House Bill Gives Anaheim Money for Road Projects : Federal funding: The $17.5 million for car-pool ramps on the Santa Ana Freeway is much less than the amount sought. The Disney Co.’s request for $395 million for related work was rejected.

House leaders unveiled a scaled-back, $151-billion mass-transit and highway bill Thursday that abandons a gas tax hike and earmarks $17.5 million for controversial highway improvements in downtown Anaheim.

The money, to construct special on- and off-ramps linking up with car-pool lanes on the Santa Ana Freeway, is only a fraction of the $175 million that Anaheim officials had requested. Officials of the Walt Disney Co. separately had asked for $395 million for related transportation projects near Disneyland.

Rep. Norman Y. Mineta (D-San Jose), a key member of the House Committee on Public Works and Transportation, said committee members included the money for the Anaheim project only after they were satisfied that it would benefit the public at large, not just Disneyland and its patrons.

“What I didn’t want to do was get in a position of having public funds go to the benefit of a private company,” Mineta said Thursday.

The Disney Co.’s original request was turned down, Mineta said earlier, because committee members were unable to quickly determine which portions of the project would solely benefit Disneyland.

Disney, for example, had asked for money to build a “people mover” that would pass over Disney-owned property and connect two planned public parking garages with the Magic Kingdom. The Anaheim request included money for planning an entire people-mover system, but not specifically for constructing the link between Disneyland and the parking garages.

Anaheim City Manager James Ruth said the $17.5 million would provide a “great start” for a series of municipal transportation improvements involving freeway improvements and proposed rail projects.

“Anything we get, we are appreciative of,” Ruth said. “This shows we did a good job in communicating what the project could do and that people in Washington thought it had a lot of merit.

“Now, it’s up to us to demonstrate the value of this project,” the manager said. “The $17.5 million will certainly give us a leg up. It’s better than nothing.”

The transportation legislation outlined Thursday by Mineta and others abandons a controversial proposal to raise the federal gasoline tax by a nickel a gallon.

The six-year package calls for spending $119 billion on highways and bridges and $32 billion on rail and bus systems. The legislation would pay for the programs by extending a 2.5-cent surcharge on the gasoline tax, enacted last fall, for an additional three years, through 1999. It also anticipates reducing the $11.4-billion balance in the Highway Trust Fund, which is financed by gasoline tax receipts.

The federal gasoline tax rose to 14 cents a gallon at the beginning of the year.

The legislation also cuts $1.8 billion from the $6.8 billion that House leaders earlier had earmarked for special “demonstration projects” for individual congressional districts. The projects, criticized as “pure pork” by some legislators, had prompted veto threats from the Bush Administration. The Administration also had strongly opposed the gas tax hike.

Rep. Robert A. Roe (D-N.J.), chairman of the House Committee on Public Works and Transportation and one of the principal backers of the nickel-a-gallon proposal, said of the scaled-down bill: “We’re not disappointed. (But) if we had more resources, we’d be able to do a better job.”

Current transportation aid programs, which had seen only minor changes in the past 35 years, expired on Sept. 30. However, states are continuing to spend money already allocated to them under the old programs.

The original House bill, which would have authorized $153.5 billion in spending over a five-year period, ran into trouble in late July after members balked at approving the gas tax increase. Faced with unexpected opposition, Roe and other committee leaders pulled the bill from the House floor Aug. 1.

The new bill incorporates most of the basic features of the earlier legislation. Generally, it provides states with greater flexibility to shift funds from highway to mass-transit programs, provisions that have pleased transit officials.

But separate legislation approved by the Senate in June offers even greater flexibility. The Senate bill calls for spending $123 billion over five years and does not include any specially earmarked money for demonstration projects. In another major departure, the Senate and House bills establish dramatically different formulas to calculate how the Department of Transportation hands out to the states billions of dollars in aid for highway and mass-transit programs.

The differences between the two pieces of legislation will be ironed out in a conference committee after the House passes its version of the bill. Floor action in the House is scheduled for next Thursday and Friday.

The bill unveiled by Roe calls for spending $37.6 billion on a National Highway System of about 155,000 miles, including the 43,000-mile existing system of interstate highways. States would be allowed to transfer 25% of their funds under that program to other road programs or to mass transit.

The bill also provides $13 billion for an urban mobility program, to be spent either on highways or transit; $10 billion for a rural mobility program; $13 billion for a state flexible program; and $3 billion for a safety program.