2 Toll Roads Exempted From Public Fund Curbs : Transportation: Assemblyman Umberg comes to the rescue of the Santa Ana River and California 91 projects.

Two Orange County toll roads got a reprieve Monday when they were exempted from a bill that would prohibit the use of public money or land for the construction of private roads around the state.

Orange County officials said the exemption by the Assembly Transportation Committee has removed doubt about plans to build a $700-million, 11-mile elevated toll road in the middle of the Santa Ana River flood plain and an $88-million, 10-mile toll road reaching from Anaheim to the Riverside County line along the median of California 91.

“That’s exceptional!” Stan Oftelie, executive director of the Orange County Transportation Commission, said Monday about the exemption.

Some local officials had warned that the bill by Sen. Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) would scuttle plans for the two routes. They were among four demonstration projects selected by the state last year in Northern and Southern California for construction by private business consortiums. The two Orange County projects are in addition to the three toll roads in the South County that had been previously approved by the Legislature.

But the four demonstration projects, to cost $2.5 billion, have incurred the wrath of Lockyer, a prominent legislator. The Hayward Democrat has accused the private consortiums--particularly one constructing an ambitious, 80-mile toll road in largely undeveloped areas east of Oakland--of “fundamental dishonesty.”

Although legislators were told that the projects would be independently financed, Lockyer said he found that sponsors of the Northern California project were soliciting an estimated $200 million from local governments to help pay for the private road.

Lockyer’s anger prompted him to write a bill banning all public subsidies for the demonstration projects--a proposal that was especially troubling to Orange County, where both projects depended on local agencies leasing public right of way to the private consortiums for nominal costs.

In addition, the OCTC has already paid $225,000 to help prepare the environmental studies for the elevated Santa Ana River roadway. The agency also has invested $5 million for environmental studies and designs that could be used for the Riverside Freeway toll road, and is entertaining thoughts of becoming a partner in at least one of the projects.

But at the urging of Assemblyman Tom Umberg (D-Garden Grove), Lockyer told the Assembly committee Monday that he was willing to leave Orange County out of his bill.

After the hearing, Lockyer said he agreed to the amendment because “there is a lot of popular support in Orange County for those projects,” along with the fact that public monies have already been spent for them.

Lockyer also said that, in political terms, he gave in to Umberg’s request for the amendment because the Garden Grove legislator was the “decisive” vote in getting the bill out of committee and onto the Assembly floor.

“I needed the vote,” he said. The vote was 9 to 4.

Umberg said he hoped the amendments demonstrated to the East Coast bond market that the “political environment is positive on these two projects” in Orange County.

And Oftelie said he welcomed the good news from Sacramento before his meeting this morning with the private consortium that hopes to build the toll road on the California 91 median.

“In clearing this legislative problem, it would certainly help us out in speeding that construction,” Oftelie said. “We’re pushing them (the consortium) to get the environmental clearances to get this project under construction this year.”

Oftelie said that the start-up time for the proposed Santa Ana River project is three or four years away.