Officials Scramble for County Traffic Plan : Transportation: Panel comes up empty-handed in its effort to determine who will write traffic control rules that will be required if gas tax measure passes.

Gripped by fears of gridlock and empty coffers, more than 100 county, city and development industry officials met here Saturday to discuss who will write and enforce tough new traffic rules linked to the proposed state gasoline tax hike on the June ballot.

Saturday’s morning-long session at Irvine City Hall provided no immediate answers. Attention quickly focused on whether a countywide Council of Governments should be formed to draft a congestion-management plan mandated by legislation that would take effect if the June tax measure passes.

The ballot measure would raise the state gasoline tax gradually over several years by 9 cents, and raise the state’s so-called Gann spending limit for transportation purposes. It would raise about $18.5 billion over 20 years, with Orange County receiving about 9% or $1.67 billion.

Stanley T. Oftelie, executive director of the Orange County Transportation Commission, told meeting participants that there may not be enough time for a so-called COG agency to be formed if the county hopes to be first in line for proceeds from the tax measure next year.

But others, including Santa Ana Councilwoman Patricia A. McGuigan, who is president of the county’s League of Cities unit, said an existing city-county coordinating committee could become a temporary, ad hoc COG.

Without passage of the June ballot measure, said former county S upervisor Bruce Nestande, the state will be unable to finance about $182 million worth of Orange County transportation projects previously approved by the state Transportation Commission. Nestande, now vice president of Costa Mesa-based Arnel Development Co., is the commission’s vice chairman.

But to back a countywide growth management plan that meets state requirements, said Huntington Beach Councilman John Erskine, city council members--including his colleagues in Huntington Beach--must change their parochial view. “Right now,” Erskine explained, “they think the transportation problem ends on Beach Boulevard,” the most congested arterial in the city.

During Saturday’s session, the influential Irvine Co.--the county’s largest landholder--pitched legislative amendments that would exempt congested intersections that are arguably beyond hope because of environmental, legal or financial constraints.

Anticipating this approach was John Stevens, an aide to Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), who helped write the state’s new traffic and gas tax package.

“It isn’t the Draconian plan or program thought up in a back room somewhere to strip the Irvine Co. or other developers in the state of California of the profits they’ll be making from development,” said Stevens, a former aide to Orange County Board of Supervisors Chairman Thomas F. Riley. “It is not a program thought up in Sacramento to try to tie the hands of local elected officials to deal with or meet the challenges of that growth that’s going to occur. . . . And it sure isn’t the Holy Grail for no-growth or slow-growth movement throughout the state of California.”

The program, he said, is aimed at making sure that land-use and transportation decisions are linked.

But Irvine Co. senior transportation planner Hugh Fitzpatrick argued that under the state plan, an existing $230-million, foothill-area traffic improvement proposal would actually jeopardize the county’s ability to meet state traffic standards. That plan was designed to improve 23 of the area’s 33 intersections and only one--the junction of Sand Canyon and the Santa Ana Freeway--would fail to meet the state’s new congestion limit.

Stevens replied that amendments are being offered to the development industry that would allow exemptions if it can be shown that other traffic improvements nearby will result in a “net benefit.”

Fitzpatrick, however, was noncommittal about whether this would satisfy the company.

Norm Grossman of Laguna Beach, a slow-growth activist who helped write the county’s existing growth-management ordinance, said after Saturday’s session that he objects to “net benefit” exemptions because the traffic statistics used to justify them can easily be manipulated.