Decision on Tollway Project Was Covered Up, Ferguson Says : Roads: Legislator says officials masked plans to make segment of Newport Coast Drive part of tollway.

Gil Ferguson doesn’t normally buy into conspiracy theories. He scoffs at the idea that Roosevelt let the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor; he doesn’t believe anyone but Oswald killed Kennedy.

But these days the Republican assemblyman from Newport Beach is talking as if an orchestrated cover-up is taking place right in the heart of his tony coastal district.

Ferguson argues that Orange County officials and the San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor Agency schemed in the early 1990s to camouflage an important decision from the public--that a 1 1/2-mile segment of Newport Coast Drive, which has helped siphon congestion off Coast Highway in Corona del Mar, would ultimately become part of the San Joaquin Hills tollway.

He fears the resulting 50-cent toll on the stretch will push many motorists back onto the Coast Highway and its adjacent residential streets, renewing the monumental traffic jams that plagued Corona del Mar before Newport Coast Drive was opened in 1991.

“This issue of taking a segment of public road and charging a toll on it has never had a public hearing of any sort,” Ferguson complains. “All that ever appeared in the 14,000 pages of environmental documents was a map showing four dots, which if you look at the bottom showed that they were going to be toll booths.”

Backed by angry residents who feel they weren’t kept properly informed, the conservative lawmaker has introduced legislation designed to stop the toll booths. But last week the bill suffered the legislative equivalent of a lynching, and it’s given little hope when the Assembly Transportation Committee reconsiders the measure Tuesday.

Undeterred, Ferguson and the rest are talking ominously of lawsuits and pushing Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren to step in. Lungren’s office, which received more than 500 letters from angry residents, has agreed to issue an opinion on the legality of the affair.

Amid all the hubbub, officials with the county and tollway agency have been left scratching their heads. After scads of hearings and countless public forums on the much-debated tollway, they can’t imagine how anyone could complain about being ill-informed.

Instead, they suggest the Newport Coast Drive toll booths didn’t become big news because other issues--most notably the tollway’s effect on the California gnatcatcher and the environment in general--captured the lion’s share of media and public attention.

“They’re trying to go back and rewrite history,” said Mike Stockstill, a tollway agency spokesman. “Instead of realizing it’s a huge project and this one just got past them, they have taken the attitude that we’ve tried to pull one over on them. There’s no evidence to support that at all.”

Stockstill said the agency cannot simply remove the toll booths and spread the extra cost to other parts of the highway, largely because plans have been cemented by the financial prospectus used to market more than $1 billion in bonds sold to finance the project. In addition, there’s the matter of fairness.

“If you cut the toll from the Newport end, what happens to the guys at the other end of the road?” Stockstill said. “They’ll be screaming.”

As far as traffic, Stockstill and other tollway agency officials insist their plans will actually end up helping Corona del Mar. Traffic projections show that the tollway, which will run 15 miles from San Juan Capistrano to Newport Beach when completed in 1997, should divert 16,000 cars each day from Coast Highway and other streets winding through the trendy seaside neighborhood.

But many aren’t buying that. “I think we again will be inundated with traffic,” lamented Luvena Hayton, transportation chairwoman of the Corona del Mar Chamber of Commerce and owner of a Coast Highway clothing boutique.

Controversy is nothing new for Newport Coast Drive. The thoroughfare was first proposed by the Irvine Co. as a bargaining chip to win approval to develop its 9,400-acre coastal property south of Newport Beach. In exchange for Newport Beach’s blessing, the Irvine Co. agreed to scale down its ambitious project and help finance the $67-million road, which snakes for six miles from Coast Highway up into the hills, to MacArthur Boulevard.

Newport Coast Drive was designed not only to service the plush tracts of homes, apartments, hotels and two 18-hole golf courses making up the development, but also to divert traffic from South County cities, like Laguna Beach and Dana Point, away from Corona del Mar.

“That road is near and dear to the hearts of the people of Newport Beach,” said Councilman Phil Sansone. “Now they feel like they’ve fought for over 20 years and, without a specific public notice, it’s being taken away from them and they’re requiring a toll.”

Like other partisans in the battle, Sansone talks in cloak-and-dagger terms about the tollway agency and county. At the very best, he said, tollway boosters failed miserably to inform the general public about the particulars of the project. Most residents, he said, thought Newport Coast Drive would essentially serve as a free frontage road to the tollway. (County highway officials say that would be impossible because of the terrain).

“The tollway’s environmental impact report is as big as three telephone books,” Sansone grumbled. “The average citizen wouldn’t know where to begin, and they’d figure it only relates to environmental matters, not to major changes in policy.”

He also points to a provision, written into state law when the Legislature authorized the tollway agency to build a pay-to-use highway, that it only be built parallel to other public thoroughfares. Sansone contends the tollway, aside from taking over what is currently a free road, completely obliterates that premise of the law.

The closest thing to an alternative route is the planned extension of Newport Coast Drive that would allow northbound traffic to turn left at Bonita Canyon Drive, funnel onto a planned extension of Ford Road and then hang a right onto MacArthur Boulevard. “It sure as hell isn’t parallel,” complained Sansone. “It’s a Z-pattern.”

Sansone, who took over Newport Beach’s seat on the tollway agency after the controversy erupted late in 1992, initially proposed that the toll booths be moved so motorists could ride free on the tollway to Ford Road, thus eliminating a need for the Newport Coast Drive extension. That idea was shot down by the agency, citing the binding provisions of the bond-sale prospectus.

That prospectus--and the bond sale itself--is a particularly sore point for Sansone and others. He sees it as a Catch-22.

The councilman contends he tried to organize a public hearing in Newport Beach on the toll booth matter in February, 1993, but the effort was rebuffed by tollway officials because they didn’t want to stir up any controversy with the bond sale looming. But after the bonds were sold, he argues, agency officials used them as the excuse to stifle debate.

Stockstill insists there was no conscious effort to evade concerns in Newport Beach. Rather, the agency was simply overrun with last-minute work to prepare for the bond sale.

“I remember the last three or four weeks before the sale,” Stockstill said. “There was only one thing that mattered--making the bond sale happen--and 100% of everyone’s effort was going into that.”

Even as opponents raise the specter of skulduggery, Stockstill points to documents he suggests deflate any conspiracy theories. Among them are the transcript of a November, 1990, informational hearing in Laguna Beach during which a tollway official explained how Newport Coast Drive would be absorbed into the toll road.

Another piece of evidence is a letter sent that same month by Lawrence Shapiro, an official with the Spyglass Hill Community Assn., complaining about the toll booths. Copies of the letter were sent to all the Newport Beach council members--including Sansone. Moreover, the final environmental report on the tollway included a response from the agency to the complaint.

“Here’s somebody, a real live citizen, who went through and found out about the toll,” Stockstill said. “He told every member of his city council,” but the warning was ignored.

Earlier this month, the association sent a widely circulated letter complaining about tollway proponents using Shapiro’s letter. They maintained that Shapiro was the only one who knew about the toll booths and, when no reply came from the agency, he assumed the tolls were being eliminated and let the matter drop.

“Without the shadow of a doubt, the toll for Newport Coast Drive was intentionally kept from the public,” the chamber’s Hayton contends. “I think it was an effort to delude the public.”

Taking the High or Low Road

Motorists will have to pay a 50-cent toll to drive on a segment of Newport Coast Drive if it becomes part of the San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor. Newport Beach Assemblyman Gil Ferguson says this will push motorists back to already congested East Coast Highway in Corona del Mar. County and corridor agency officials say the incorporation has been planned all along.

Proposed Newport Coast Drive extensions

Section alleviates highway congestion

Toll collection