OCTA Orders Broader Study on Merger

Ignoring protests by its toll-road counterparts, Orange County’s largest transportation agency voted unanimously Thursday to move ahead with a study of consolidation after a consultant concluded there are no legal obstacles to a merger with the tollway agencies.

The vote came a week after angry toll-road board members denounced the Orange County Transportation Authority as an empire-building bureaucracy looking for financial stability. But on Thursday, some authority members were sounding conciliatory.

“We’re not going to storm the headquarters” of the toll-road agencies, said Thomas W. Wilson, a Laguna Niguel councilman and transportation authority member. “If it’s feasible, let’s move ahead. If it’s not, let’s drop it.”

The authority voted Thursday to form a committee of members from both toll-road boards and to competitively bid a larger, $60,000 study that would look at the issues of a merger more closely than an in-house one last year. It is unclear whether tollway board members will choose to be part of that study or even join the committee. The authority has no power to compel their membership.

Some toll-road board members were concerned that the initial study on the matter had been financed by the authority and completed by Dan Miller, who had worked on the merger of the county’s transit district and transportation commission. Those two agencies ultimately formed the transportation authority.

But Supervisor Roger R. Stanton, another authority board member, ridiculed what he called “hand holding around the campfire” with tollway board members for a consensus about consolidation. Stanton said a merger already makes sense, just as it did five years ago when the authority was established.

“If you built a transportation system from scratch, you wouldn’t do it this way,” he said. “If it has to be done by legislation in Sacramento, then fine. But if it’s good for Orange County, we should do it.” Stanton nonetheless voted to authorize a broader study and form the joint committee.

Authority board members said that they are not aware of any legislative efforts to merge the agencies, and nobody at the authority was working to get such a bill introduced in Sacramento.

Thursday’s meeting had none of the animosity expressed last week by toll-road board members, who voted overwhelmingly against efforts to merge and took verbal shots at both the authority and its executive director, Stan Oftelie.

One toll road board member said the authority’s efforts to expand were “frightening . . . more scary than Jurassic Park.”

Wilson suggested Thursday that toll road board members adopt another popular movie title: “Sense and Sensibility.”

The authority’s preliminary study suggests there are enough similarities between the agencies to “create opportunities for cost savings and efficiencies” by merging the two. The study also takes into consideration a possible consolidation with the transit system of Laguna Beach, the only city to run its own buses, and county transportation duties of the Orange County Environmental Management Agency.