Riverside Tollway Mired in Problems : Transportation: Lawsuits, legislative blockades and environmental concerns are delaying the project well beyond the planned 1993 completion date.

COSTA MESA —  When state transportation authorities unveiled plans last year for a privately built, four-lane toll road down the center median of the Riverside Freeway, the idea offered a tantalizing promise. For a dollar or two, motorists could find blessed relief from bumper-to-bumper conditions prevailing each day on the freeway, one of the nation’s most crowded.

But in the months since, the $88.3-million project on California 91 has been beset by pitfalls and problems.

Lawsuits have been filed; others have been threatened. An influential state legislator has tried to block the deal. Air quality and environmental regulators have proved to be tough customers. Plans to extend the toll lanes--originally intended for a short stretch in Orange County--into Riverside County for several miles are up in the air.

Although promoters of the project, Irvine-based California Private Transportation Corp., once passed out lapel buttons stenciled with “91 in ‘91” and confidently predicted that construction would begin this year, that now is out of the question.

Officials at the firm, an offshoot of engineering giant CRSS Inc. of Houston, say work will not begin on the roadway for at least another year, pushing back the planned mid-1993 opening date that might have made it the state’s first operational tollway.

The delays have prompted grumbling among commuters and transportation officials alike, who are eager to ease the tangled mess on the Riverside Freeway. Each morning and evening, traffic clogs lengthy stretches of the freeway, a prime conduit for motorists making the daunting journey from newer, more affordable neighborhoods in the Inland Empire to job-rich Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Although transportation authorities in Orange County talk glowingly of California Private Transportation Corp. and practically lionize the firm’s president, Gerald S. Pfeffer, they have started toying with the idea of setting a “drop dead” date for the 10-mile project some time next year. If significant progress isn’t made by then, they could pull their support and begin pursuing efforts to build ordinary car-pool lanes instead.

“I think they should be going faster,” said Stan Oftelie, the Orange County Transportation Authority’s executive director. “We’ll be reassessing our support if this goes on much longer.”

In Riverside County, transportation officials are eager to see the private firm push the project deep into their county by purchasing car-pool lanes now under construction along the Riverside Freeway and incorporating them as part of the tollway. If that does not happen, they have promised to sue to block the project.

“We’re keeping our litigation powder dry,” said Jack Reagan, Riverside County Transportation Commission executive director. “If they attempt to move forward without extending the project into Riverside, we’ll be forced to take action.”

Undeterred by such threats, the project’s proponents have pressed ahead. Of late, Pfeffer has resembled a shuttle diplomat, zipping between his office in Irvine and various locales throughout the state, all the while juggling scores of issues in an effort to see that the toll lanes are built.

“I feel we’re making good progress on the private implementation, and if all goes well we can get this project under construction sometime in the summer of ‘92,” Pfeffer said. “There may be ways to accelerate the start even more than that, but we still have to sort those out with our partners in the public sector.”

Pfeffer also sees reasons for hope because the project has been greeted warmly by the financial community.

“The reason we believe we’re getting that interest is that it’s more and more apparent that the budget deficits and other problems of the public sector are not going to go away,” he said. “There will be increasing use of these private and public-private financing methods. This project is viewed by a lot of people on Wall Street as very doable.”

If anything, the Riverside Freeway tollway has made the greatest progress of the four “privatization” projects picked by state officials last year after a painstaking selection process.

Most of the engineering work for the extra lanes was already done by Orange County transportation officials, who had been hoping originally to build car-pool lanes. It is much further along in the molasses-slow environmental review process and has a prime ingredient the other three lack: prime right of way ready for a road to be built.

A second Orange County project, the 11.2-mile, $750-million elevated toll road planned along the Santa Ana River by the Texas-based Perot Group, has hardly gotten off the ground and is fast approaching a Sept. 11 deadline for environmental work to begin in earnest, Caltrans officials say.

Meanwhile, tollway projects proposed for San Diego and Alameda counties are being threatened by lawsuits, as well as opposition by some state legislators in those areas.

The rocky first year was not exactly what state officials envisioned when they first proposed letting private consortiums take over a role traditionally held by the public sector.

When the idea was conceived in the late 1980s, authorities felt that the firms would be able to quickly construct projects that might have laid fallow for years because of state budget constraints.

The toll projects were christened last September amid an atmosphere of hope and promise. They have been bedeviled by delays ever since.

Negotiations to hammer out franchise agreements between Caltrans and the private firms lasted twice as long as officials on both sides expected, culminating in January after four months of talks.

Matters only got worse when state Sen. Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) introduced legislation earlier this year in an effort to derail the toll road projects. Lockyer suggested that the tollways defy the long-tested tradition of public highways in the state, are unfair to lower-income motorists, and amount to a giveaway to developers and big business. Although the legislation is pending, amendments to Lockyer’s bill exempting the two Orange County projects were added by Assemblyman Tom Umberg (D-Garden Grove).

“There’s no question that we experienced some delays earlier in the year while the Legislature debated” Lockyer’s bill, Pfeffer said.

In the meantime, a lawsuit challenging the toll projects was filed by a group representing the rank-and-file engineers of Caltrans. Although tollway backers have dismissed it as the actions of a disgruntled union, the suit by Professional Engineers in California Government challenges the highways on a variety of environmental and technical issues.

“We think it’s poor public policy in California to require motorists to pay a gas tax and then trap them into paying a toll on top of that,” said Richard Baker, an executive assistant for the group. “I think we’re suing for a loftier purpose than some people suggest.”

Problems have persisted on the local level as well.

Eager to get construction going, Orange County officials in recent weeks talked of speeding things up by tapping money from Measure M, the county’s special transportation sales tax that will raise $3.1 billion over the next two decades.

Authorities concede that there is little chance those funds can be used until they scuttle a lawsuit filed against the half-cent sales tax hike by the Orange County Libertarian Party and Drivers for Highway Safety, a grass-roots group that opposed the measure.

In Riverside County, transportation authorities have also talked about offering low-interest loans to help push the toll lanes forward, but no decision has been made.

Meanwhile, they have managed to jump-start the effort by beginning work on car-pool lanes along a stretch from Riverside to Corona. The lanes should be open to traffic in less than a year, Reagan said. Contracts are now being pulled together for the stretch between Corona and the Orange County line.