The plan has been in the works for years, for eight years in fact. The Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission wanted to expand Highway 1, adding high-occupancy vehicle lanes between Soquel Drive and San Andreas Road, additional lanes between exits, and three new bridges for bicycles and pedestrians to cross the highway. The price tag for the total project is $503 million, but first it would have to get through an environmental impact report. Budgeted at about $12 million, the EIR alone has taken over a decade to complete.
Now the federal government is stepping into the fray. It allocated $5.5 million to the environmental impact report, which it is now using as leverage to get the RTC to decide whether it really plans to go ahead with the project. “Use it or lose it,” is the underlying message from the Federal Highway Administration. Not only is FHA threatening to put an end to the project, but it has told the RTC that if the project does not go through, it will want that $5.5 million back.
That’s assuming that the RTC has $5.5 million it can give back. It does not, says Executive Director George Dondero.
Dondero is stuck, faced with either canceling the project and paying back money he doesn’t have, plus telling locals they’ve wasted eight years and millions of dollars on a project that went nowhere, or else moving ahead with a project for which there is no clear funding source. (Several tax measures to pay for the highway widening have failed at the ballot.)
One option is to complete part of the project. On Thursday, the RTC voted 7-4 to do a much-scaled-back version consisting of adding a few exit lanes and building a single bridge for pedestrians and cyclists.
The problem is the cost. Even that would set the RTC back $30 million, but it doesn’t have the money for that, either. The only way to do that would be to skim money off of other projects, but it is uncertain whether they will even find it there. “We just made a decision to do something, and we have no idea how to pay for it,” said County Supervisor John Leopold, who voted against the project.
The syndrome is not just local. A report appearing in Thursday’s Business Journal posits that California “may have lost as much as $3 billion in stimulus funding because it failed to spend it on time.” Highway One could be another example of a shovel-ready project with funding available that has gotten lost in a bureaucratic paper jam. That’s not something any official will want to admit when people are feeling pinched.
Read more at the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
