O.C. Transportation Board Keeps Oftelie at the Wheel

County transportation czar Stanley T. Oftelie only half listened recently as two visitors talked passionately about Orange County’s first commuter trains. This is about as thrilling as a slow freight train out of Colton, Oftelie mused. These guys gotta lighten up!

Suddenly, Oftelie grabbed a gadget out of his desk drawer, put it to his lips, produced the “Whoo-ooh!” sound of a train whistle and blew his guests away in stitches.

With his own brand of humor providing a solid boost, Oftelie overcame doubters Thursday and won a 11-0 vote to keep his powerful, $117,000-a-year job as executive director of the Orange County Transportation Authority.

While hardly known outside governmental circles, Oftelie directs the half-billion-dollar bureaucracy charged with solving Orange County’s traffic mess, ranked as the county’s No. 1 problem.

For the past four months, he has had to work hard to mend fences with city officials who felt that he slighted their interests in favor of county and regional projects.

Oftelie’s efforts paid off Thursday with the 11-0 decision by the OCTA board. “My Uncle Lester used to say I’m the best of a bad lot,” Oftelie said with characteristic humor after Thursday’s decision. But he added: “I think (board members) pretty much determined that they wanted to work cooperatively.”

As head of the OCTA, Oftelie oversees a budget of nearly $500 million and to a large extent sets the public agenda on transportation issues by recommending projects, proposals and consulting contracts to his board and finding ways to pay for them.

Oftelie will need his fabled sense of humor to confront a host of immediate problems, including an anticipated drop in sales-tax revenue of 22%, or $17 million, that threatens to delay some highway and transit projects.

County and state officials credit Oftelie, a former journalist and supervisor’s aide, with advancing Orange County’s highway and transit programs beyond most bureaucrats’ wildest dreams. Since taking over the county’s transportation agency in 1983, Oftelie and his staff have secured approval for three massive freeway-widenings, designed a system of so-called Super Street improvements, added two commuter trains, laid plans for eight more trains and jump-started work on a $1.1-billion, high-tech, urban rail line.

He also was one of the leading architects and strategists for Measure M, the half-cent sales tax increase approved in November, 1990, that will raise millions of dollars for transportation projects.

But only four months ago, Oftelie’s job was in jeopardy. Critics said he had made enemies by siding too often with county supervisors in their disputes with cities over transportation priorities and being too eager to pour concrete wherever he could, as fast as he could.

In June, when the Orange County Transportation Commission and the Orange County Transit District merged to form the OCTA, the cities were given a majority of seats on the new board. Suddenly they had the power to express their dissatisfaction, and one of their first actions was to seek a successor to Oftelie.

He applied to keep his own job, joking that although he would be able to find work elsewhere, he would have to change youth soccer leagues, in which he coaches. Board members said Oftelie indicated a willingness to listen to the new board and, in the end, he was one of four finalists from a pool of 50 applicants.

Even critics, such as Buena Park City Manager Kevin O’Rourke, acknowledged recently that opposition to Oftelie had almost dried up.

“I can tell things are getting better,” Oftelie joked earlier this week, “because when I come across city managers, now they wave at me with all their fingers.”

But in exchange for keeping his post, two OCTA board members said, Oftelie may be subjected to a closed-door review, with his future to be determined by how he responds to the gripes voiced there.

Oftelie’s supporters say he’s successful in part because of his personal style--warm, jocular, willing to go the extra mile to win support for a new project or policy.

But his critics say Oftelie is a shrewd manipulator, an empire-builder who curried favor with his bosses in the county while trampling on the cities.

“He’s not 100% perfect,” said Anaheim Councilman and OCTA board member Irv Pickler, an Oftelie ally. “Sometimes, in order to accomplish what he wants to do, he steps on somebody’s toes. But that’s the nature of the beast. . . . A lot of people may have felt that he catered to big developers or to the county supervisors because he used to work for former Supervisor Ralph Clark. But I’ve never felt that way about him. I could see what was being accomplished.”

“I think Stan is perceived by city officials to be pro-county, or that he’s slighted them somehow, or that he’s arrogant,” said San Juan Capistrano Councilman Gary L. Hausdorfer, one of the new city representatives on OCTA. “The flip side of this is that there are a large number of cities not well-versed on transportation.”

Oftelie’s modus operandi is to, over time, bring people into line with his own thinking, then credit them. For example, county supervisors originally opposed the merger of OCTC and OCTD because city representatives outnumbered the county 6 to 4 on the board. But Oftelie, who first proposed the merger several years ago, persuaded the supervisors that consolidation was valid on its own merits, even if the cities were in control.

Admirers say he’s brilliant, innovative and has an eye for the big project. For example, Oftelie proposed and helped write the joint-powers agreement between the cities and the county that created the Transportation Corridor Agencies, which oversee three publicly owned tollway projects in the South County.

He also established the $1.6-billion Santa Ana Freeway-widening project as the county’s top transportation priority, citing the oft-repeated phrase: “The Santa Ana Freeway is the Main Street of Orange County.”

Indeed, criticism of Oftelie was muted and closely held until 1989 when OCTC-OCTD merger legislation was being debated in Sacramento and he was drafting provisions in Measure M that were strongly resisted by city officials. In the merger battle, he was accused of seeking enormous power.

In helping to draft Measure M, he included a ban on proceeds going to any city that attempted simply to replace city financing for projects with Measure M dollars.

“He’s trying to build an empire,” Santa Ana Mayor Daniel H. Young said at the time of the 1989 debates. “He’s trying to create a new agency with veto power over cities’ growth-management policies because those policies affect traffic. He wants to create another Coastal Commission, with himself on top.”

Since then, Young, who vowed to have Oftelie removed, has joined the OCTA as one of the agency’s new city representatives. He has tempered his criticism, vowing to work with Oftelie in part to ensure that the $1.1-billion urban rail system gets built. A substantial portion of the proposed 21-mile route goes through Young’s city.

Throughout his clashes with Young and others, Oftelie steadfastly denies that he’s building a transportation empire. Nonetheless, due to the county’s growth, Oftelie’s skills and the OCTC-OCTD merger, he has seen his domain grow from an agency with an annual budget of less than $1 million to one of nearly half a billion. His original staff of less than two dozen people is now a work force of 1,600.

Oftelie notes the vastness of these changes but protests that they would have happened without him. And he believes that people spend too much time trying to analyze his behavior and motives.

“It’s so simple,” Oftelie said recently, “but some folks just don’t get it. I believe that the residents of Orange County want transportation improvements, have indicated their willingness to pay for them, and deserve to have them built today, not tomorrow. There comes a point, I think, when you stop debating which way you’re going to go and just go. Otherwise you condemn the public to transportation misery.”

Oftelie’s entre with county supervisors and other officeholders is due in part to his sense of humor and writing abilities. When Supervisor Don R. Roth recently railed against the costs of building new jails and other facilities, Roth used Oftelie’s line that the county staff has an “edifice complex.”

“He’s one of the most brilliant people I know,” said ex-Supervisor Ralph B. Clark, now a lobbyist. “And he’s been like a son to me.”

But Oftelie’s talents are not universal, says Monte Ward, another OCTA official.

Ward advises that motoring skills don’t necessarily go with being the county’s top transportation official.

“Have you ever had Stan drive you somewhere?” Ward asks. “Stan has trouble talking and driving at the same time. . . . No kidding. You could end up on the sidewalk.”

Profile: Stanley T. Oftelie

Position: Executive director, Orange County Transportation Authority

Salary: $117,000 a year

Age: 43

Birthplace: Pasadena

Jobs: 1983-1991: Executive director, Orange County Transportation Commission 1976-1983: Executive assistant, County Supervisor Ralph B. Clark 1975-1976: Staff writer, Orange County Register 1975: Instructor, Golden West College 1975: Staff writer, Los Angeles Times Southeast Edition 1970-1974: Staff writer, Orange County Register

Education: 1980: Master’s degree in public administration, USC 1976: Transportation Management Certificate, UCI 1974: Master of Arts in communications, USC 1970: Bachelor’s degree in journalism, Arizona State University Family: Married Dee Adams in 1969. Four sons: Dan, 20; twins Steve and Andy, 17, and Joe, 9.