Freeways Are on Road to Improvement

The Orange County Transportation Authority board voted Monday to sell $225 million worth of bonds to finance freeway improvement projects--primarily the widening of the Santa Ana Freeway--over the next three years.

The money is needed, an OCTA spokesman said, to keep the construction on schedule until its costs can be reimbursed with revenue from Measure M, a county sales tax approved in 1991.

“Measure M is a 20-year program, and in 1991 we were given direction by the OCTA board to build out the freeways in 10 years,” said Jim Kenan, the authority’s director of finance and administration. “By accelerating the project schedule, OCTA had to raise cash early in the program to pay for it.”

Bond sales in 1992 and 1994 netted a total of about $797 million, Kenan said. The new bond sale, scheduled for the week of March 23, is expected to net about $200 million.

“As sales tax revenues come in from now until 2011,” Kenan said, “we will pay off our bonds. The board made a conscious decision not to have Orange County freeways under construction for 20 years.”

Kenan said he expects the interest rate to be 4.7% on the bonds, which OCTA plans to pay off by 2011.

In accelerating the construction schedule, he said, OCTA saved the county about $150 million in land acquisition costs by taking advantage of depressed real estate prices--and eased freeway congestion for Orange County motorists.

“We have been able to buy properties and get them into escrow at deflated prices,” Kenan said. And, he quipped, “all you have to do is drive the route to realize that, my God, if this went on for 20 years, the public would want to shoot those transportation people.”

About $183 million of the new bond revenue will go to pay for the ongoing widening of an eight-mile stretch of the Santa Ana Freeway from Buena Park to the Los Angeles County line. The rest, Kenan said, will help pay for improvements to the Costa Mesa and San Diego freeways.

This is a particularly good time for raising money through bond sales, he said, because of interest rates that are at historic lows. “The bond market is very strong,” Kenan said.

In other action, the OCTA board urged the Southern California Assn. of Governments to refer a controversial proposal for two new toll roads to a special committee for further analysis of the roads’ proposed alignments and environmental impact.

In a recently published 20-year regional transportation plan, the association included plans for one road, called the Northern Corridor, which would connect San Bernardino with the Eastern Transportation Corridor (now under construction) in Orange; and another, called the South Pass Corridor, to run east-west between the Foothill Corridor (also under construction) and Interstate 15 in Riverside County.

Some environmentalists have expressed opposition to the proposed roads.

But at present, OCTA spokesman John Standiford said, they are nothing but “lines drawn by some planners and engineers.” The planners, he said, “haven’t gone out to get public feedback. What we’re asking is that there be some more analysis and outreach to determine how best to serve [transportation] needs.”

To accomplish that, the board recommended that the proposed roads be analyzed by the Four Corners Policy Coordination Group, a SCAG committee of elected officials representing the four counties affected: Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Los Angeles.

“What we want SCAG to do,” Standiford said, “is work with the public and elected officials. It’s important that they look at the overall picture, including a whole variety of options.”

David Haldane can be reached at (714) 966-5997 or by e-mail at david.haldane@latimes.com