TARGETED AREAS

The proposal to consolidate housing, transportation, water and related public works under one umbrella agency drew praise from unexpected quarters Friday, as academics and urban planners cautiously embraced the idea of considering these intertwined and vexing issues together.

Although planners said they don’t necessarily agree with each proposal, they said they are excited at the prospect of finding new ways to plan, finance and build public works projects.

“I’m optimistic about it,” said Roger Snoble, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in Los Angeles, which operates commuter bus and rail lines and coordinates most of the region’s highway construction projects.

The consolidation proposal is based on the idea -- popular among some urban planners -- that all of the infrastructure requirements of a rapidly growing state such as California need to be considered together. The failure to do that, the report said, has led to holes in the transportation system and a massive housing crunch.

In addition to consolidating several departments, the report urged significant changes in the way that major public works projects are financed.

The commission urged the state to involve private investors when building and operating roads, bridges and transit systems.

If implemented, the commission’s proposal would change the way highways and public transit projects are built by freeing contractors from rules that spell out the type of materials that must be used and the construction methods to be employed.

Instead, contractors would be allowed to build the projects as they saw fit -- but they would have to guarantee the work and repair any problems.

The commission also urged several changes in the way the state raises money to pay for road projects, including reserving the interest earned from gasoline tax revenue for transportation projects. The commission also urged the governor to consider charging motorists a fee based on the number of miles they drive each year, rather than relying on the sales tax, in order to collect more from highly efficient cars such as hybrids or electric vehicles.

“This report sets out hundreds of recommendations to really move in new directions,” said Martin Wachs, director of the Institute for Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley.

He stopped short of embracing every idea in the report. He said some proposals could threaten the jobs of state employees. He acknowledged the plan would dramatically reduce government regulations over how private contractors build public projects. But he emphasized that contractors would be required to guarantee the quality and safety of their work, a practice common in Europe.

But, he said, the panel’s work represented the “cutting edge of academic thought” in urban planning and transportation planning.

Still, some urban planners urged caution in moving forward with such dramatic changes. Gordon Hamilton, deputy director of planning for the city of Los Angeles, said that consolidating such complicated areas as housing, transportation and water planning under one department could result in a lack of attention to important topics.

“Our concern at the state level would be whether or not integrating the departments would dilute the expertise of the staff of those departments or compromise their mission,” Hamilton said.

For example, he said, there was a decision when Richard Riordan was mayor to coordinate the work of the planning department with other infrastructure-related agencies. But, he said, that led to the neglect of some functions of the department, including historic preservation, that did not fit neatly into the definition of infrastructure planning.