Why I'm voting NO on the new Measure M tax.

There are a number of good reasons to oppose this new tax. They range from the usual, “It's a tax, so I'm a'gin it”, to the “Well, we really need to spend more money on transportation, but this tax isn't going to be spent for exactly what I want, so I'm going to oppose it this time.” Both of these approaches miss the point, in my opinion. 

It's clear to me that Orange County's transportation needs are not being met, even though the Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) already spends a lot of tax money.  The problem is that they spend the money on trendy, expensive social engineering projects designed to force drivers out of their cars, instead of maintaining a road system commensurate with the population.

Metrolink, for example, gives a few middle-high income (>$80K) commuters about a five dollar per trip subsidy and a nice smooth train ride to work.  Since riders don't pay the full cost of their trip, the system is naturally quite popular.   In fact, several billion dollars of the new tax would go toward expanding the system.  It's like a bad joke: The trains are full, they're losing money on every rider, but they want to make it up in volume.  The more they expand it, the more tax dollars it burns.

The currently disavowed Centerline trolley is another example of the OCTA approach. They spent about $60 million desperately trying to sell the public on an expandable starter segment of the full 87 mile system, but failed to convince the Feds to fund any of it. After that, they decided to try to pass this new tax,  and wisely claimed Centerline is now and forever dead.  We'll see. There are a couple of billion dollar projects in the new spending plan that look very suspicious.  I've never seen any action to remove the 87 mile trolley line from the master plan, and no one seems to want to talk about it.

When OCTA did build roads, they were mainly HOV, (High Occupancy Vehicle, carpool) projects, not normal general purpose lanes. Hundreds of millions were spent on expensive freeway to freeway carpool connectors, which add very little usable capacity.  

You might wonder why OCTA acts this way.   It's not necessarily the  people involved. It goes much deeper than just a case of bureaucrats behaving badly – it's an inherent flaw built into the structure of the agency.

The OCTA was formed in 1989 by combining several agencies, the largest being the Orange County Transit District (OCTD), and the Orange County Transportation Commission (OCTC).

The OCTD seemed to do a pretty good job of running the buses,  but the OCTC had problems.

The OCTC was supposed to plan transportation to handle the rapid growth the county was undergoing at the time.  Their budget ran in  the tens of millions of dollars, but they were not terribly successful.  Some may remember the scandals in the '80s involving county supervisors allegedly selling development rights (personally).   Instead of developers (and indirectly, buyers) paying for new infrastructure to support the larger population, taxpayers were stuck with the bill.

A grassroots-sponsored slow-growth initiative came close to passing in the late '80s.  The original Measure M was the developers response to that slow-growth movement.  Measure M was sold as a growth management program, a one-time fix that would expire in 20 years, not booty to maintain an empire. The OCTA was formed  to administer that tax by merging the OCTD and OCTC.

When the transit oriented, $200M OCTD and the somewhat inept $50M OCTC were merged, guess who got the driver's seat?  Within a year or so,  an 87 mile trolley system (later named Centerline) was in the master plan, and they began working tirelessly to sell it to the public.  The explicit goal was to get solo drivers out of their cars and into transit. 

The OCTA thus has an inherent conflict of interest.  As OCTD transit operators their goal is to increase ridership by getting drivers out of their cars and into mass transit.  But as OCTC planners, they also decide how to spend the transportation money.  The amount was predetermined by the original Measure M, but it doesn't say how effective projects have to be. One of the metrics the OCTA uses to evaluate projects is how many drivers are forced into mass transit.  The more, the better.

Now how are you going to get drivers out of their cars if you actually did reduce congestion? That would only encourage them to drive solo, which is not politically correct social engineering. So it's not surprising that OCTA projects have not reduced congestion.   They need congestion to discourage solo drivers, so they have deliberately avoided increasing capacity, by concentrating on expensive but ineffective projects.

It's worth noting that the recent decision to fund the SR-22 widening was made about the time they decided to try to pass this new tax.  They realized they needed to appear road friendly until it passed, or they would never have a chance with the voters.

So the problem is not just that we are being asked to vote for a new tax, it's that the tax would be going to the same dysfunctional OCTA that from the beginning has been wasting our money on ineffective behavior modification schemes.

There are many examples of the OCTA not acting in the best interests of taxpayers.  The 1999 Grand Jury report is worth reading, because it details the attitudes of the OCTA involving Centerline. The report represents the considered opinion of a number of reliable people who studied the issue for many weeks. 

Another example is the saga of the SR-91 widening. In the 1990 spending plan, two lanes in each direction were to be added to the SR-91 (Riverside Freeway) for about $200M.   Later, after the tax passed, toll roads came into vogue, and the right of way was given to a private  toll road company with the understanding that the lanes would be entirely funded from tolls, using no tax money.  Also in the agreement was a non-compete clause, in which OCTA guaranteed no improvements would be made to the parallel freeway lanes.  The private company built the lanes for about $130M, funded by a bond issue.   After a couple of years of operation, toll revenue was insufficient to make the bond payments, putting the private company in financial difficulty.   Rather than let the company default on the bonds and return the lanes to the state, the OCTA jumped in and bought the system for about $210M, not only bailing out the private company but giving them a nice $80M profit to boot.  It gets even better, though.  The well paid broker representing the private company in selling the lanes to the OCTA was none other than the former chair of the OCTA, Gary Hausdorfer.  Now he's CEO of Cofiroute, hired by OCTA to manage the toll lanes. Nice job.

After the Grand Jury report, Centerline fiasco, and other unflattering events, the OCTA board decided they needed an “independent review” of their performance to shore up their falling reputation, since they would need voter approval for this new tax. So they chose the Orange County Business Council, which is now funding the Yes on M campaign. The author of the report is Stan Oftelie, the former CEO of the OCTC and OCTA during most of the period of interest.   Stan and the OCBC are nice guys and all that, but an “independent” review? I don't think so. 

The next example further illustrates almost comical OCTA behavior.

I belong to a small group (Drivers for Highway Safety) who are interested in transportation and have made it a point to follow the antics of the OCTA from the beginning.   In the early 90's, we were watching the planning process for “improvement” of the 55/405 interchange and noticed the price had suddenly jumped from an original $90M to over $500M, with no explanation.  A few of us went to the next OCTA meeting and asked the board what caused the large increase.  We were met with blank stares, and a directive to the CEO (Stan Oftelie) to prepare an itemized list and notify us.  A couple months went by with no action, so we appeared again to find out what was going on. The CEO told us that because of the OCTC-OCTA merger, the relevant documents were tied up in archives, so the exact answer was not available.  One of our members then asked,”It doesn't have to be real accurate. Could you just give us an answer to the nearest $50 million or so?”  There was a bit of embarrassed giggling amongst the normally staid board members, and we received a somewhat disheveled list a few days later.

Buried in the list was several hundred million dollars for an immense parking structure near Disneyland, about fifteen miles from the 405/55 interchange.  OCTA had added it to the Federally funded project under some theory that it was part of an HOV system, since a small percentage would be used for park and ride, and the rest leased to Disneyland. When the Feds found out they were building a garage for Goofy, they dropped the funding for it, saving taxpayers a bunch of money.  Later Disney did build a very similar structure, and if you've visited Disneyland recently, you've probably parked in it, maybe even in the Goofy section.

Now it's true that Disney helped fund the first Measure M campaign, but there is absolutely no proof that the project was intended as a payback.  

So what should we do about OCTA? It's a State, not County organization, but it can be changed by legislative action. It has been expanded twice, from the original 7 up to the present 17 members.  The members include all five elected County Supervisors, two city representatives from each supervisorial district, and two “public” members. As far as accountability goes, all 15 of the elected officials could in theory be recalled, but the 2 “public” members are chosen by the other members and accountable to no one.

In practice, of course, they are all well insulated from practical public oversight. Do you know who your OCTA representatives are? Have you ever been to a board meeting?  Don't worry, you're not the only one.

The chief executive is hired by the board to oversee the staff which takes care of day to day operations. The current CEO is a former bus driver and trolley promoter brought in to oversee the Centerline trolley project.

I'm giving you the boring structural detail so you can understand what I think should be done with the organization.

First and most important is to disentangle all transit operations into a completely separate, independent, entity similar to the original OCTD. It should be in the business of operating the public transit system, and nothing else.  It worked pretty well before, it should work now.  It might even make sense to privatize it.

The remainder, the new OCTC, would be responsible for technical functions, including planning, modeling, and preliminary design, and political functions, where the actual binding decisions would be made about what projects would be built.

At present, the political component is far too diluted.  There is plenty of political power there, but too many people are involved to allow real public accountability.   For example, who was held accountable for the Centerline fiasco? No one I know of.  In contrast, when the County went bankrupt in 1994, all eyes turned to the supervisors – the political power and accountability is concentrated there.  They couldn't dodge the responsibility, and were forced to take action when voters demanded it. If they hadn't, I believe at least some supervisors would have been recalled.

I believe the political power and responsibility of the OCTC should be returned to the County Board of Supervisors. To get expertise required for the technical functions, each supervisor would appoint (and take responsibility for) a qualified professional transportation engineer as his commissioner on the OCTC board.  It seems only reasonable that if legal advice requires a law degree, and financial advice requires a CPA, then transportation engineering advice should require a transportation engineering degree. It simply doesn't work to ask the public for their “perceptions” of what transportation projects will work,  especially when there is big money in play to affect those perceptions. (See the Grand Jury Report).

The five OCTC board members would hire and manage a common staff to plan and model different approaches, then select and do preliminary design on those candidate projects that would best handle future traffic needs.  The OCTC board members would be professionally accountable for the engineering estimates of cost and expected performance of the projects submitted to the board..

Based on those estimates of cost and effectiveness, the supervisors would publicly decide which projects would be worth the cost, and  approve only those.  That keeps the technical issues and the political decisions separate, as they must be for credible results. 

Under the existing system, the OCTA board hires politically connected design firms to perform technical tasks such as evaluations, design. and environmental reports. The ones who get hired know the political requirements and usually perform accordingly, if they want to be hired again. That insulates the process from voters.  When things don't work, who do you recall?

There are many details I have left out,  and no doubt other, perhaps better, ways to get rid of OCTA's inherent conflict of interest. I would welcome comments and suggestions.  We need to get the debate started.

The bottom line is that OCTA needs to be thoroughly restructured before we should even consider voting more money for them to spend.   When the transit bias and the aggressive marketing of politically correct projects are removed,  the money currently wasted on those sinkholes can instead be spent on effective transportation.

If this tax passes, we'll be locked into a dysfunctional agency for another 30 years.  Lets fix the problem first.  That's why I'm voting NO on M.   I hope you'll join me.

Bill Ward