Transportation Funds in Good Shape Now, but in 2010 . . .

There was good news and bad news Monday for Orange County’s long-range transportation planners.

The good news: Orange County leads the country in funding its transportation from private sources, such as assessment districts, developer fees and the still-to-come toll roads.

“No other region comes close,” said consultant Michael I. Schneider, a senior vice president at Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas Inc. “We’re the envy of urban areas throughout the United States.”

On the downside, those people still around in the year 2010 will find themselves more than $6 billion short when the $18-billion bill comes due for a host of long-range transportation projects.

Orange County now finds itself in a “game of catch-up” in laying new asphalt and commuter rails after a “decade of inattention,” Schneider said.

Already, two of the nation’s 10 most crowded freeway interchanges are here. And unless billions of dollars are spent on new freeways, rail corridors and car-pool lanes, by the year 2010 half of motorists’ time will be spent in delay, and average road speeds will drop from 31 to 19 m.p.h., according to a recent study by the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

The figures Schneider presented Monday to the Orange County Transportation Commission are preliminary and won’t be complete until next month after the statewide vote on two propositions--72 and 74--that could mean hundreds of millions more dollars in the county’s transportation coffers.

But even if the $18 billion of transportation projects is ever actually funded and realized, “I don’t think we can kid ourselves and say traffic here will be wonderful,” Schneider said after his presentation.

On June 27, a wish list of projects and their costs will be presented to the board in a report called the 20-year master plan.

That project list will then be taken to the public this summer for comment and debate “when we really establish priorities,” said Clarice A. Blamer, chairwoman of the Transportation Commission.

The Transportation Commission, created by the state Legislature, oversees transportation planning and sets spending priorities in the county.

This master plan being drafted is based on a $20-billion dollar wish list drawn up in 1980. Of major projects on that list, only the car-pool lanes on the Costa Mesa Freeway and the widening of the Santa Ana Freeway are now under way or completed.

A mass transit system of light rails included in that plan was defeated overwhelmingly by county voters in 1984, along with an updated list of other transportation projects that were to be funded by a one-cent sales tax increase.

According to Schneider, that vote sent the message that those using transportation should pay for the benefits more directly.

In 1983, he said, about 90% of transportation funding in Orange County came from the federal government or the state. Now that figure has dropped to half. The other half comes from private sources.

“The transition was really quite incredible,” Schneider said.

“There has been a dramatic shift in the past four years on what we are able to accomplish locally,” Chairwoman Blamer said after the meeting.

But this new half-and-half mixture of traditional state and federal funding with money from private sources also is establishing a troublesome dividing line in the county, Schneider warned.

With the Costa Mesa Freeway roughly the Mason-Dixon line, as one official joked, the south county, with its booming development, stands the most to gain from this private sector funding trend, tied as it is to new construction. And the new toll roads will mostly serve the south. The already-developed north county remains reliant on the traditional funding sources of state and federal dollars.

The revenue figures Schneider presented Monday are based on the assumption that development in the county would continue as it is now and that no new funding source, such as a sales tax, is enacted.