State Cuts Threaten Roadway Projects : Transportation: A plan to widen Ventura’s Seaward Avenue is spared for now, but county officials are warned of future funding risks.

State transportation officials have raised serious questions about funding a long-sought road-widening project in central Ventura that would relieve congestion on one of the city’s most popular routes to the beach.

The proposed $8.6-million expansion of Seaward Avenue would widen the freeway crossing from four to six lanes. But looming state budget cuts have threatened that and a handful of other local improvements planned in coming years.

A lobbying campaign has spared the Seaward Avenue project for now, but members of the Ventura County Transportation Commission have been warned that more cuts are imminent.

Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of highway projects across California already have been abandoned or delayed because of funding shortfalls. Others are sure to fall before a revised statewide priority list is approved next March.

In Ventura County, sound walls along California 126 and improvements at the interchange of the Ventura Freeway and Lewis Road in Camarillo have been pushed back beyond the turn of the century.

And to reduce the county’s dependence on state funding, a political consultant is scouting area voters and advising the county Transportation Commission officials about when to pitch a ballot initiative that would increase the local sales tax.

Money raised from that half-cent tax increase would be set aside as matching funds for local transportation projects.

“It’s always a guessing game, and we don’t know until the last minute how much money we’re going to get” from the state, said Camarillo Mayor David Smith, chairman of the county Transportation Commission.

“We try and get the top one or two projects on the [state] list, and it seems like anything underneath those gets put off until the turn of the century,” he said.

After learning that funding for the Ventura Freeway-Seaward Avenue interchange may be in jeopardy, Ginger Gherardi, the local panel’s executive director, testified before state commissioners in Riverside last week on behalf of the project.

She later told the county transportation panel that the widening project is safe from cuts so far, but that she will have to keep close tabs on it and other road improvement plans throughout the county.

State officials “simply went up with a mathematical chart and said ‘This looks like a good project to drop,’ ” Gherardi told commissioners.

“It’s not a recommendation yet, but it’s a red flag,” she said.

County transportation commissioners in October approved a priority list that details which local projects should proceed and which could be delayed considering the looming budget cuts.

Top priorities include widening the Ventura Freeway between Vineyard Avenue and Johnson Drive, reconfiguration of the Pacific Coast Highway-Pleasant Valley Road intersection in south Oxnard and the Seaward Avenue project in Ventura.

The California Transportation Commission must cut $600 million worth of projects from its $5-billion spending plan, known as the State Transportation Improvement Program, a priority list that ranks road projects across the state.

The plan typically is approved every two years, with 60% of the funds going to the 13 counties that make up Southern California and 40% designated for the 45 Northern California counties.

But since state lawmakers ordered seismic retrofitting projects to the top of the list following the January 1994 Northridge earthquake and voters rejected two bond proposals, planners have had trouble adding new projects to the 1992 priority list.

The 1994 list included virtually no new projects from the earlier list, and the 1996 version will probably recommend deeper cuts and delays, said Robert Remen, executive director of the California Transportation Commission.

“With $350 million needed to be cut out of Southern California, every project is at risk,” Remen said. “But at the same time we are faced with needing to scale back the program, we also recognize that the world hasn’t stopped since 1992, when projects were last added to the program.”

Nazir Lalani, transportation engineer for the city of Ventura, said that the widening of Seaward Avenue is vital because the road accommodates much more than local commuter traffic.

“I fought a huge battle in 1989 to get this project onto the [priority list] in the first place,” said Lalani, who has asked the city’s Sacramento lobbyist to help safeguard funding for the project.

“This interchange was substandard from years and years ago,” he said, adding that the intersection attracts more than 30,000 cars a day. “It’s not something that the city of Ventura caused by new development.”

Transportation officials are still planning to ask voters to dig deeper to pay for road improvements across Ventura County.

Smith said that the county Transportation Commission is committed to getting a local sales-tax increase on a future ballot, most likely next November.

“I think it will come up next year,” he said. “It needs to.”