Barrage of Erroneous Tickets Takes Toll on Commuter

When Thomas Holder got the first citation in the mail, he didn’t realize that it was the beginning of a bureaucratic quagmire worthy of Kafka.

The ticket imposed a $20 penalty for illegally using the 91 Express Lanes, the automated toll road connecting Orange County and Riverside. Holder, 61, wasn’t worried because he knew it wasn’t true. Although he takes the toll road to work every day, he has a toll road account, pays for the trips and has the statements to prove it.

But the citations kept coming. Holder made dozens of phone calls. He wrote letters. Finally, in desperation, he contacted two state senators.

All to no avail. Six months after that initial ticket, the sales and marketing director from Newport Beach has received 19 more citations with price tags ranging from $20 to $500. The total tab: $6,550 and mounting.

Holder’s reaction? “I am not a happy camper.”

Greg Hulsizer, general manager of the California Private Transportation Co., which operates the state-owned toll road, apologized late last week for the erroneous citations and promised that the fines would be waived. “I can understand how Mr. Holder might be frustrated,” he said.

That would be good news to Holder if he hadn’t heard it so often before. “I can’t believe that any agency could be this irresponsible,” he said.

Holder has been a toll road customer since 1996, when he opened an account with the Transportation Corridor Agencies, which operates toll roads in south Orange County. Like other customers, he received a transponder--the cigarette-pack-sized device that fits on a dashboard and allows overhead sensors to automatically debit a driver’s account for the price of the toll. The electronic boxes are supposed to be usable on any of the county’s three toll roads. Last February, Holder began using it on the 10-mile road along the median of the Riverside Freeway to shave time off the 45-mile commute to his job in Chino.

For eight months all went well, then the first citation arrived. The toll road agency sends out citations to those who do not pay their tolls, whose license plate numbers are recorded by hidden video cameras.

“I wasn’t too concerned,” recalls Holder’s wife, Myrna, who pays the couple’s bills. “I just wrote across it that it was a mistake and mailed it back to them.”

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She did start getting concerned a month later, however, when two new citations arrived demanding $100 apiece. “I called the office and they told me they would take care of it and that it wouldn’t happen again,” she said. The following month, a $250 ticket arrived. Once again, Myrna says, she called the office and was assured that the problem would be solved. Since then, according to the Holders, the tickets have been arriving fast and furiously, sometimes as many as three in a day and as recently as last week. “We’ve had $1,500 days,” Thomas Holder says.

Between them, the couple says, they have phoned the toll road operators more than 40 times. They have faxed them five letters and mailed them two. And earlier this month, in desperation, Holder says, he enlisted the aid of two state senators--Ross Johnson (R-Irvine) and John R. Lewis (R-Orange)--for whom the couple’s son works as a legislative aide.

“It’s been pretty frustrating,” said Matt Holder, who has made more than a dozen calls on his parents’ behalf. “Every time I talk to them I wait a week, then my dad starts hammering on me and I call again. Nothing has happened. This is certainly one of the more extreme cases of unresponsiveness that I’ve ever seen from an agency.”

Hulsizer says his company has been responsive, claiming that the earlier fines were waived when brought to the attention of customer service representatives. The erroneous citations, he said, were generated by a defect in Holder’s transponder. And the delay in solving the problem, he said, stemmed from the fact that the transponder had been issued not by his agency, but by the Transportation Corridor Agencies.

“Typically, we would refer a customer from another agency back to that agency for a new transponder,” he said. “I can’t say whether that happened in this case. But our recommendation was and is that he get a new transponder.”

Until then, Hulsizer said, the toll road’s computer system will be reprogrammed to stop issuing Holder citations. “We feel badly,” he said. “As of now, it’s all been resolved.”