If you can go way, way, back in your mind – back a month or two, to just before Anaheim exploded – you might remember that the pinheaded bureaucrats of OCTA were attempting to sneakily convert two taxpayer-paid lanes of the 405 into lucrative toll lanes. What’s up with THAT mishegas?
I’d nearly forgotten myself until my phone rang early one morning last week. It was The Moorlach, returning a call from many weeks before. “That’s how busy I’ve been, Vern. You wanted to talk about, let’s see, the 405 tolls and Bustamante.” “Ah, I don’t care about Bustamante any more,” I yawned, and for some reason this caused him to bellow forth a long sasquatchy Moorlach laugh. A Moorlaugh.
Supervisor Moorlach is probably the most solid of all the OCTA board members on our side, against the Toll Lane scam. Along with Shawn Nelson, Lorri Galloway, Carolyn Cavecche, and probably Larry Crandall and Pat Bates, he clearly sees what a taxpayer ripoff and voter swindle it is. That makes four to six votes that we can count on right now, but we need eight.
And it’s very much in flux. The Toll Lane option needs nine votes out of sixteen to win. I asked The Moorlach, do they have that? And he wasn’t sure. I said, “Should we keep up the heat, keep calling the Board members, keep the spotlight on them?” And, quoth The Moorlach, “YES, PLEASE DO THAT!”
So – that’s why I start my story that way. We need to keep up the pressure, by e-mailing them all en masse at this link, and also individually at the contact info I’ll give you below. If you agree with me, and with most citizen/taxpayer/drivers who have a chance to hear both sides, you will want to tell them you want the two new free lanes of Alternative 2 which you’ve paid for and voted for; and that you will raise holy hell if they try to turn them into toll lanes with their “Alternative 3.”
To refresh your memory:
- Alternative 1 would build one new free lane in each direction, for 1.3 billion, which we have, from our Measure M sales taxes.
- Alternative 2 would build TWO new lanes for only 1.4 billion, so we’re $100 million short but we can deal with that (see below)
- and Alternative 3, which the OCTA bureaucracy craves, would build two new lanes but then convert the two inner lanes to high-priced toll lanes; this would cost $1.7 billion but the extra .4 billion would be covered by the toll revenue. (And after THAT, they’ll have billions in toll revenue to play with!)
Out of the 15 voting members on the Board, there are five who are such Toll Lane Dead-Enders (Toll Trolls) that they’re almost not worth talking to. Although four of the Toll Trolls are elected officials, three of those are termed out, and they all work more as lobbyists than politicians, so they don’t give a damn what you have to say. Those five would be Santa Ana’s Miguel Pulido, Tustin’s Jerry Amante, HB’s Don Hansen, Laguna Niguel’s Paul Glaab, and so-called “public member” Greg Winterbottom.
We should be focusing our utmost persuasive powers instead on the following “swing votes” – especially if you’re in their districts or cities:
- Supervisor Janet Nguyen 714.834.3110 – Janet.Nguyen@ocgov.com
- Supervisor Bill Campbell 714.834.3330 Bill.Campbell@ocgov.com
- Supervisor Pat Bates – 714.834.3550 PatBates@ocgov.com
- Garden Grove Mayor Bill Dalton (714) 741-5104 mayor@garden-grove.org
- “public member” Michael Hennessey 714-560-5443, wknowles@octa.net.
- Lake Forest Councilman Peter Herzog – (949) 461-3420 pherzog@lakeforestca.gov
- Fountain Valley Councilman (and water board candidate) Larry Crandall 714-593-4410 fvcrandall@yahoo.com, and fvproud@fountainvalley.org
All right, I’ve mentioned that everything is in flux right now, right? Let’s see what that looks like.
OCTA tries to Divide and Conquer the Six Unruly Western Towns!

Six feisty West-county Mayors. “Now hold it right there, partner. You’re suggestin’ me and my friends here pay you good money to ride on this trail we already paid for with our taxes?? You got another think comin. Now GIT out of our way, boy!” (Sounds best in Margie Rice’s grand southern drawl, not as good in John Collins’ Bwoston accent.)
So, you may remember that the City Councils of the six most affected Western OC towns (with the glaring exception of run-by-whores Garden Grove) – that’s Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa, Westminster, Seal Beach, Los Alamitos and Fountain Valley – voted against the Alternative 3 toll lanes and for the Alternative 2 free lanes. And then, you may remember that the MAYORS of those towns (the pro-tem in HB’s case) sent OCTA a letter, which we reprinted here, detailing all their many strong objections to the Alternative 3 Toll Lane Option. And OCTA, required by Measure M’s language to at least “take into account” the desires of the affected communities, had no choice but to read the letter and write back, having made a few small modifications in their Alternative 3.
There’s a lesson here, in politics and life in general. When you make a long list of grievances, your interlocutor will be tempted to cave in and compromise on a few of the smaller ones, and then expect you to happily fold. When, as likely as not, the first thing you listed was a “DEAL BREAKER” that the other side will NEVER cave on.
Well, one thing that irked Costa Mesa was Alternative 3’s intention to tear down and rebuild the Fairview Bridge, which has just recently been widened at great expense and inconvenience already. So, OCTA saw a chance to cave there, hopefully peel off this one very outspoken Republican town from all the others, and STILL keep their precious toll lanes, if they just shortened the project by a couple miles so that it stopped BEFORE Fairview. And hence was born Don Hansen’s “Alternative 3 Lite,” later to be known as Alternative 3A.
No sale. A few letters have gone back and forth, but the Deal Breaker remains – ANY toll lanes created out of lanes that were paid for by the public are a theft that won’t stand public wrath OR litigation. As I like to phrase it, we taxpayers are paying $1.3 billion or more, and putting up with 5 years of disruptive construction, and we deserve all the benefit – i.e. 2 new lanes.
OCTA likes to counter that all they promised us was one new free lane (which means pretending that today’s carpool lane is not a free lane) and that the construction of the toll lanes would be financed solely by the tolls and hence is none of our business. I counter that, no, these toll lanes could never be built without first building the two new lanes hence leeching off our taxpayer dollars. The irrepressible Mayor Cavecche (who generally agrees with us and opposes the toll lanes) thinks my argument is nonsense. Well, maybe it will make more sense to her in the legalistic language the Mayors used in their latest letter dated Sept. 5:
Gift of Public Funds
In the OCTA letter dated August 21, 2012 to the Corridor Cities, OCTA asserts that user fees/tolls would be paying for the toll lanes proposed in Alternative 3, and not Measure M2 funds. However, this argument by OCTA does not take into account that the construction of toll lanes is enabled by construction of a widened freeway section for the general purpose lane. If OCTA factors in that the construction of the toll lanes is dependent upon the general purpose lane being paid for by taxpayers, it is clear that a portion of the toll lanes under Alternative 3 will be constructed using public funds. Since Measure M did not anticipate the allocation of funds to enable the construction of toll lanes, it is clear that Alternatives which include toll lane provisions (Alt. 3 and 3A) are not a viable possibility.
Hm, that kind of sounds like the sort of legalese used by folks preparing a lawsuit!
Petty, Pissy, Petulant: OCTA becomes Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi.”
Last I heard – and I still haven’t been to an OCTA meeting, but I will make it to the next two – the Toll Trolls are furious at our ingratitude, our ingratitude for all the little concessions they’ve given us in their grand quest for toll revenue. They have bent over BACKWARDS, they feel! Apparently there’s already an Alternative 3B and an Alternative 3C, ALL rejected! At one point Jerry Amante (who has already sported the nickname “Toll Road Jerry” for years now, and already has a cushy lobbying job all lined up) threatened to take back ALL concessions and ram through hardcore original Alternative 3! (Mayor Cavecche tells me that’s not what he said, but that’s what my friends heard.)

“No new lanes for YOU!”
Well, how else could we be punished for our ingratitude? Perhaps, if OCTA doesn’t get their Toll Lanes, then maybe WE shouldn’t get ANY NEW LANES AT ALL. Yeah, that’s the ticket! Let the ungrateful public stew in their traffic jams until they come crawling back! NO FREEWAY WIDENING FOR YOU! That’s what they were threatening a couple meetings ago anyway.
Maybe, grumbles OCTA, we should just take our ball and go somewhere ELSE in the County, somewhere where the people aren’t so difficult, where they trust our judgment and let us make all the decisions for them. HA! We respond. Fat chance finding a place like that, as long as the Orange Juice Blog and Diana Lee Carey are around!
After a little bit of calming down, but still feeling vengeful, they now say (some of them) “Okay, Alternative 3 might not happen … but then neither will Alternative 2. You people will have to be happy with just ONE new lane. We don’t have that extra $100 million anyway. And all we ever promised you in Measure M was ONE new lane.”

“Maybe just ALTERNATIVE ONE for you!!”
Well, this is irritating. As anyone who’s spent time shopping for something worthwhile can see, if you’re going to spend $1.3 billion and tear down and rebuild every bridge to get ONE new lane, it’s stupid not to spend just a small fraction more than that and get TWO new lanes.
And there are ways to cover that extra $100 million, although it’ll be difficult with an OCTA behaving like sticks in the mud. They were on the verge of transferring some money – nearly the needed amount – from excess revenue off the 91 tolls the other day – until they remembered their pique. Aside from that, there is federal money slated for just this sort of thing, and as soon as the great Alan Lowenthal (D, Long Beach) takes office in a few months, a big chunk of the area will finally be represented by a Congressman who believes in investing in our infrastructure and bringing back our hard-earned federal tax dollars for Orange County needs.
However this all works out, any scenario that excludes Toll Lanes on the 405 has to be considered a victory for the people of Orange County against our sneaky, corrupt bureaucrats and politicians. But for now, let’s keep pushing for:
Yes on Alternative 2!
No on Alternative 3!
Final Vote, Monday Sept. 24!
Our Coverage Thus Far:
- “Lexus Lanes” on the 405? Help Stop the Latest Toll Road Outrage!
- Perfect Circularity: A 405 Toll Lane for the Sole Purpose of Funding a 405 Toll Lane?
- OCTA’s Will Kempton to Betray OC Voters?
- Proposal Unites Enemies in Costa Mesa, against HB Mayor Don Hansen.
- 405 Toll-Gate For Dummies: How the proposed toll lanes are illegal.
- My Modest Proposal to build “Expensiveways” on the 405
- A Taxpayer Bailout for the Failed 73 San Joaquin Hills Toll Road?
- Seal Beach and Westminster to Join Costa Mesa in opposing 405 tolls
- OCTA expects BILLIONS in revenue from 405 Tolls!
- 405 Toll Projection – $2.95 for Three Miles!
- Cooking the Books with Two VERY different sets of numbers…
- How We Can Defeat the 405 Toll Lanes! And … Meet Your OCTA Board!
- Huntington Beach Mayor Hansen Rebuffed by his own City Council
- Six Feisty West-County Mayors tell Supes: No 405 Toll Lanes!
- OC Democratic Party Goes on Record: NO TOLL LANES FOR THE 405!
- OCTA to Toll Lane Opponents: “Fine, NO FREEWAY WIDENING FOR YOU!”
AND NOW, somebody has created the excellent…
*Chariman Vern,
You failed to mention Alternative 3A…..which expands the one more lane and then
changes that into a toll lane……
You can’t keep track of OCTA’s alternatives. 3A, 3B, 3C…. Anything it takes to try to bribe local cities into letting them add tolls to the freeway.
What’s fascinating is that every time they modify their original toll road vision, they add to the arguments against adding tolls.
If you remove the direct interchange from the proposed toll lanes that would connect to the 73, you add another point where there is a huge merging problem as drivers enter and exit the toll lanes and the free carpool lanes south of the toll lanes.
Remove the merging area in Fountain Valley to save local businesses, and you guarantee that there is a permanent slowdown around Brookhurst, which is exactly the problem we are trying to eliminate.
This process has been a complete public relations nightmare predicated on greed and hubris.
*Exactamundo Quimby…..Exactamundo!
Quimby, you’re an informed guy — don’t these new proposals require new public comment periods, new impact statements (environmental and probably otherwise), etc.? Presuming so, how do they think they’re going to get away with not providing them? It’s like the agency and its boosters on the Governing Board (mostly from the City Councils) are descending into madness.
“don’t these new proposals require new public comment periods, new impact statements etc.?”
Only if you are attempting to follow the law, a requirement curiously absent from OCTA’s current board and management.
From what I have been hearing, they have their consultants busily scurrying around to make up new numbers by next Monday’s committee meeting, but they have no intent of allowing this new data to suffer the indignity of public exposure for more than a week before they vote on the locally preferred alternative/
It’s not madness, it’s hubris on the part of Will Kempton who sees most of his board members as weak-willed, termed-out hacks scurrying for their next paycheck as a lobbyist.
I don’t much care whether or not they are attempting to follow the law, so long as they can be forced to do so even after they flout it with their vote. With these flurries of belated new proposals, they’re rendering the concept of “public comment” meaningless. Well, it’s there for a reason — and rarely more so than in a law that requires respect for local sentiment about projects!
Anyone who reads this but doesn’t share this on social media should hang their heads in shame. This is what we want everyone in the county to have read by Sept. 23. (And not just those in the county — San Diegans and Angelenos drive the 405 as well, and southeastern Long Beach in particular would be mightily screwed up by tolls!)
This is the story you’ve been waiting for, fellow Juicers! Spread its glory FAR AND WIDE!
Need for a change? New ideas?
Change “Freeways” to “Pay ways” and let the auto driver pay too.
Well at least as much as the train riders and bus riders do.
OCTA is holding price increase meeting now to make sure the bus riders pay at least 20 percent of the cost. The auto driver pays less than 7 percent of the cost.
Put it to a vote.
Should the wealthy 1 percent pay a 8 cent per mile tax on auto use to bring their out of pocket cost to the same level as bus riders?
Heck, at 24 cents per mile the busses could have a 1st class section at a fee and coach can ride for free. The new freeways, bus rides for free and stick the rich car drivers with the bill.
You forgot to mention the tax subsidy to people of incomes less than $200,000 for their first 15,000 miles of driving in a year. Didn’t you?
At the recent Garden Grove City Council meeting I spoke in detail about the 3 Options for the 405. I told the city council that no one wants toll roads for our 405 freeway, especially in view of the fact that we agreed to continue Measure M, gas tax to improve the 405 freeway for the general public. I mentioned that both Supervisor Janet Nguyen and Mayor Dalton are are voting representatives on the OCTA board. I said to Mayor Dalton that he has the chance to stand up and do the right thing on the eve of leaving office and vote for Option 2, two general purpose freeway lanes, that we all have paid for and want.
No toll lanes on our 405 freeway!
Poor Dalton is not the sharpest tool in the drawer. He probably still thinks that a bright, shiny Santa Ana trolley will someday make it to Garden Grove if he votes for tolls on the 405. And then Garden Grove will magically morph into Portland. Trollies will do that, don’t you know?
do those people have cars? Have them turn in the junk heap, the hazards waste dump on 4 wheels for a nice new bike.
HOW ABOUT – The Future -mass transport now instead? Metro Rail 91 – Newport via the 55 and 405 @ 5 up to LB . Later add the 22 , 5 and other main thoroughfares. Just use the carpool lanes as rail lanes – since they are not used for carpools to limit drivers on the road anymore anyway.
BUILD this then there will be people to support short trip buses and other transport options.
*Make all freeways…..People Mover belt driver…..like at the airports. Everyone can
buy suction shoes so when they are flying down the roads without a vehicle at 70MPH they won’t go flying. The cool part will be the helments with the 3-D Glasses we will all need. Heck, think how many people we could move….if they didn’t have cars at all?
The only pollution would be the heavy CO2 from breathing and the poop stains on the belt drives.
I read a story that sounds like your comment.