Transportation Officials in Sharp Split Over Fund Use

At an unusually divisive joint session Monday, Orange County transportation officials clashed over a proposed use of transit funds to add lanes to the Orange Freeway and make loans to the county’s tollway agency and Caltrans.

The Orange County Transportation Commission split 4 to 3 in favor of the proposal, while the Orange County Transit District board sought a 60-day delay on the issue, voting 4 to 0 with Supervisor Don R. Roth absent.

The dispute illustrated a fundamental rift between members on each authority--some believe that the county’s transportation ills should be solved by building more highways while others want to develop more mass transit.

OCTC Executive Director Stanley T. Oftelie said he will try to persuade critics to support his group’s position, even though OCTC has the authority to proceed without the transit board’s concurrence.

But the conflict left leaders seemingly at odds--Santa Ana Mayor Daniel H. Young even threatened to pull his city out of the tollway agency--just as transportation officials are seeking to present a united front in hopes of reviving a financing initiative defeated by voters last year.

Monday’s proposal called for diverting $26 million in transit funds to add car-pool and auxiliary lanes to the Orange Freeway, loaning between $75 million and $100 million to the financially strapped tollway agencies and advancing several million dollars to Caltrans for rights of way needed to widen the Santa Ana Freeway.

“This is an opportunity to pour some concrete in this calendar year,” argued OCTC member Dana W. Reed, a Newport Beach lawyer. “Why are we always trying to delay things? I think we need to stop trying to find excuses.”

Reed attacked Young, who did not attend the meeting but wrote a “scathing” letter against the proposal. “This is about the fourth time he has come before this commission to delay things,” Reed said of Young. “I’m tired of it.”

In the letter, Young accused OCTC of “cannibalizing” transit funds for projects in which much of the money would go for freeway sound walls and tollways that are supposed to be self-supporting.

“The (tollway) corridors can and must finance their own efforts or cities like ours will pull out,” Young wrote.

Young’s position was echoed by the county’s League of Cities chapter. But the county’s cities were split, with Anaheim and Placentia supporting OCTC member Clarice A. Blamer, a Brea councilwoman, and OCTC Chairman Thomas F. Riley in their bid to use the transit funds.

Anaheim, Brea and Placentia are anxious to see the Orange Freeway widened--the project would add 11 miles of car-pool and auxiliary lanes in each direction north of the Santa Ana Freeway interchange.

The money at issue is in a $200-million fund earmarked for a transit way--a barrier-separated lane reserved for car pools or buses--on the Santa Ana Freeway between the Costa Mesa and Garden Grove freeways. The transit district expects to draw construction money from the account within a year.

Four years ago, OCTC won legislative permission to tap interest generated by the fund so that cities could pay for local street improvements. But League of Cities President Patricia A. McGuigan, a Santa Ana councilwoman, warned that Monday’s proposal would be the first attempt to use the account’s principal.

OCTC officials responded that the Orange Freeway project should be funded because it is ready to go and that without immediate action the work might be delayed until 1996.