Council Coalition May Lack Power to Block New Freeways

A new, slower-growth coalition on the Irvine City Council probably does not have the power to block construction of three controversial freeways near the city’s borders, Orange County transportation officials said Wednesday.

Irvine’s participation in the developer-fee program set up to finance the Foothill, Eastern and San Joaquin Hills freeways is considered crucial to the program’s success over the long term, because Irvine alone is expected to generate a fourth of all fees collected.

But the city already has contracted to levy fees on developers for at least the next four years through its agreement to join the multicity Joint Powers Authority overseeing planning and construction of the freeways, according to Stan Oftelie, executive director of the Orange County Transportation Commission. Any decision to withdraw from the authority--an option proposed Wednesday by Councilman Larry Agran--would mean that development fees would be collected from within Irvine but city officials would play no role in controlling the size of the new freeways or the route they will take, Oftelie said.

“If Irvine withdraws, it makes the financing more difficult, but more importantly, it eliminates Irvine’s voice in developing the regional transportation facilities,” Oftelie said. “They simply won’t have a place on the Joint Powers Authority board of directors, and they won’t have as much role in shaping their own future.”

But Agran, a longtime opponent of the developer-fee program and at least two of the three new freeways, said that withdrawing from the Joint Powers Authority that administers the fee program would give the city some bargaining power.

“I think now we’re in a position to bring about a far more sensible transportation system. Rather than having to pay the price of overdevelopment in south county, I think we can compel a decision to re-evaluate all of the south county growth projections,” he said.

The coalition of cities now planning for the freeways is “financially and politically a house of cards, and our withdrawal would bring about the collapse of the house of cards,” Agran argued.

Most of the roughly $100 million in development fees scheduled to be collected in Irvine for the new freeways would be paid by the Irvine Co. In the past, company officials have discussed simply paying the fees voluntarily, in the event Irvine decides not to collect them, in order to assure construction of the freeways, which are crucial to the company’s future development plans.