COUNTYWIDE : OCTD Needs Tax Boost, Stanton Says

With freeway traffic expected to nearly double within 20 years, the chairman of the Orange County Transit District on Monday predicted even greater public reliance on mass transit in the 1990s and said new tax revenues are needed to help pay for it.

“Orange County has become an urbanized landscape,” said Roger R. Stanton, district chairman and a member of both the County Board of Supervisors and the county Transportation Commission. “Gone are the days when OCTD buses carried a scant percentage of the county’s work commuters.”

Stanton’s comments were part of his “State of the District” speech, which kicked off Monday’s OCTD board meeting in Garden Grove.

Referring to the transit district’s record average of 160,000 passenger boardings per day in 1989, Stanton said the past year was a preview of a time when “even more people will rely on public transportation to get around.”

It was an unusually conciliatory speech for Stanton, who over the years has been one of the transit agency’s strongest critics, mostly on financial matters. Stanton noted Monday that OCTD has held its costs to about $55 per hour of vehicle service for more than a year, one of the lowest among urban areas on the West Coast.

He said county residents will look to OCTD’s Commuter Network subsidiary to connect them with car pools, van pools and express buses in order to take advantage of 120 miles of car-pool lanes and so-called transit ways to be constructed on almost all Orange County freeways during the next 10 to 15 years.

“By the next century,” Stanton said, “OCTD will be the cornerstone of almost every mode of daily travel in this county.”

Stanton said that such a vision depends in part on voter approval of the nine-cent gasoline tax increase on the June ballot statewide.

He added that many county officials are considering a new countywide sales tax proposal for the November ballot in the wake of Measure M’s defeat last fall. Measure M would have increased the sales tax from 6 cents to 6.5 cents to fund county highway and transit projects.

“While it is premature for this board to comment, I can say that we could use this money as matching funds for state and federal assistance,” Stanton said. “Last November’s results were close, which tells us that residents may be more willing to approve a package that provides some relief from traffic congestion.

“Transportation leaders just have to do a better job of defining the specifics of that package,” he said, “since anyone who drives in this area knows we have major traffic problems.”

Stanton said OCTD also will be heavily involved in planning for light-rail systems that are on the drawing boards in several cities, and which may be tied to the planned high-speed train system linking Anaheim and Las Vegas.