Planned Sale of Toll Lanes Is Criticized by Officials

State and local transportation officials representing Riverside County are criticizing the planned sale of 10 miles of toll lanes in Orange County to an Irvine-based nonprofit group, calling it a secretive and questionable deal that will do little more than gouge commuters.

Last week, a group of Orange County and Riverside County businessmen announced that they were buying the 91 Express Lanes, the first private toll road built in California. The four lanes straddle the median of the Riverside Freeway between Anaheim and the Riverside County border.

Members of the nonprofit group, called NewTrac, said that Orange and Riverside counties’ taxpayers will benefit from the sale because it will cost less for a nonprofit group to finance the project, generating millions of dollars for other road improvements in Orange and Riverside counties.

But critics said those promises are hollow.

“We’ll find our folks in Riverside and San Bernardino counties paying higher tolls for no reason other than to pay off the profits of the original investors,” said state Transportation Commissioner Robert A. Wolf, who lives in Moreno Valley.

NewTrac based its long-term financial estimates on what it expects to be sharp increases in revenue, Wall Street analysts have said. If those projections are met, NewTrac will have an extra $6 million a year to split between the Orange and Riverside county transportation agencies, its backers said.

But Wolf and others contend that the counties will be unlikely to get any money back, because the 91 Express Lanes will be so heavily in debt. And if the nonprofit group fails, Wolf said, California taxpayers will have to step in and make the outstanding bond payments.

Riverside County Supervisor Bob Buster said the state, not a nonprofit group, should take over the toll lanes, charging that California’s experiment in road privatization has failed.

“These toll lanes have been an unmitigated disaster for us. This sale is only confirmation of that,” Buster said. “They lost their shirts and now they are going to be bailed out by the sale of tax-exempt bonds.”