13 Officials to Go on Free Europe Trip to Study Transit Innovations : Travel: Two state business organizations and hosts in Paris, Berlin and other cities will pick up the tab.

Thirteen of the state’s most influential transportation and environmental officials will leave Wednesday on an all-expense-paid, 12-day trip to Europe to study high-speed railroads, high-tech automobiles and highways and exotic alternative fuel systems.

The trip to Paris, Berlin, Stockholm and other cities is being sponsored by two California business organizations that say they try to preserve a cautious “environmental balance” while combatting environmental extremists.

The California Foundation on the Environment and the Economy, an offshoot of the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance, will pay all expenses on the $4,000-a-person trip that are not picked up by European industrial hosts, according to foundation director Pat Mason.

Serving as staff for the trip will be two officials of the California Institute for Technology Exchange, Don Camph and Yvonne Ryzak. Mason and Camph said in separate interviews that far from being a junket, this and other annual trips the foundation has sponsored in recent years have been hard-working looks, in Mason’s words, “at how other countries have dealt with technological-environmental issues.”

“I wonder when I’m going to get a nap,” said Mason of the forthcoming trip.

Said Camph: “Our premise is that one of the ways public policy is formed and facilitated is direct exposure of policy makers to what is going on in various societies. . . . I’m not going to tell you we’re not going to have some fun. But it’s basically work.”

He noted that the group will fly economy class and stay in moderately priced hotels.

Among those scheduled to go are three state transportation commissioners who have been skeptical of expenditures for rail right of way acquisitions and commuter rail projects, commission Chairman W. E. (Bill) Leonard and members Bruce Nestande and Joe Duffel.

Nestande said, “We have a very jammed schedule. . . . We are in Berlin for less than a day.”

The four legislators are Republican state Sen. Becky Morgan, vice chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee; Republican state Sen. Bill Leonard, chairman of the Senate Republican Caucus; Assemblyman Jim Costa, a Democrat, and Democratic Assemblywoman Delaine Eastin. Costa recently sponsored legislation authorizing Caltrans to help privately funded rail and road projects with gifts of public rights of way. Easton is a member of both the Assembly transportation and toxic materials committees.

Sen. Morgan said she is enthusiastic about the trip because she went with the same group to Indonesia and Australia in 1985, looking at oil and gas exploration facilities, and learned a great deal.

“There was no effort to sell me on anything,” she said of the earlier trip.

Others going include retired Senate President Pro Tem James Mills, now chairman of the San Diego Metro Transit Development Board; Norton Younglove, a Riverside County supervisor who is chairman of the managing board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District; Chris Reed, a Santa Monica city councilwoman who is chairman of the Southern California Assn. of Governments; Henry W. Wedaa, a Yorba Linda city councilman who is vice chairman of AQMD; Rod Dierdon, a Santa Clara County supervisor who is chairman of the San Jose area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and Nello Bianco, chairman of BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

Also going are two businessmen, Jack Coffey, manager of state affairs for Chevron, and Steve Baum, senior vice president and general counsel for San Diego Gas and Electric Co.

Camph said that while in Europe the party will ride French, German and Swedish high-speed trains, but will not go to a German testing facility for the kind of magnetic levitation train proposed to run between Las Vegas and Anaheim, because it has been shut down for safety work.

He said the party will meet with European experts on automatic vehicle navigation systems, vehicle identification technology, automatic toll collection and congestion pricing, a system for charging people escalated tolls for entering certain congested areas at certain hours.