The Times Poll That Found Support for Toll Roads in Orange County--Is the Majority Always Right?

Only a fool can’t understand that when it comes to commuting in Orange County, more than anything else, the public wants relief.

Working men and women simply hope to get home in time to enjoy family and friends. They want that privilege more than they abhor rampant development, loss of open space and rare species and more than they hate breathing filthier air--but not by much.

Thus, despite 15 years’ worth of so-called planning (which resulted in a calamitous and presumably embarrassing environmental impact report) the Transportation Corridor Agency seems to have beguiled John and Suzie Q. Public into thinking that the San Joaquin Hills Tollway is the answer. It isn’t.

To begin with, the TCA calls the proposal a “transportation corridor,” instead of what it really is: an expensive and private toll road, the cost of which, before anything has been built, was passed on to the public to the tune of $50 million. After developer costs are accounted for, who will back the remaining toll road bonds, we asked. They probably aren’t going to be guaranteed, the TCA replied. What they omitted was that the burden of bond default will land in the public’s pocket.

Huh?

Then we read a movie-lingo denial by Stan Oftelie, executive director of the Orange County Transportation Commission, who claimed that the toll road is not growth-inducing. “They are coming even if (we) don’t build it,” he wrote in a Commentary in The Times (“Tollways Juggernaut: Is It the Right Road for Public Travel?,” Feb. 10). Curiously, the same day The Times reported that Ken R. Smith, Orange County’s Environmental Management Agency transportation chief, equated increased development with the toll road. “It’s clear that many of these development projects were based on the idea that the (tollway) would be there,” said he. Somebody else came to the same conclusion: the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

No connection, Mr. Oftelie?

Are other TCA “facts” as reliable? The proposed toll road, for example, probably would relieve traffic and some air pollution from the San Diego Freeway, they claim. But where will the extra cars and bad air go? The TCA’s answer is to move them through a region designated as permanent parkland, Orange County’s only remaining coastal wilderness. So we get less over here, and more over there.

SHAREN HEATH, Laguna Beach