Legislators Vow Quick Action for Commuters

State legislators on Wednesday promised relief for commuters stuck in gridlock on the Riverside Freeway while admitting the state’s experiment with private toll roads went awry with the 91 Express Lanes.

Lawmakers stopped short of saying whether they would try to wrest control of the toll lanes from the private operators. One measure under consideration would create a quasi-governmental agency to buy the toll lanes.

“We’ve got to do something for these people,” state Sen. Betty Karnette (D-Long Beach) said Wednesday. “These are very serious problems.”

Assemblyman Lou Correa (D-Anaheim) agreed.

“This whole 91 toll road is just a mess,” Correa said Wednesday after spending 5 1/2 hours in a joint legislative hearing on Tuesday in Sacramento on the toll roads. “Now the issue is, how do we unwind it?”

The state has several options. It could try to buy the interests of the toll lane operators after getting an independent appraisal, or it could try to negotiate changes to the group’s contract to allow the state to add lanes to the freeway by compensating the company for lost revenue. Or the state could do nothing, and wait to see if the toll lanes operator finds another buyer.

“I don’t believe that there are a lot of buyers out there,” Correa said. “I’m very concerned about taxpayers coming in and subsidizing or bailing out a private enterprise.”

At Tuesday’s hearing, legislators grilled Caltrans officials, asking why they failed to vigorously safeguard the public during negotiations last year with the private toll road operators.

Caltrans Director Jose Medina agreed in October to settle a $100-million lawsuit brought by the toll road operator in response to Caltrans’ plans to add more lanes. In agreeing to the settlement, Caltrans effectively shelved improvements on a hazardous stretch of freeway for at least 15 years.

“Caltrans should have fought harder to move forward with its construction program,” Assemblyman Tom Torlakson (D-Antioch) said Wednesday. He also recommended modifying the state law to require that the Legislature--not Caltrans--negotiate future changes to the toll road group’s contract with the state.

Several lawmakers said the Legislature never meant to give private toll road operators veto power over improvements made to nearby state highways by allowing non-compete clauses in agreements to run the roads. Such a scenario, which occurred in the case of the 91 lanes, won’t happen again, lawmakers said.

Officials with the California Private Transportation Co., which was granted the 91 Express Lanes franchise in 1990, said it is unlikely that a private interest would agree to run such a project without a non-compete clause.

“It is simply counterintuitive to believe the state of California can expect the private sector to invest enormous sums of capital into public projects without any means of protecting its investment,” said the group’s general manager, Greg Hulsizer.

Without the current provisions in the contract, Hulsizer said, the lanes never would have built and the freeway “would still be mired in nightmarish gridlock.”

Some legislators urged an immediate buyout while others disagreed, saying the state should not subsidize a money-losing project. Hulsizer has previously said his company will show a $1.8-million loss for last year, primarily because of lingering construction debt.

The private company said its franchise is still highly valuable.

“CPTC is not seeking to sell the Express Lanes franchise because the project is unprofitable or, as some critics would say, a ‘money loser,’ ” Hulsizer said. “To the contrary, the Express Lanes is an extremely valuable asset and far from financially troubled.”

Beyond the debate of whether to buy or sell the lanes, some lawmakers questioned the internal workings of Caltrans.

Correa said it was clear from Tuesday’s testimony that there were communication and management problems within Caltrans, with officials in Orange County and Sacramento moving in opposite directions when it came to deciding whether the freeway needed improvements.

For instance, officials in Sacramento said the planned road improvements didn’t meet the federal definitions for safety considerations. In order to meet its contractual obligations to the toll operator, Caltrans had to prove that planned roadwork was strictly to improve safety.

However, a ranking Caltrans official from Orange County said that the segment of the Riverside Freeway the agency planned to improve was only a few accidents away from meeting the federal threshold.

Dale Ratzlaff, deputy director of planning for Caltrans Orange County district office, said local Caltrans engineers believed the road work proposed for the Riverside Freeway, which has some of the heaviest truck traffic in the county, would be a “preemptive” strike for safety.

“In our minds we had a legitimate safety concern,” Ratzlaff told lawmakers Tuesday.

He said engineers started worrying about safety shortly before the opening of the Eastern Toll Road and planned widening of Route 71 in Riverside County and the impact on the already congested bottleneck through Santa Ana Canyon.

“What we saw in this small spot of the 91 was additional traffic being packed in,” Ratzlaff said. “We had this prediction that accidents were going to increase.”

Caltrans’ internal documents show a significant increase in accident rates along three sections of roadway that were slated for improvements. In one case, accident rates jumped by as much as 183% since the toll lanes opened in late 1995.

The problem is particularly acute in spots where a large number of motorists are forced to cross several lanes to get into the toll lanes, while cars leaving the carpool lanes are also merging.

A separate Times analysis showed that the number of serious accidents increased along nearly every segment of the six miles of the Riverside Freeway where Caltrans had planned to add lanes.

The California Private Transportation Co. has said that the percentage of accident rates has declined on most sections of the freeway between January 1994 and July 1999.

Times staff writer Megan Garvey contributed to this report.