Another Ugly Government Temple

by Patrick O'Hannigan

The Point Loma section of San Diego is a fine place from which to think about arguments that rage in smaller cities like San Luis Obispo. After lounging around a hotel pool, swilling espresso in a bistro that used to be a house, and marveling at the killer whales that do so much to keep SeaWorld profitable, I was a happy man. On the drive home, the black and white cruisers of the California Highway Patrol looked like killer whales with engines. I did not recover my distrust for government until the O’Hannigan family vacation ended in a ten-mile traffic jam while a state road crew poked its way through power pole replacement on a weekend afternoon.

By the time I rolled back into my town, I had a pretty good inkling of why many citizens think that plans for a new county government center in San Luis Obispo are ambitious enough to create anti-government sentiment. Ninety thousand square feet is a lot of space for employees who currently occupy only twenty-four thousand square feet. County bureaucrats say they want to consolidate currently scattered offices, but the blueprints they are drooling over include considerable room for expansion, not to mention private elevators that insulate state employees from the rabble who pay their salaries.

Around here we measure buildings by how they complement or discomfit the Old Mission that has been the soul of downtown SLO since famously footsore Franciscan Padre Junipero Serra first said Mass on the banks of a local creek in 1772. In deference to the fifth of twenty-one California missions along El Camino Real and the fact that both tourists and residents want area hills to dominate the skyline more than buildings do, San Luis Obispo has a municipal ordinance limiting downtown buildings to four or fewer floors. By local standards the proposed county building is huge.

Complaints about the ugly design of the new county building seem justified because published drawings show only a big block-like structure with cosmetic touches aimed at making it user-friendly. A loincloth will make a sumo wrestler look small before a rooftop garden hides the arrogance of this proposed fortress. The design has none of the dignity of the existing county courthouse, an imposing structure of the pre-World War Two kind that hosted testy conversations between Philip Marlowe and various cops in the detective fiction of Raymond Chandler.

The San Francisco-based architects who designed the new building have worked in San Luis Obispo before, yet the behemoth on the drawing board will partially block views of an art deco landmark known as the Fremont Theater. Combine that with the fact that government operates under fewer constraints than business does, and you have what some residents fear is a recipe for industrial-strength resentment.

In the name of limited government, I say bring on the resentment. Among other good things, more people are beginning to realize that state agencies strive to spend every dime in their annual budgets. Fiscal habits that would bankrupt a private person are used to justify bigger budgets in subsequent years.

Not that I mind having a new county building in town. As government ghettos go, the office kind beats the tenement housing kind every time. I do wonder why the Chamber of Commerce and the Downtown Business Association keep strewing figurative roses at the feet of county leaders, however. Letterhead used by county supervisors says nothing about bwana, massah, sahib, or royalty of any kind. The supervisors themselves usually behave more like Larry, Moe, and Curly than like Lee, Jackson, and Longstreet. Even fictional characters like Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe Cartwright are more deserving of deference than most of the local politicos. Could the ironic success of government schools have something to do with the city’s servile attitude towards the county?

None of the Mensa rejects bowing to county poobahs seems to understand economics, for example. Listen long enough to people behind Chamber of Commerce desks and you might think that the new government building is a talisman with which to scare off vampires poised to suck blood from our state university and our pink hotel.

Perhaps someone unfamiliar with San Luis Obispo wrote a memo suggesting that only an infusion of taxpayer money could keep the town from turning back into the one-horse burg it once was. The Chamber of Commerce has declared county government a fountain of civic vitality.

An essay to that effect in the local newspaper would have been marginally more convincing if Parade magazine had not addressed the same subject the day before. It seems a small town in Pennsylvania was rescued from oblivion by a renovated movie theater. Note that it was a movie theater, not a monument to imperial government, that sparked economic revival. San Luis Obispo has decided to ignore that lesson and obscure sight lines to one of its best-known buildings, an architectural marvel that serves as a film festival magnet and a backdrop for local artists. Go figure.

The moral of this story is that we all need smaller government. A corollary to that moral is that government growth, however well-meaning, is always and everywhere a threat to liberty. Unfortunately, people who do not thirst for freedom have as much chance of thwarting state ambition as a herring has of escaping Shamu at feeding time, and it can be said both of buildings and of politicians that we get the ones we deserve.

Patrick O’Hannigan [send him mail] is a technical writer in California.

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