Bid to Extend S.D. Trolley Advances on 2 Key Fronts

The San Diego Trolley’s East County extension project, stalled for two years by fiscal and administrative roadblocks, cleared two major hurdles Thursday and appears to be on track to reach its final destination in El Cajon by 1988, according to a transit official and two area congressmen.

Reps. Jim Bates (D-San Diego) and Bill Lowery (R-San Diego) were both optimistic about the project’s future after the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation approved a $9-million allocation for the extension Thursday.

The trolley extension is a part of $415-million transit funding proposal that is expected to go before the full House Appropriations Committee before Congress recesses in August, Lowery said. It should clear Congress and go to the President by early October, he said.

The allocation would bring the amount of congressionally allocated funding for the project to $20.3 million. Combined with $60 million in already-secured funds, this is almost enough to get the trolley to El Cajon, said Tom Larwin, general manager of Metropolitan Transit.

“We need about 82 or 83 million dollars to get all the way to El Cajon, and it looks like we’ll have enough to get there,” Larwin said. “This is just the bare-bones project, single track to El Cajon. We’re still hoping to get another $20 million (to build two tracks).”

“We’re halfway there,” Lowery said from his Washington office Thursday. “We’ve made tremendous progress from last year, when we got nothing.”

But more important than the allocation, Lowery said, is that the Metropolitan Transit Development Board will at last be able to spend this federal money. The federal Urban Mass Transportation Administration, which has withheld certification of the trolley extension pending environmental review, is ready to give the project the green light, he said.

“The reason we got zero (from Congress) last year was that we did not meet the threshold tests that UMTA requires for money to be spent on a project,” Lowery said.

In a meeting Thursday with UMTA chief administrator Ralph Stanley, Lowery said he was told that the trolley extension meets the federal government’s two main criteria: that the project will increase transit ridership, and that the cost of providing each additional rider will be less than $6.

Larwin said he has not been notified of this by UMTA officials, but expects official certification “any day now.”

Although Thursday’s allocation was considerably less than the $28 million requested in May by Lowery and then-San Diego City Councilman Dick Murphy, the congressmen said they were pleased.

“We pulled this out of the sky,” Lowery said. “There were only nine new (transit project) starts funded out of 15 that applied.”

“The trolley project is a proven winner and merits federal funding to reach its full development,” Bates said in a statement issued by his office Thursday.

Although Lowery said that he anticipates little congressional opposition to the measure, the trolley may have some trouble making it through the White House. The Office of Management and Budget has announced that the Reagan Administration will not approve funding for any new transit projects. However, Lowery said he thinks the project can bypass the administration’s directive.

“We can put language in the continuing (budget) resolution that would mandate in law that the administration spend the money,” he said. “When we legally mandate it, it’s law, not policy.”

Lowery predicted that the transit funds would be a small part of a huge 11th-hour spending proposal that would reach the President’s desk in early October, after the start of fiscal year 1986.

“The President will be in a position where he has to sign it,” he said. “The President may not like this project, but is he going to veto the entire $500-billion expenditure bill? No.”

If Lowery’s prediction proves correct, San Diegans could be riding the trolley from its C Street terminal to the corner of Main Street and Marshall Avenue in El Cajon by 1988, Larwin said.