Forum Tackles Traffic Congestion : Business, Community Leaders Seek Answers to Dilemma

When Orange County voters were asked in 1984 to approve a 1-cent sales tax increase for road, highway and mass transit improvements, 70.3% of them said no.

The ballot measure, Proposition A, was defeated in every city in the county and in all but one of the county’s 2,223 voting precincts: one in Seal Beach.

Interviewed later by county transportation officials, voters in the small, untrendy Seal Beach precinct said they were hoping that, somewhere in the $5 billion that would be raised by the tax hike, there would be money to build a long-sought sound wall to protect their neighborhood from San Diego Freeway noise. There was no mention of grandiose proposals for new freeways, freeway-widening projects and new rail transit lines touted by supporters of the proposition during the campaign.

“They wanted that sound wall so badly they were willing to pay for it. But throughout Orange County, the other voters couldn’t make that connection. They couldn’t see any direct benefit to themselves for the money they paid in,” Stan Oftelie, executive director of the Orange County Transportation Commission, said Thursday.

“They don’t think we spend our money particularly wisely, or particularly well. So we have to learn to do better,” said Oftelie. His observation served as an initial point of reference for about 200 business and community leaders looking for answers to the county’s traffic congestion dilemma during a daylong forum at Chapman College titled “Transportation and the Quality of Life.”

Turn to the Community

The forum was an attempt to turn away from traffic engineers and planners and outward to the community to find the answers that Proposition A did not provide, transportation officials said.

“It’s clear that we cannot find a solution until we understand what our problem really is,” said Brea Mayor Clarice Blamer, a member of the Transportation Commission. “And even if we agree that traffic in Orange County is a tremendous problem, a problem which dramatically impacts the quality of our lives, we find there is significant disagreement on how to deal with the traffic which threatens to engulf us.”

The points of disagreement emerged clearly during a morning panel of government officials, an economist and an environmentalist debating the need for new freeways cutting through Orange County’s undeveloped foothills and a controversial rail transit system proposed for the county’s urban core.

Yet the problems themselves were unarguable:

- Supervisor Bruce Nestande, chairman of the California Transportation Commission, said he looks at Orange County as part of a statewide transportation crisis: Even if all of the maintenance and construction projects proposed over the next five years are built, traffic congestion on California highways will double. And the state is still nearly $750,000 short of the money needed to complete the improvements.

-Oftelie said the Transportation Commission’s studies show that more than half the county’s large streets and highways are in need of major repair. It would take $205 million to bring them up to normal engineering standards.

-Economist Robert S. Dunham said that while the county’s highway system is already well over capacity during rush-hour, 78,000 new jobs were created within the county last year, the highest since the boom years of the late 1970s. This year the new job total is expected to come close to that level.

-Laguna Beach Councilman Robert Gentry said his city last year had to accommodate a million more tourists than the Hawaiian island of Maui handled.

With a surplus of road deficiencies and a shortage of money to fix them, Oftelie said county transportation officials have begun to undertake a process known as “transportation triage. . . . We see some projects that will grow and prosper; some projects will have to wait outside the operating room, and some projects and ideas are going to die.”

After the panel, forum participants--who included representatives of some of the county’s largest corporations, chambers of commerce, universities, civic groups and cities--broke into individual work groups to come up with their own suggestions. The results will be officially tabulated later, but a preliminary look showed that they agreed in several respects with proposals that came from the panelists.

Flexible Working Hours

Many of them favored efforts to make the county’s existing road system stretch further by way of bus and car pool lanes on the freeways, ridesharing programs, and flexible working hours to stretch out freeway rush-hours.

Others mentioned the need to build homes and job sites closer together. A significant percentage said they wanted to be more directly involved in decisions about transportation and overall development of the county.

After the conference, Blamer said she will recommend that the Transportation Commission convene a meeting of the county and the 26 cities to carry on the discussion of Orange County transportation issues.