‘Burned Out’ Chief of Tollways Resigns

Embattled Orange County tollway chief John Meyer resigned Thursday, explaining that he is “burned out” and fed up with hostile landowners who complain about project delays but offer “no solutions.”

The 57-year-old Meyer also cited a desire to return to mass-transit planning, his specialty before becoming the executive director of the San Joaquin Hills and Foothill/Eastern Transportation Corridor Agencies 2 1/2 years ago.

Meyer, who will remain at his post until a successor is hired, said he will become a full-time, independent transportation consultant and expects to continue doing some work for the two corridor agencies overseeing the three planned tollways in eastern and southern Orange County.

Although some board members had privately advocated that Meyer be replaced, Meyer’s resignation was accompanied by official denials that he was forced out.

Meyer, who earns $95,000 a year, said he decided to resign three weeks ago, after a May 16 meeting with members of the Building Industry Assn., an organization of home builders and landowners.

“We found ourselves in a hostile environment,” Meyer said. “There were no solutions, just criticism.”

Meyer said he also wanted to return to transit planning because despite the need for new tollways and freeways, growth and air-quality regulations mean that “our future is in mass transportation.”

Reacting to Meyer’s resignation, former county supervisor and one-time tollway board member Bruce Nestande claimed that “the survivability of the toll roads is marginal at this point in time” due to weak management both by the agencies’ staff and board members.

Nestande, vice president of Costa Mesa-based Arnel Development Co., is a member of the California Transportation Commission, which has earmarked $46.5 million for the San Joaquin Hills tollway.

“Every aspect of the (tollway agencies’) management ought to be evaluated,” Nestande said, “including a complete review of the environmental process, an assessment of the engineering, and a review of the advice and motives of the bond underwriter, and of who should do the legal work.”

Nestande said a series of meetings with tollway officials and financial advisers early last year convinced him that “they were all foundering. Timetables were not what I had thought they were, and the finances did not seem to be in order.”

After those meetings, Nestande was able to secure state funding anyway but also insisted on a study by an independent financial consultant who recently cautioned that the San Joaquin Hills tollway is feasible financially only with carefully planned borrowing.

Meyer, who initially objected to Nestande’s request for an independent financial report, leaves at a critical point in Orange County’s effort to build the state’s first tollways.

During Thursday’s board meetings, for example, a total 1989-80 budget of $105 million for the two tollway agencies was adopted. Most of the money will go toward final engineering work, with an acknowledgement that developer fees already collected will no longer cover the costs, necessitating the need for bond sales.

Also, board members Thursday tentatively approved a deal with 11 landowners and the county to build the first, 7.6-mile segment of the Foothill tollway between Rancho Santa Margarita and Santiago Canyon Road north of El Toro in 1991. The segment will be financed with $74 million from the sale of community facilities assessment district bonds.

“John has been criticized for being a one-man show,” San Juan Capistrano Mayor Gary L. Hausdorfer said after Thursday’s board meeting. “But the flip side is we haven’t had the staff we should have.

“It’s time for a change. We don’t need to get into personalities.”