Toll Road Mired in Problems : Transportation: Lawsuits, legislative obstacles and environmental concerns delay building of the Riverside Freeway project.

When state transportation authorities unveiled plans last year for a privately built, four-lane toll road down the center median of the Riverside Freeway, the idea offered a tantalizing promise. For a dollar or two, motorists could buy blessed relief from bumper-to-bumper conditions found each day on the freeway, one of the nation’s most crowded.

But in the months since, the $88.3-million project on California 91 in Orange County has been beset by pitfalls and problems.

Lawsuits have been filed; others have been threatened. An influential state legislator has tried to block the deal. Air quality and environmental rules have proven to be obstacles, and plans to extend the toll lanes into Riverside County for several miles are up in the air.

Although promoters of the project, Irvine-based California Private Transportation Corp., once passed out lapel buttons stenciled with “91 in ‘91” and confidently predicted that construction would begin this year, that now is out of the question.

Officials at the firm now say work will not begin for at least another year, pushing back the planned mid-1993 opening date that might have made it California’s first operational tollway.

The delays have aroused grumbles from commuters and transportation officials eager to ease the tangled mess at rush hours on the freeway, a prime conduit for commuters from newer, more affordable neighborhoods in the Inland Empire to job-rich Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Transportation authorities in Orange County still talk glowingly of California Private Transportation Corp. and the firm’s president, Gerald S. Pfeffer. But they have considered pulling their support of the 10-mile-long project and instead pursuing efforts to build ordinary car-pool lanes.

“I think they should be going faster,” said Stan Oftelie, the Orange County Transportation Authority’s executive director. “We’ll be reassessing our support if this goes on much longer.”

In neighboring Riverside County, transportation officials want the private firm to extend the project in their direction by purchasing car-pool lanes under construction along the Riverside Freeway and including them in the tollway. If that does not happen, they have promised to sue to block the project.

“We’re keeping our litigation powder dry,” said Jack Reagan, Riverside County Transportation Commission executive director. “If they attempt to move forward without extending the project into Riverside, we’ll be forced to take action.”

Of late, Pfeffer has resembled a shuttle diplomat, zipping between his office in Irvine and various locales throughout the state, juggling scores of issues in an effort to see that the tollway project survives.

“I feel we’re making good progress on the private implementation, and if all goes well we can get this project under construction sometime in the summer of ‘92,” Pfeffer said.

Pfeffer said he sees reasons for hope because the project has been greeted warmly by the financial community.

“The reason we believe we’re getting that interest is that it’s more and more apparent that the budget deficits and other problems of the public sector are not going to go away,” he said. “There will be increasing use of these private and public-private financing methods. This project is viewed by a lot of people on Wall Street as very doable.”

Even with its problems, the Riverside Freeway tollway has made the greatest progress of the four tollway “privatization” projects picked by state officials last year after a painstaking selection process. The Riverside Freeway project is further along in the environmental review process and has a prime ingredient the other three lack--prime right of way ready for a road to be built.

A second Orange County project, the 11.2-mile, $750-million elevated toll road planned along the Santa Ana River by the Texas-based Perot Group, has hardly gotten off the ground and is fast approaching a Sept. 11 deadline for environmental work to begin in earnest, Caltrans officials say.

Meanwhile, tollway projects proposed for San Diego and Alameda counties are being threatened by lawsuits, as well as opposition by some state legislators in those areas.

The rocky first year was not exactly what state officials envisioned when they first proposed letting private consortiums take over a role traditionally held by the public sector.

When the idea was conceived in the late 1980s, authorities felt that the firms would be able to quickly construct projects that might have laid fallow for years because of state budget constraints.

But negotiations to hammer out franchise agreements between Caltrans and the private firms lasted twice as long as officials on both sides expected, culminating in January after four months of talks.

Matters got worse when state Sen. Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) introduced legislation earlier this year in an effort to derail the toll road projects. Lockyer suggested that the tollways defy the long-tested tradition of public highways in the state, are unfair to lower-income motorists, and amount to a giveaway to developers and big business.

The legislation is pending, with amendments added by Assemblyman Tom Umberg (D-Garden Grove) to exempt the two Orange County projects.

In the meantime, a lawsuit challenging the toll projects was filed by a group representing the rank-and-file engineers of Caltrans. Although tollway backers have dismissed it as the actions of a disgruntled union, the suit by Professional Engineers in California Government challenges the highways on a variety of environmental and technical issues.

“We think it’s poor public policy in California to require motorists to pay a gas tax and then trap them into paying a toll on top of that,” said Richard Baker, an executive assistant for the group. “I think we’re suing for a loftier purpose than some people suggest.”