Panel OKs Tollway for Eastern O.C. : Transportation: After a heated session, Anaheim, Orange and Santa Ana members vote against the $630-million, 23-mile highway. Regulatory roadblocks still lie ahead.

A divided Orange County tollway agency approved a $630-million highway Thursday through the foothills of eastern Orange County after an acrimonious public hearing punctuated by heated exchanges between officials and a vocal demonstration by environmental activists.

At one point, about a dozen protesters paraded through the meeting room in masks bearing the likeness of Donald L. Bren, the billionaire Irvine Co. chief whose firm owns much of the land that would be traversed by the Eastern tollway.

Taking a major step for traffic-weary residents, the tollway agency board put the finishing touches on the route and approved an environmental review in a series of 9-to-3 votes. Before construction can begin, however, the project must navigate what promises to be a lengthy federal regulatory process. It could also become a target for lawsuits from opponents.

The tollway, which could be under construction by late 1993, is expected to ease traffic in central Orange County, particularly on the crowded Costa Mesa and Riverside freeways. The third of three tollways planned by the agency, the 23-mile stretch of pavement would run south from the Riverside Freeway to Santiago Canyon Road, breaking into two legs that would meander to the Santa Ana Freeway. Drivers would pay 15 to 20 cents per mile.

Although the agency had been marching resolutely toward Thursday’s decision, the vote prompted fierce debate between members of the tollway board, a collection of representatives from cities and county government who typically conduct business in staid formality and vote together on most issues.

Board members from Santa Ana, Anaheim and Orange cast dissenting votes after unsuccessfully pleading for a 30-day delay to resolve several disputes.

“Our three cities contain about 600,000 or 700,000 residents,” Director Robert L. Richardson, a Santa Ana councilman, said after the meeting. “The message (from the tollway board) was, ‘You guys don’t count.’ ”

Richardson and Orange Mayor Gene Beyer said their respective city councils planned to hold closed sessions next week to discuss the possibility of filing a lawsuit against the tollway agency. Anaheim Councilman Irv Pickler said it was unlikely his city would consider any legal action.

At one juncture, Richardson and County Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez, who also sits on the tollway board, tussled after a Santa Ana city staff member gave a presenta tion alleging various environmental problems with the project and drew tough questions from the board.

“I will not tolerate a staff member of mine being hectored,” Richardson protested.

“I think that’s a highly inappropriate comment!” Vasquez barked back.

Although officials from the dissenting cities want to see the highway built, they were miffed when the board refused to guarantee that the highway’s west leg would be built first if construction is performed in phases.

Tollway agency officials say plans call for the entire road to be completed all at once. Authorities in the dissenting cities, however, worry that funding problems might prompt the agency to initially build the eastern leg, spurring commerce at the Irvine Spectrum business complex, a major competitor to central county office parks, while failing to ease traffic on overburdened central county freeways.

Other board members remained unsympathetic, saying that a month’s delay might not settle any differences.

“I think we do have consensus now,” Mission Viejo Mayor Sharon Cody told her colleagues. “If we postpone this for a month, we may in fact be further away from consensus.”

The vote came at the end of a four-hour hearing rife with passionate testimony from residents of the hilly enclaves in eastern Orange County that would bear the brunt of the highway’s impact.

“I have to live here for the rest of my life. I can’t see how this road will help,” Tustin resident Athena Seary told the tollway board. “Is this my inheritance? Just this black and gray wasteland?”

Others complained that the tollway was economic folly and would clutter the scenic backcountry with pollution and noise.

“There needs to be a great sobriety as we launch into this,” said Jim Brooks, a longtime tollway opponent concerned that the roads could become a burden on county taxpayers if the venture falters and has to be bailed out.

Jeffry Katz, a leader of the Tustin Hills Homeowners Coalition, told the group that they were “entering into a fiscally irresponsible game” based on an antiquated vision that Orange County will be home to “unending growth.”

Annette DeFonts noted that the area is made up of terrain that can trap smog and act as an echo chamber for traffic noise.

“I would ask that you put aside the desires of builders and contractors and the Irvine Co. and be responsible to the people this will impact. That’s us,” she said.

Tollway agency staff members, however, said studies have demonstrated that noise from the highway will be below government standards and that health effects will be negligible.

The most vitriolic protest came at the start of the session, as demonstrators from Earth First! a radical environmentalist group with members scattered around the country, tried to draw attention to Bren, who has not played a visible role in development of the highway.

Pulling on masks fashioned from photocopies of the Irvine Co. leader, the protesters paraded around the hearing chambers and onto the dais. They unfurled banners, tossed photocopied “Bren bucks” at startled board members and chanted “I’m Donald Bren! I own you all!” After a few minutes the protesters left peacefully.

“I think we made a statement today about the way politics are played in Orange County,” said Craig Beneville, the group’s spokesman. “It’s a plutocracy with the few rich landowners dictating the way things are done.”

Beneville, who last crossed paths with tollway officials when he chained himself to the front gate of the agency’s Costa Mesa offices earlier this year, said he hoped citizens would “reassert their rights,” but suggested that if necessary “civil disobedience remains the last option of the dispossessed.”