attempted legislator-brokered compromise before being put to voters to be confused by the irrelevancies advanced on both sides (e.g., the comparative gluttony of civil servants and private engineering and architectural firms feeding at the same public trough).

There happens to be more than enough work on a variety of state projects to soak up all available talent on both public and private payrolls.

Part of the reason for the current excess of engineering work is the governor's six-year, $6.8 billion commitment to traffic congestion relief projects around the state.

Add more billions for seismic retrofitting of Caltrans structures and other state projects, and it becomes doubly puzzling why the Professional Engineers in California Government (a union of 11,000 state-employed engineers, architects and land surveyors) fights Prop. 35 to hang onto jobs they are not numerous enough to handle all by themselves.

In this period of transitory workload growth due to the surge in state construction projects, it is madness to put large numbers of additional engineers on state payrolls. The need is only temporary. And it is madness to incur delays because civil servants have too much to do.

The more efficient and expeditious way is to contract with private firms to meet the peak workloads, without swelling the state payroll for that purpose or delaying project completion dates.

Critics of Prop. 35 say it will invite shady dealings between state agencies and private contractors by overly easing the rules for farming out some of the work. On the other side of the same coin is the allegation that, in the absence of competition, civil servants tend to slip into lazy habits.

We'll opt for competition accompanied by close scrutiny, and frequent audits, of outside contracts.

California needs a lot of engineering talent to carry out the projected transportation improvements. Prop. 35 is a part of the solution.


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