Funding Crisis Shouldn’t Affect O.C.’s I-5 Work

A severe financial crisis in the state’s transportation program is expected to delay millions of dollars in road projects designed to ease congestion on clogged Los Angeles freeways, but Orange County’s biggest highway-widening project should be spared.

Rail projects critical to getting Southland motorists out of their cars may also be vulnerable as state officials attempt to make good on their promise to give earthquake safety first priority for scarce transportation dollars.

In Orange County, the biggest project in the state transportation plan--the massive expansion of the Santa Ana Freeway through the heart of the region--is likely to escape unscathed. Local transportation officials plan to use money from the county’s half-cent sales tax measure for transportation, which was approved by voters in 1990, to make up for any shortfalls in state money.

“We’ve done a shift to keep our priority on the Interstate 5 at a high level,” said Stanley T. Oftelie, Orange County Transportation Authority executive director.

The $2-billion project, which will double the number of lanes from southern Orange County to the Los Angeles County line, won’t be completed until early next century.

While the Interstate 5 project shouldn’t be hurt, widening work on the Costa Mesa and Riverside freeways will be delayed four years or longer. That’s because sales tax money planned for those projects would be diverted to keep the Santa Ana Freeway project moving.

About $94 million would come from funds intended for widening the Costa Mesa Freeway north of the Garden Grove Freeway, and $114 million would come from funds for widening the Riverside Freeway between the Orange Freeway and the Los Angeles County line.

Orange County residents commuting northward may also feel the effect of project delays in Los Angeles County, where the crisis means that everything from the long-awaited extension of the Foothill Freeway in the San Gabriel Valley to the completion of a system of high-occupancy vehicle lanes along the San Diego Freeway may be put on hold.

Even mass transit projects like the Pasadena Light Rail and the extension of the Red Line into the San Fernando Valley could be subject to postponements as officials try to squeeze enough funds out of road and rail projects to pay for the strengthening of highway bridges subject to damage in severe earthquakes.

The official estimate is that the delays would last at least a year, but other transportation experts predict it could be much longer as the state continues to identify more bridges in need of retrofitting.

The revenue crisis “is going to ricochet back and forth, up and down the state,” said California Transportation Commission Chairwoman Octavia Diener. “A lot of projects are going to be stretched out and take a lot longer to build, and it already takes too long to build these things.”

But even as congestion-easing projects are being delayed, Assembly Transportation Committee Chairman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) said motorists shouldn’t lose sight of what they are getting in return--the peace of mind that highway bridges will not collapse in a major temblor.

“Los Angeles is at much greater risk because of a lack of seismic retrofit than the expansion of road projects,” he said. “Having to make the choice, I think seismic retrofit is much more important than new roads. We ought to make the roads that we have safe.”

The tug of war over funds between roads and retrofitting was precipitated by the voters’ rejection in the June 7 primary election of Proposition 1A, a proposed bond issue that earmarked $1 billion for the seismic strengthening of bridges. The bond issue’s failure meant that all bridge retrofitting costs would then have to be absorbed by the transportation program, which was already facing funding shortages because of a slump in gasoline tax revenue and voter rejection of an earlier rail bond issue.

In fact, in January, even before the Northridge earthquake made seismic retrofitting a high-profile issue, Caltrans Director James van Loben Sels confided to a legislative workshop that insufficient revenue would send the state’s transportation program “off the cliff” in 1995.

“Because of the June 7 defeat of Proposition 1A . . . the voters shoved the program over the precipice and into a free fall about six months sooner than expected,” Arthur Bauer, executive director of Californians for Better Transportation, wrote his members in their latest newsletter.

In the next few days transportation officials will put a cost estimate on the second phase of the seismic strengthening program. Once that is done, they will face the unsavory task of determining which other road and rail projects will be slowed down to pay for it.

Rail projects are less threatened because in most cases they don’t have to share scarce gasoline tax dollars with the seismic program; much of their financing is from bond issues or specially earmarked federal funds.

The catch there is that, given the fiscally conservative mood of the voters, a $1-billion bond issue scheduled to go on the ballot in November is considered to have little likelihood of passing. Some officials, including Katz, are pushing to keep the measure off the ballot rather than face what they predict is certain defeat.

Without that bond issue, the funding shortage would climb to about $3 billion and financing would become less certain for projects like the Pasadena Light Rail and the East-West Valley Line, a mass transit rail line that will run across the San Fernando Valley connecting with the Red Line subway.

“If we don’t have a bond issue or some other way to fund those projects, they could be impacted (by the crisis),” said Linda Bohlinger, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation’s deputy executive officer for capital planning. She said one hopeful sign that these projects may have a better chance of keeping on track than the road projects is that both Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Quentin Kopp (I-San Francisco) and Katz are urging the Wilson Administration not to delay any mass transit projects.

“The rationale for leaving rail out of the freeze is that rail is the one thing that worked well both in the Loma Prieta and the Northridge earthquakes,” Katz said.

Caltrans officials confirm that it is mostly road projects that will be delayed, but they say how many will not be known until an assessment is completed of the number of bridges that will need retrofitting. They acknowledge, however, that delays are likely to hit most large projects scheduled for the latter half of the decade.

In the meantime, projects likely to face delays include:

* The addition of car-pool lanes in both directions on a 7.6-mile section of the San Diego Freeway from the Orange County line to the Long Beach Freeway. Bohlinger said the $37-million project is a key element in local plans for a major high-occupancy vehicle system designed to relieve congestion on Los Angeles County freeways.

* The six-mile extension of the Foothill Freeway from its terminus at Foothill Boulevard to the San Bernardino County Line. Bohlinger said that for years the $274-million project has had the highest priority in Los Angeles County freeway system because it would relieve a critical bottleneck in the fast-growing northeast sector of the county. Plans for the extension call for the construction of four lanes, including a car-pool lane, in each direction.

* The construction of a San Diego Freeway interchange at Arbor Vitae Street, a project first requested by the Los Angeles Department of Airports in 1976. The $24-million project would provide access to LAX from the San Diego Freeway as well as the Century Freeway.