O.C., Riverside Near Pact for Median Toll-Lane Plan

In an attempt to avoid litigation, transportation officials from Orange and Riverside counties have moved closer to agreement on plans for toll lanes in the median of the Riverside Freeway.

Under a compromise still to be fine-tuned during the next few months, two toll lanes would be built in each direction along the heavily congested, 10-mile stretch between the Costa Mesa Freeway and the Riverside County line. The lanes would be free to buses and cars containing more than three people.

“The overwhelming majority of issues between the two counties has been resolved and that’s why we’re hailing this as a real milestone--a watershed,” said Gerald Pfeffer, president of Irvine-based California Private Transportation Corp., the firm selected by Caltrans to build and operate the experimental, privatized toll lanes.

Before Thursday, Riverside County transportation officials had threatened to seek a court order that would have blocked construction of the toll lanes. They opposed them as discriminatory against Riverside County residents who commute to job-rich Orange County and who are already paying a special county sales taxes to have toll-free car-pool lanes now under construction on their side of the county border.

Jack Reagan, executive director of the Riverside County Transportation Commission, appeared before the Orange County Transportation Authority board on Thursday and said his agency was now “leaning toward” the proposed compromise.

The OCTA board authorized its staff to negotiate a written agreement with Riverside County, but such an agreement won’t speed construction. In addition to the dispute, the project has been delayed by the Private Transportation Corp.’s inability to secure construction financing amid the current economic recession.

Last month, Riverside County proposed doubling the length of the toll lanes so that they would extend from Anaheim to Interstate 15 in Riverside County and splitting the project’s cost and toll revenues between the Private Transportation Corp. and the two counties.

Orange County countered that the project must remain totally privatized but offered to exempt car pools of three or more people from paying tolls, expected to be about $2 each way during peak traffic and $1 in off-peak hours.

Issues still to be resolved are:

* Riverside’s demand that excess profits from toll operations go to finance other improvements along the traffic-choked corridor, such as commuter rail service, instead of the state highway fund. Orange County officials fear that raising this issue with legislators in Sacramento will only reignite opposition to toll roads generally and delay the project. Without this feature, Reagan said, the Riverside County Transportation Commission will insist that Orange County scrap the toll lanes in favor of regular car-pool lanes for vehicles carrying two or more.

* Riverside’s insistence that $20 million in state funds previously earmarked for the widening of the Riverside Freeway--proposed before the tollway project came along--remain available for improving stretches of that freeway. Orange County wants to divert that money to the cash-strapped, $1.6-billion Santa Ana Freeway-widening effort.

“We consider today a milestone in the progress of the project,” said CPTC’s Pfeffer. “If everything falls in place, we hope to be out in the financial markets (to raise private construction capital) in the spring, with a view to starting construction in the summer of 1992 and then open in 1994.”