County’s CO for Rail Projects : Ex-General Coordinating Plans of Six Cities for 23-Mile Linkup

David Shuter knows Southern California’s car culture. He owns six cars. But Shuter is promoting rail transit these days, as the new $50,000-a-year part-time director of a six-city group spearheading a 23-mile urban rail project.

Shuter’s job: coordinate plans for the six cities involved with the Orange County Transportation Authority, the agency that will manage the project. Under an agreement with OCTA, the cities will hold sway over station sites and routes within their boundaries, which may become politically and economically charged issues.

In one of his first duties, the retired Marine Corps general from Cleveland will lead 19 city and county officials on a July 25 inspection tour of SkyTrain, a fully automated rail transit system in Vancouver, Canada.

An aeronautical engineer by training, Shuter said he has been interested in transportation since he was a child. He is an amateur collector/restorer of cars. After retiring as a brigadier general in October, he applied unsuccessfully for the posts of manager and deputy manager at John Wayne Airport.

Shuter, 54, was familiar with the ambitious urban rail plans, so when Santa Ana Mayor Daniel H. Young asked him whether he was interested in becoming the part-time executive director, he said yes.

“I’ve ridden on rail transit above ground and below ground all over the world, including Moscow,” Shuter said. “I’m just fascinated with it.”

He negotiated a contract with the six-city group in April and recently moved into a bare, white cubicle inside a suite of county offices on Civic Center Drive, across the street from Santa Ana Stadium.

“I think he has solid knowledge of Orange County,” Young said of Shuter, who commanded El Toro Marine Corps Air Station from October, 1987, to October, 1990. “He knows how to run large, complicated projects. He has the basic skills for this.”

While commander at El Toro, Shuter also oversaw air bases at Tustin, Camp Pendleton and Yuma, Ariz., coordinating manpower, equipment, supplies and housing among them. He equates such responsibilities with that of a chief executive officer for a large corporation.

At El Toro, he was caught in the middle of the battle between proponents of a regional airport at the base and the Pentagon, which refuses to give up its runways.

He participated in the county’s search for an alternate site to relieve John Wayne Airport and was quizzed by Government Accounting Office investigators last year about how the El Toro base had successfully fended off various initiatives aimed at opening its runways to joint use by commercial air cargo or passenger carriers.

Now one of his tasks is to help smooth over differences between the cities involved in the rail project and the transportation authority. Some points of friction, Shuter said, are likely to be which sites to pick for maintenance yards and whether monorail technology will be used.

The cities in the project are Anaheim, Costa Mesa, Fullerton, Irvine, Orange and Santa Ana. Each will work with developers and businesses to capture revenue from development rights along the rail route in order to help foot the enormous bill for building the system.

A final commitment to build the line is not expected until 1993. Already, however, officials will request bids from consultants Monday for preconstruction planning, design and environmental studies.

Shuter acknowledges that some economists believe that rail transit is not efficient financially, but he still believes that a new rail age is upon us.

“What is it going to take to get a guy out of his car and into rail?” Shuter asked. “I tell people that there are six conditions. Some people will need just one condition to be met, while others will need all six.

“They’re cost of ride, convenience, comfort, speed, safety and (benefit to the) environment.”

Aggressive in his pursuit of facts, Shuter on his own time and money went to San Francisco recently to talk to officials at the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, “to ask them what mistakes they made so that we won’t repeat them down here.”

Among BART’s mistakes, Shuter said, was telling the public early on that there would be fast service to San Francisco International Airport, which is only now being installed, two decades late.

Also, he said, BART published fares four years before the system’s debut, then had to increase them, and marketing experts overestimated the number of people who would keep taking BART after trying it.

“Some people,” Shuter said, “simply didn’t like it after they tried it.”

Still, Shuter remains convinced that building more highways will not solve the county’s traffic problems.

“Look at Houston,” he said. “They doubled the width of their freeways to 12 lanes, and nothing has changed. The congestion is as bad now as it was before.”

Frustrated, Houston officials two months ago voted to build a $1.1-billion monorail system.