GEORGE A. GONZALEZ - fieldi

AUTOMOBILE EMISSION STANDARDS 87A number of major corporations supported the 1974 proposition, includingBank of America, Atlantic-Richfield (an oil firm), and Crocker NationalBank. 4 Importantly, major oil firms did not come out in opposition to Proposition5 (Whitt 1982, 131). Detailing the lack of any serious opposition tothis proposition, Whitt (1982) explains that “only $1,700.29 was put upagainst Proposition 5.” He adds that “$203,215 was contributed” to supportpassage of the measure, “with 99.4 percent coming from business” (132).CONCLUSIONIn examining the history of Los Angeles’s economic growth and the creationof California’s air pollution abatement regime, we can see that many of theindividuals, institutions, and interests that promoted and economically benefittedfrom Los Angeles’s growth also took the lead in shaping and establishingCalifornia’s pollution control efforts. Their air pollution reductionand growth objectives were reconciled through the utilization of pollutioncontrol technology to achieve the former. Hence, economic growth couldcontinue and air quality could improve. Improved air quality would, in turn,protect the business milieu.The technology control approach to air pollution abatement wasextended to automobile emissions. A conciliatory attitude was taken towardthe automobile, not solely because of formal economic ties among automotive-relatedfirms and leading economic interests in the state (Whitt 1982),but, as I discussed in chapter 4, large land holders and land developers in LosAngeles, and throughout the state, by the 1940s and 1950s had become aseconomically dependent on the sale and use of automobiles as automotiveinterests themselves. Thus, when the opportunity opened to shift a significantamount of financial resources away from the development and maintenanceof publicly financed automotive infrastructure and toward the development,maintenance, and operation of non-polluting mass transit, localgrowth coalition members in the state stood largely idle while automotiverelatedinterests, especially oil, closed it off.Finally, the policymaking process that led to the establishment of theautomobile as a major contributor to smog, and the subsequent creation ofCalifornia’s automobile emission regulatory regime, demonstrates that thecurrent policy approach taken by public agencies in California to the issue ofautomobile emissions is not the result of public officials seeking to navigatethe competing and somewhat conflicting preferences of the public, as positedby Sudhir Rajan (1996). Nor is this approach the result of public officialsstriving to reconcile economic growth and air pollution concerns, as held byDaniel Mazmanian (1999). Both Rajan’s and Mazmanian’s arguments areconsistent with the state autonomy/issue networks model. Instead, we seethat the current contours of California’s clean air policies resulted from the