Compromise on Tax Measure Eases Builders’ Fears : Traffic: Tough new standards might have slowed construction in the county.

The folks over at the local builders’ trade group and the Irvine Co. are breathing a little easier since Monday.

That’s when months of intense lobbying in Sacramento got them a compromise on some tough new traffic standards that might have slowed construction in the county.

In fact, these standards might be called “Son of Measure A,” the slow-growth measure that the real estate industry spent millions of dollars persuading the county’s voters to kill two years ago.

The new ones are attached to a state measure that would gradually increase the gas tax by 9 cents a gallon if the state’s voters approve it in June.

Generally, builders like anything that will get more roads built; new roads enhance the value of their land and ease the increased traffic their subdivisions, offices and shopping centers generate.

And this tax would raise more than $18 billion over the next 10 years.

But to get it, cities and counties must also swallow stringent new standards on traffic congestion. If they don’t start making a dent in the traffic jams, they don’t get all the new tax money they would be entitled to. Why hand out money, said supporters, if the cities don’t use it to clean up their own messes?

When the builders’ trade association discovered that the tough traffic requirements had been slipped quietly into the tax package passed by the Legislature, they were dismayed. Their argument went like this: The traffic standards are impossible to meet in traffic-choked urban areas such as Orange County. So the places that need the money most might not get much of it, while rural counties where traffic is light would rake it in.

The lobbying paid off. Meeting on Monday with the author of the standards, Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), the lobbyists got Katz to increase their options.

If, for instance, a city can’t hold down traffic congestion at an intersection, it will be allowed to do something to improve air quality instead.

That kept the environmental groups that attended Monday’s lengthy meeting happy. They had threatened to oppose the tax increase too if the traffic standards were softened. That might have shot the whole thing down because a single powerful interest group could sink the measure, political experts say, so iffy is its prospect of passage by the voters in June.

“The environmentalists felt we left the traffic plan intact and the developers felt the whole thing was a little more workable,” Katz said Thursday. “I still believe the old standards would work, and I still think that the people who caused the trouble with this were acting out of greed.”

The builders are studying the new requirements Katz proposed. They could come out with a statement shortly in favor of the tax increase, said members of the Building Industry Assn., the home builders’ powerful trade group.

“We seem about to reach a fair agreement,” said Owen R. Waters, a senior staff vice president in charge of BIA’s lobbying in Sacramento.

The new requirements are also being studied carefully at the trade association’s Orange County chapter in Santa Ana. So far, they look agreeable, said Executive Director Christine Diemer Reed.

Officials of the Irvine Co., the county’s largest landowner with more than 60,000 acres, are still reading the new requirements too. The company also lobbied hard against the traffic measure, including trying to get some toll highways it is helping to build exempted from the regulations, according to Katz.

The company says that’s not so--that it was only trying to make sure it wouldn’t get penalized for helping alleviate the county’s traffic mess.

If, for instance, one of the off-ramps on the new toll highways dumped a lot of traffic onto a city street, the Irvine Co. says traffic would get worse at the intersection and the city would get less gas tax revenues, even though the toll highway improved traffic flow overall.

Now, under the new regulations, if traffic flow gets worse at crowded intersections and there is not much that can be done, a city won’t necessarily lose the money, the company says.

It can require developers in the area to either widen a road or build a traffic signal elsewhere in the city, or make an improvement in air quality.

That’s if the measure passes. Some political experts are skeptical, saying a 9-cent increase is too much for voters to swallow. Even a mere half-cent increase in the sales tax went down in flames last year in Orange County, which is notorious for the anti-tax sentiments of its voters.

But the money from the gas tax, Katz said, is critical. The state, he said, needs $3.5 billion more than it has for a modest five-year road program.