CALIFORNIA VOTERS WHO are disgusted with the snail's pace at which many state and local public construction projects proceed have an opportunity to do something about it on Nov. 7. The voters can and should approve Proposition 35, which will allow state and local governments to contract out engineering and architectural services on major projects.

Prop. 35 should save the taxpayers substantial amounts of money – possibly more than $2 billion annually -- and it will certainly speed the completion of critical construction projects around the state. It is also likely to create as many as 40,000 new jobs. These are jobs that are not directly tied to the wild fluctuations of the high-tech sector.

The state certainly knows that this system of operation works. Former Gov. Pete Wilson used it to rebuild the Santa Monica Freeway in record time after the devastating 1994 Northridge earthquake. That showed us that a public/private partnership is an effective tool in the state's construction arsenal, especially when contrasted against the abysmal on-time record of state-run projects.

The state had to stop doing such contracting after its 11,000 unionized engineers, architects and surveyors won a lawsuit that claimed the practice was illegal. Prop. 35 is an attempt to make such a practice legal. It seeks to return that flexibility to state and local governments.

Obviously, this proposition is opposed by these same state employees who want all of the work to stay in state government. If that happens, of course, the state's aggressive construction schedule detailed by Gov. Gray Davis will require that the state hire and train thousands more employees to do the work.

The Legislative budget analyst points out that is an exceedingly unlikely scenario. Caltrans already has thousands of engineering vacancies that it cannot fill because of the tight labor market. That means that if state construction is left to Caltrans alone all or most projects can expect substantial delays. That is simply unacceptable when there is such a simple solution at hand.

Couple all of that with Caltrans having the highest engineering costs of any state in the country and it is easy to see why California voters should support Prop. 35.


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