Traffic ‘Nightmare’ Predicted : Caltrans Official Calls Tax Increases Vital

Advocating voter approval of two upcoming tax measures, Caltrans’ Orange County chief warned Wednesday that only a 10-mile segment of the $1.6-billion Santa Ana Freeway widening project will be completed unless additional revenue is found during the next four years.

“I dread to think of what’s going to happen,” said Keith McKean, director of Caltrans’ Orange County district office. “It’s my worst nightmare.”

Although construction work under existing and immediately pending contracts will not stop, McKean said, Caltrans will have no money available to start new projects after April, 1990.

The portion of the Santa Ana Freeway scheduled for widening beginning in late August or September extends from the junction with the San Diego Freeway--known as the El Toro Y--through Irvine and Tustin to the interchange with the Costa Mesa Freeway.

Plans call for doubling the freeway’s width from six to 12 lanes, with two of the new lanes reserved for buses and car pools. However, because the freeway at either end of the 10-mile project is not yet being widened, McKean said he fears traffic using those new lanes will have nowhere to go.

If more money does not become available to widen the other segments, McKean said, the six new lanes of pavement may not be usable. “We’ll stripe them out,” McKean said.

He acknowledged that seeing unused pavement would anger motorists, but said it still makes more sense to go ahead and finish the 10-mile segment. “We’ll be way ahead of the game” when it’s time to finish other segments of the 10-year, $1.6-billion project, McKean said.

McKean’s remarks came during a luncheon briefing for the news media about current highway and transit projects countywide in which the directors of several agencies spoke. Although a similar briefing was held last year, Wednesday’s presentations were a not-so-subtle public relations blitz on behalf of the proposed countywide half-cent sales tax for transportation projects on the Nov. 7 ballot, and the statewide gasoline tax increase on the June, 1990, ballot.

Stanley T. Oftelie, executive director of the Orange County Transportation Commission, acknowledged at Wednesday’s luncheon that the commission legally will have to step back from its advocacy role and simply answer questions and supply information about the need for additional revenue once OCTC’s half-cent sales tax measure goes to the registrar of voters on Aug. 8 for inclusion on the Nov. 7 ballot.

Meanwhile, McKean stated emphatically that there would be no new construction money by April without passage of the gasoline tax increase. And James P. Reichert, general manager of the Orange County Transit District, said that the county’s half-cent tax for transportation is needed in order to produce local funds that can be used to attract matching state and federal grants.

McKean said, “We’re getting the last of the funds that we’ll be getting for some time.”

He traced the problem to a $350-million deficit in the California Transportation Commission’s five-year State Transportation Improvement Program. The commission approved more construction projects than it could pay for, based partly on inaccurate assumptions about federal funding.

McKean said there is money in the state highway budget for maintenance programs, but without major legislative action, those cannot be transferred to new construction.

The half-cent sales tax, if adopted by county voters in November, would provide $550 million for the completion of the Santa Ana Freeway widening project, and about $2.55 billion for a laundry list of other freeway, commuter lane, street improvement and mass transit projects over a 20-year period.

About $55 million of the sales tax proceeds would go for the reconstruction of the El Toro Y interchange to handle the new lanes of Santa Ana Freeway traffic that will be merging with San Diego Freeway traffic.

Without that money, McKean said Wednesday, that reconstruction may never take place or will take much longer to complete. The state and federal governments have not agreed to fund it.

The sales tax is part of the County Transportation Commission’s 20-year, $11.6-billion Traffic Improvement and Growth Management Plan. In writing the plan, said Oftelie, OCTC assumed that the state Department of Transportation would be able to fund most segments of the Santa Ana Freeway widening project and the reconstruction of the interchange of the Santa Ana and Costa Mesa freeways.

But now, the $36.4-million final stage of the Santa Ana Freeway-to-Costa Mesa Freeway interchange reconstruction project is also unfunded, said McKean, causing even more problems for motorists once the 10-mile Santa Ana Freeway segment south of there is finished.

“It’s going to be a real mess,” McKean said.