At any rate, when I was about 12 years old, I decided to read a book a day for the entire summer; and I did it, thanks to the local library.  I'd go down there once a week and get seven books.  They were very tolerant of that, I guess.  And a week later I'd take those seven back and get seven more.  I hit 100 books before the summer was over.  I haven't read a thing since.  So that's one of the library stories I'm going to tell.

I will tell you this little political story involving libraries.  When Proposition 13 passed in 1978, of course it was a big financial blow to local governments, including libraries.  Jim Nielsen authored this bill to provide, as I recall, 40 million dollars from the State to support local library services.  And Jerry Brown vetoed the bill and used it as an example of "I've gotten the message," you know, smaller government, cutting taxes, and so forth.  But in the same week that he vetoed that bill, he approved another bill that happened to also involve about 40 million dollars.  It was a 40 million dollar-a-year tax break for the horse racing industry who just happened to be represented by his father's law firm, but that's another story.  So I wrote a column about this strange juxtaposition of events.  And the headline on the column, which I'm very proud of, was "Millions for bookies, nothing for books."  It didn't make me too popular around the Governor's office for awhile.  That's another story about libraries.

The final story I'm going to tell you about libraries is a non-political story but I think it's really more on point about what we're talking about here.  A friend of my stepdaughter's came over to the house because she had been assigned to write a school report on Malawi.  I think that's how you pronounce it.  Tiny little country in Africa. And she'd gone to the Roseville City Library near our home and she found virtually nothing on Malawi.  You know, she could find it on a map. There may have been a little brief reference to it in some book but it was really insufficient and she did not have a home computer at that time.  So she came over to see whether she might tap into our computer and find something.

We first looked it up on the Internet.  Tagged into the Internet and pulled up one of the search engines, and just typed in Malawi.  Wham.   More Malawi than you'd ever need in your entire life.  I mean just thing after thing after thing, all these contemporary reports and statistical studies and this and that.  I mean I printed out half-dozen things for her.  It gave her what she needed.

I guess that's really the final message.  That from the time I was 12 years old, the place of the library has clearly changed in people's lives for a lot of reasons.  That girl and her family  bought a computer and got Internet access after seeing that demonstration. I know technology is one of those reasons. But the whole concept of a library being an almost exclusive repository of information available to the public, clearly has changed. Today, the library is only one of a whole menu of information sources. The question that you're pondering here is: what relevance will libraries have as California moves into the 21st Century?

So with that little series of vignettes, I am going to launch into my description of what's going to be happening in California for the rest of this decade, the rest of this century, the rest of this millennium and into the next one as well.

I think we all know that California is a place of unending change.  The only constant about California is that it's constantly changing, but there are periods in which the rates of change and the depth and breadth of that change is greater or lesser.  I think that we are really blessed to be living in probably the most interesting place in the world and probably in its most interesting period - a period of dramatic, far-reaching, deep, powerful, social and economic evolution.  There are a lot of specific things one could mention but I think they really can be categorized in three big areas of evolution.

The first and probably the most important is economic.  California was an agrarian society for most of its first century.  It became an industrial society earlier in the 20th century and it is now evolving economically into this very powerful but also very complex post-industrial economic mode. There's a lot of data to support that thesis but it's not merely a theory, it's real - very, very real.  We're evolving into an economy that is in trade services, entertainment and communications, in a dramatic way.

There are more people employed in the motion picture industry in Southern California now than in aerospace.  Motion picture employment has tripled since 1980 while that of aerospace took a very bit hit - maybe a half-million people in the early 1990s.  Aircraft assembly hangars are being converted into sound stages in Southern California to make up for a shortage of motion picture sound stages.  All the major studios are expanding film production dramatically.   Not only does it service the American market but the worldwide market as well.  It is a humongously powerful and growing industry.

The number of people employed in tire factories in California has declined by 85 percent since the mid-1970s and there are more cars on the road.  The number of vehicles in California is expanding rapidly - more rapidly than the number of drivers, nearly three times as fast as the number of drivers.  We have 25 million vehicles and only about 19 million licensed drivers in California. There's something weird about that.  (laughter).  You could have one driver in every vehicle - you know one vehicle for every driver and you'd still have about six million vehicles still parked some place.  That's California, right?  More vehicles, more tires, but they're not being built here, they're being built someplace else.  There's only one tire factory left in California near Hanford.

But during that same period, employment at hotels, like this one, has doubled in the last 20 years.  Look at it another way.  In 1980 there were 3.4 million Californians employed in what I call the basic traditional areas: manufacturing, utilities, transportation like railroads, and so forth.  These are traditional activities.  Today, if you take those same exact categories, there are 3.4 million employed in them, 7,000 fewer since 1980.  All of the growth in employment since then - about 30-35 percent - has been in the new economy, the trade service economy.  Within the manufacturing area, we all know that's undergone a tremendous revolution in the high tech area.  Health care is now the largest single industry in California.  It's a 100 billion dollar a year industry.  It's twice of what the defense industry is and growing.  Look at all the new hospitals that are being built around the state.  You've seen them all.  There are two new ones in my little community of Roseville -  a new Kaiser Hospital and a new Sutter Hospital.

This economic transformation of California is real and it has myriad impacts unto itself.  It means that the requirements for work are changing dramatically.  It means a certain level of stratification.  Some people believe California is becoming  a two-tiered economy.  A lot of expansion among what some people call the "cognitive elite" - among people who are symbol manipulators like you and like me.  People who take words and numbers, symbols, rearrange them in a computer, or on a piece of paper, and get paid to do it.  Lawyers, accountants, computer programmers, software designers, multimedia mavens.  They're all symbol manipulators.

And then, there is a lot of expansion down there among the garment workers, in the low-tech industry, the service industry, the ill-paid and the ill-trained.  And there is a kind of squeezing out of the middle.  It's not certain.  It may be happening, possibly not.  The data would indicate that perhaps it is, but it's still too early to tell.

Today, jobs are portable.  Jobs don't have to be on rail heads.  They don't have to be next to a port.  Don't even have to be next to an airport.  Jobs can be anywhere.  You take the computers, plug them in, you're in business.

When I was getting my health care through Blue Shield not too many years ago, before I went to Kaiser, my insurance claims were being processed in Grass Valley up in the Sierra Foothills.  It's just as easy to process those insurance claims in Grass Valley as it is in downtown San Francisco. In fact, it's easier.

So one of the effects of the economic evolution that's going on in California is that jobs are being dispersed from the coastal cities into the inland valleys.  The land is cheaper, labor costs are cheaper, housing for workers is cheaper, so on and so on.

Jobs are portable.  They can be picked up.  Look at the intense competition for that next Intel chip plant.  If it can be in Albuquerque, it can be anywhere.  So there's an intense competition.

The second big thing that's happening is population growth.  The sheer numbers are absolutely overwhelming.  Six-million more Californians in the 1980s, 25 percent population growth in ten years.  That's a very high rate of population growth, comparatively.  To demonstrate that, California's population growth was one-fourth of all the population growth in the United States during that period.  The population growth alone would have been equal to the thirteenth most populated state in the United States - the equivalent of adding a Virginia or a Massachusetts to our population in just ten years.

And you say, "Okay, that was in 1980s. Everybody left in the 1990s.  Right?"  We read all the stories. U-Haul did not have enough trailers for all the people who wanted to pack and leave California.  And it was true as far as it went.  We did lose a lot of people in the early 1990s.  Well over a million, maybe two-million people, literally packed up and left and went mostly to other nearby states.  But, what those stories did not tell you was that our population did not stop growing.  It slowed, but didn't stop.  Because the two most important components of population growth in California are babies and foreign immigration and they remained as high as ever during this period.

The numbers work out something like this, and it's a very consistent pattern I might add.  First of all, and foremost, babies.  We have a birth rate in California second only to Utah's which is a religious matter of some kind in Utah.  Utah has the lowest teenage pregnancy rate in the nation; we have one of the very highest teenage pregnancy rates in the nation.  California's high birth rate produces almost 600,000 babies a year.  That's more than one baby a minute.  They're just popping out there like crazy.  Pop.  Every minute.  Well, about every 45 seconds, pop here comes another one.  Think about that.  Think of all the babies being born in California.  In California, only about 220,000 people have the good manners to die every year.  And contrary to popular belief, they are not all slaughtered on the LA freeways, either by auto accidents or bullets.  Actually, only about 4,000 people are murdered in California every year.

So births minus deaths, the so-called natural increase, adds up really to about 350,000 a year.  You add to that another 300,000 or so foreign immigrants, two-thirds legal, one-third illegal.  So that's 650,000.  That's kind of your basic, built-in population growth in California.  Now you either add to that, people coming from other states, or you subtract from that the net loss to other states.

So now we've got 32.5, almost 33 million in California, up from 30 million in 1990.  We're back to even on that, maybe we're even gaining a little bit.  We can expect six-million plus per decade, according to both the census bureau and our State Department of Finance, for at least the next two decades.  We were 30 million and by the end of this decade we're going to be close to 35 million. We're going to be 41 or 42 million by the end of the next decade. We're going to be 47 million by the end of the decade after that and we're going to top 50 million somewhere around 2025.  And that's going to be twice as many people as we had in 1980.

Now think of the sheer impact of those numbers.  It means more of everything.  More cars on the road, or at least more driving.  We've doubled the amount of vehicular driving in California in the last 20 years.  We've only increased the lane miles of highway by 7 percent in that period.  Want to know why there are traffic jams?  That's why there are traffic jams - more cars on the road. Baby boom of the 80s, means school boom in the 90s, right?  Maybe it'll mean a juvenile delinquency boom in the late 1990s, too.  We don't know that yet, but it's possible.

We need to be building the equivalent of a pretty good sized school every 24 hours in this state, 16 to 20 classrooms costing roughly 2.5 billion dollars a year, ad infinitum, as far as you can see down the horizon.  As long as those babies keep being born, that's going to be true.  So where are we going to get the 25 billion dollars we need to build schools in the next ten years?  Anybody got any bright ideas?  Nobody knows.  They don't know down at the Capitol either.  Believe me, they don't know.  More cars on the road, more kids in school, of course more kids in college after that.  More of everything.  Water.  Houses.  Jobs.  Libraries?  Maybe, don't know.  Computers?  Don't know.

Third big thing that is happening is cultural change.  Lots of foreign immigration.  One-third of all the foreign immigration in America comes to California and with that, lots of babies.  The exodus of people in the early 1990s in California was a white flight, by and large, and it accelerated the rate of cultural change.  It also accelerated the relative decline of the white population because of that.  The decline of the white or Anglo population to below 50 percent was not supposed to take place until sometime in the next decade. Instead, it will occur in this decade.  It accelerated pretty dramatically.  We're about 51 percent Anglo, non-Latino white today.  That will drop below 50 percent pretty soon.  And as everyone in this room knows, we're not just talking a few ethnic classifications here. We're talking 110 languages in Los Angeles public schools.

This is the most ethnically and culturally diverse society that has ever existed in the history of humankind.  Nobody has every done this before.  Nobody has ever gone through what we're experiencing in California; and that reverberates out.  Any one of these three big trends would be traumatic, equivalent to an earthquake or some other gigantic, cataclysmic event, albeit in slow motion. Instead of happening in seconds, it is happening over decades.  But it's important because it's changing the face of California sociologically and physically, environmentally and all other ways.

You take all three of those trends and put them together and you create all these mutant hybrid sorts of changes, issues, challenges, almost too numerous to list.  Eventually they translate into political terms, like where are you going to find the money to build schools much less operate them?  Where's the money going to come for transportation?  What kind of transportation should you build? and so forth.

One way to look at politics: it's a side show.  It's kind of fun sometimes, disgusting at other times, but politics is the means by which a society identifies a consensus of social values and then somehow implements that consensus into programmatic or legalistic terms.  We all agree that we shouldn't wantonly kill each other.  I'm not sure we have exactly, but if we had, then politics is a means by which we define homicide, specify penalties for it, and so forth.  It's that consensus implementation process.  But you first look at California and you say, "What is the consensus?  Is there a consensus on anything?"  Maybe it is as the range of values -  a wider and wider and wider range.  That consensus becomes ever more elusive.

What's clear is that all institutions, the institutions you represent, the institution I am part of, the institutions of politics, all of the mechanisms that we have in this society to communicate with one another and interact with one another are under challenge because of the inner mingling, intertwined social economic and demographic forces that are at play in this society.

As I said, the issues are almost limitless.  Education, transportation, water - where's the water going to come from?  Are we going to build more dams, more reservoirs, more canals?  Will we reallocate the water that's already there - 85 percent used for agriculture, into non-agriculture uses?  Think how enormously complicated it is to create the mechanisms.  Is that water to be just simply reallocated?  Is it to be sold?  Is it to be marketed?  One of the very intense controversies in the Capitol right now is a plan by the San Diego Water Authority to buy water from the Imperial Irrigation District, my old stomping grounds, and use it in San Diego. But how do you get it there?  It has to go through the Metropolitan Water District and they want to charge $246,000 an acre foot to transport that water.  San Diego says that's usurious.  Boom.  Big political battle over water.  Not over water per se, but how it's to be priced.  Who is going to pay for it?  Farmers want to sell it.  People in San Diego want to buy it.  How's it going to get there?  Who is going to pay for transporting it?  How much are they going to pay?  Those are the sorts of issues that arise out of these things.  San Diego needs that water.  It wants water independence and that's the way it's chosen to get it.

Housing development patterns have changed, too.  The jobs have shifted into the inland valleys.  So the people are shifting into the inland valleys.  I think you heard a little bit about this earlier today.  Population growth in this decade will be 17 percent on average, according to the current projections.  So any area that is growing faster than 17 percent is above the line and then there are areas that are growing slower than 17 percent, or below the line.  Now where is the growth occurring?  There are 29 counties that have above-the-line growth in this decade.  There are three counties that are right on the mark of 17 percent and the others, 26 counties, are below the line.

Those 29 counties, with a couple of small exceptions, are inland counties in the inland valley areas.  Riverside County, San Bernardino County, the Inland Empire of Southern California, Northern San Diego County, up through the Central Valley.  All the Central Valley counties, except one are above the line.  Yolo County is the only one that isn't above the line, but it's just barely below it.

On the other hand, the coastal metropolitan areas are not growing nearly as rapidly.  That's particularly true of the San Francisco Bay Area.  While California is growing by 17 percent, San Francisco itself, pretty much built out, will only grow by about eight percent.  Marin County is only supposed to grow about four to five percent; half of those will be inmates of San Quentin Prison.  That's the one area of population growth that Marin County does not control - inmates of San Quentin.  As a matter of fact, in the decade of the 80s, Marin County only grew by about 7,000 people and at least half of them were inmates of San Quentin Prison.

Between 1980 and 1996, Riverside County grew 108 percent.  Its job base grew 134 percent from the shift of jobs and there is a very, very close correlation, although not exactly precise. There are a few exceptions, but there is a very, very close correlation between the fastest growing job areas and the fastest growing population areas, as you might expect.  It's a massive shift demographically.  Now it doesn't mean these coastal areas are losing population, per se.  There's actually only one county that's even close to losing population, and that's a very small rural county.

It's actually a two-pronged process, as near as I can figure.  The basic components of population growth in California, i.e., foreign immigration and babies, are largely an urban phenomenon - not exclusively but largely.  But there is this off-setting shift, white-flight really, out to the burbs, out to the edge cities.  Not the close-in suburbs - not the Orange Counties and the Contra Costa Counties and the San Mateo Counties.  Those populations are rather stable.

Sacramento is a perfect microcosm of what's going on.  You have the urban core, not growing very much in population but its population changing in ethnic and cultural composition.  Then you have the older suburbs - Carmichael, Fair Oaks, places like that, not growing very much.  Then you have the edge suburbs, where I live, Roseville, Placer County.  Placer County is the fastest growing county in Northern California except for small counties that have prisons in them.  Isn't that amazing, that these places get to count inmates.  It's just wonderful isn't it?  I wonder if the inmates get subtracted from where they come from?  Think about that for a minute.
Placer County grew 76 percent since 1980.  That's where NEC is located. That's where Hewlett Packard is located.  That's where Oracle is about to locate - Silicon Valley East they call it.  And this phenomenon is replicated all around the state.  Then finally, beyond that, we have the fourth belt - the rural outback county of California that's not growing very much.  They still have resource economies, for the most part, except where they build those prisons.  Prisons are the fastest growing component of California state government.  It's one growth area.  The one thing that the state has done for rural economic development in the last 20 years is build prisons.  And that's true in Imperial County and Del Norte County, to use the two extremes.  If it wasn't for those prisons, those places would have dried and blown away a long time ago.

And that's what's really happening in California.  Thinking of California as Northern and Southern California is really erroneous.  The two halves of the State have become more alike, sociologically, even politically. What's really important is to think of California as these concentric belts.  Those urban cores not growing very rapidly but changing demographically and culturally, very rapidly.  The older suburbs which are more settled, become job-centered in areas like Contra Costa County along the 680 corridor, or Orange County, near the Orange County Airport.  Lot of jobs.  Lot of commuters going into those areas.  It's funny, those people in Contra Costa County, San Mateo County, Orange County, think they're getting a lot of growth because they see a lot of traffic.  The truth is their populations aren't growing very much at all, but they've got a lot of commuters coming in because they put controls on population growth. They do not put controls on job growth.  Kind of an interesting phenomenon.  Four concentric belts is how to think of California accurately.

The prognosis for this state, demographically, economically, and culturally, is more of the same.  The economy will continue to convert itself.  The old industrial economy will continue to shrink.  The new industrial economy, high-tech, will continue to expand and the new symbol economy, the new service economy, will continue to expand dramatically.  The potential for economic growth in California is almost limitless.
 
Think about where we exist.  We exist where North America, Latin America and the Pacific Rim intersect with one another.  We are the crossroads of much of the world.  We have a diverse economy, a diverse population that has cultural ties with much of that world so the potential for economic development in the new economy is absolutely limitless.  The question, really, is whether we will be able to manage that growth, and the concurrent population growth and diversity in such way that we retain some identity as a state, some cohesiveness as a culture and do not degenerate into mutually warring tribes.  And that's a great challenge.

You know we could become Bosnia on the left coast of America without working at it too hard.  The potential for that is there.  And it will be the quality of our civic leadership and our civic institutions that will determines what happens.

You notice I haven't said much about politics?  That's because I don't think politicians are terribly important in the scheme of things.  Politicians, despite what we say about them in the media, despite what they say about themselves, are not really leaders.  They are truly and more accurately reactors rather than actors.  They react to the problems presented to them by changing social and economic circumstances that are, in large measure, beyond their control.   They react in ways that the society essentially allows them to react.  It's rare that politics, on its own, deals effectively with some public policy issue.  It's only when we have achieved some sort of civic consensus about something, that essentially provides an atmosphere of a no-lose situation for politicians, that they will finally act.  So if we leave it to the politicians to decide these things, they probably won't deal with it.  They will tend to become bogged down in minutia, trivia.

But, there are many impediments.  There are structural impediments to effective policy-making.  There are cultural impediments.  All the changes that have gone on in the society of California, the dramatic changes we've seen, are not reflected in the body politic.  Voters are overwhelmingly white, like 75-80 percent white, middle to middle-upper class, home-owning people.  So all the changes that are going on in society are not mirroring the body politic.  In fact, the characteristic gap is widening because the changes going on in society are much more rapid than what is going on with voters, which creates a political paradise.  Who do politicians respond to?  Constituents or voters?  That dilemma permeates the Capitol.

And there are other structural impediments.  We have created a structure of government that is almost indecipherable.  We have not changed it much. We have merely added to it.

I'll give you a very good example, because it's probably the single most important endeavor we have - public education.  Who is responsible for public education in California?  Will somebody please tell me?  I don't know.  I literally do not know.  I hear school boards pontificate, superintendents pontificate, the legislature pontificates through several voices, the governor has something to say.  The state superintendent of public instruction has something to say and the state school board has something to say and they all say different things.  When things go well, they're in there clamoring for credit.

When the test scores come in bad, the responses are: "Not me, that was that other guy over there.  That was because this guy didn't do his job over here. My predecessor screwed up. Not my fault."

But who is responsible for public education?  I am very serious about this?  Can anybody name who's responsible when the scores don't come in, when the buildings are falling apart?  Who is responsible for that?  It's a tremendous structure that encourages passing the buck and pointing fingers.  It discourages accountability and that's true whether you're talking about education or almost all other forms of endeavor.

You know, I am hesitant to make predictions about how all this is going to affect the library business, the library profession.  I think it is going to be very challenging.   I hate that word - challenging - but I think it's literally true in this case.  Libraries, like other institutions in California, are going to be dealing with an increasingly diverse population, not only just in ethnic terms and linguistic terms, but in cultural terms as well.  You know, lifestyles, sexual orientation, you name it.  As Dorothy told Toto, "We're not in Kansas anymore."  California isn't Kansas.  A generation or two ago, we were Kansas, but we're not Kansas any more.  We're more diverse.

Rapidly changing economic circumstances will compel people to constantly retrain themselves to keep up with the changing economy.  And, finally, the sheer numbers, the incredible crush of the sheer numbers that present challenges for all institutions, in and outside of government, that service the population of California.  The best thing about this is, it gives me a hell of a lot to write about.

I've got it all figured out.  If I just write about another 3,000 columns, on top of the 4,500 or so I've written already, I can retire.  Thank you very much for your attention.

Dan Walters has been a journalist for more than 36 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. In 1981, Mr. Walters began writing the state's only daily newspaper column devoted to California political, economic and social events. In 1984, he and the column moved from The Sacramento Union to The Sacramento Bee. His column now appears in more than 50 California newspapers. In 1986, his book, The New California: Facing the 21st Century, was published in its first edition. The book has since undergone revisions and has become a widely used college textbook about socioeconomic and political trends in the state.

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