Countywide : Tollway Agency Suit Goes to New Judge

A lawsuit designed as a preemptive first strike by transportation officials against environmentalists who object to construction of a South County tollway was transferred Tuesday to a Santa Ana judge newly appointed by President Bush.

U.S. District Judge Linda H. McLaughlin, scheduled to begin her duties as a federal judge this week, was quickly assigned to hear the lawsuit. Her lifetime appointment was confirmed by the U.S. Senate last month.

McLaughlin, 50, gained attention locally for a 1990 ruling in a civil rights trial that mandated reforms in the treatment of youths at Orange County’s Juvenile Hall. Her first judgeship was an appointment to the Municipal Court bench in 1980 by Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. She was elevated to the Superior Court bench two years later.

Environmentalists were disappointed by the transfer because it means a delay until McLaughlin reads all of the legal briefs and motions filed in the case.

“I’d feel a lot better if the judge had issued a ruling today,” said tollway opponent Norm Grossman, a member of the Laguna Beach Planning Commission and a board member of Laguna Greenbelt, one of the groups named as a defendant.

Laguna Beach resident Elizabeth Leeds, the only individual named as a defendant, appeared in court without an attorney, representing herself. When the court clerk asked for attorneys’ business cards, she scrawled one out by hand on a piece of paper.

Tuesday’s hearing was to focus on a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Transportation Corridor Agencies in hopes of gaining a quick declaratory judgment approving the federal environmental documents needed to build the 15-mile, $793-million San Joaquin Hills tollway.

The TCA’s court papers argued that the agency shouldn’t have to wait for the environmentalists to sue, which could take more than a year, in order to resolve the issue of whether the environmental documents are adequate for construction to start.

But the Natural Resources Defense Council, representing all the defendants except Leeds, has argued that a recent Texas ruling in a similar case indicates that the TCA has no standing to sue, since the environmental impact statement involved is a Federal Highway Administration document.

Tollway agency lawyers claim that the Texas case is not similar enough because the plaintiffs were local governments that favored a road and happened to be interested bystanders--they were not building the road, whereas the TCA is doing so in Orange County.

On another battlefront, tollway opponents are seeking to derail legislation in Washington that would provide the TCA with federal loan guarantees to be invoked if the tollway agency defaults on construction bonds.

Opponents argue that such loan guarantees at least symbolically undermine a previous TCA pledge to repay the bond debt from toll revenues and not at taxpayers’ expense.