Should The Toll Road Continue South?

Our Transportation Corridor Agencies (TCA) also referred to as "The Toll Roads" was originally formed in 1986 to oversee the development of the San Joaquin Hills, Foothill and Eastern Toll Roads. I moved to Rancho Santa Margarita in 1998 before the local toll roads were finished or charging money, but once they did, it was cheap and they had cash machines you could pay. Later at the big toll stations they had people and then machines you could pay with cash or a card, you could also always use a transponder, but then the TCA decided to rip out all the perfectly working infrastructure and go to a super inconvenient online system.

Shortly after the switch to all electronic, there were 2.3 million violations in the space of 3 months, an average of nearly 19,000 a day. The unpaid penalties left to collect for violations that weren't cleared, added up to nearly $37 million, with the fine being $100. The Transportation Corridor Agencies collected almost 3 times as much in tolls and fines combined than the previous year during that transition, according to the OC Register, yet still, they are raising the rates, which they claim is required per the terms of their loans, that they keep refinancing.

A recent financial review of the TCA shows that the debt of the TCA has increased from $2.9 Billion to $6.4 Billion in the last 20 years, despite having not built any new toll roads, which is its only business. Somehow they also have managed to continually refinance their debt to ensure that the roads will never be paid off, while at the same time claiming they have $1 Billion in reserves and earn over a third of a billion a year. Really makes you start to wonder what is going on with the money at the TCA.

At the September 26, 2018 Rancho Santa Margarita city council, the TCA report from Councilman Tony Beall, who is the city representative to the TCA, refuted the concerns raised by the Not My Toll Road group by stating how the TCA brings in $380 million per year in revenue and how record levels of customers use it, over 100 million transactions per year and 1.3 million active accounts. And they hold $1 Billion in reserves, which seems odd given their $6.4 Billion in debt and the incredibly bloated salaries by many of its employees, which you can read about here.

November 28, 2018 report by RSM Councilman Beall spoke about the connection between the toll road at Oso to the non-toll road on the other side of the road. The history of this section of road is very interesting and can be read in detail at CUSDWatch, which I suggest you read for full background. To summarize briefly, a small arterial road was to be built from Rancho Mission Viejo (RMV) to Tesoro High there at Oso Parkway. This went back and forth as people were concerned that it would be connected to the toll road and then create a toll road extension without having gone through proper vetting. Construction eventually started anyway, using falsified permits that showed the original small arterial road and not the highway that was being built. It is built less than 100 feet from a sensitive receptor, namely Tesoro High, without any approval or mitigation of the contaminants in the air from the construction that blew into the school. While various groups were trying to stop it, work just continued and was finished, so now you have a toll road that stops at Oso and then a highway looking road that picks up on the other side of Oso. What is especially interesting is some of the details that have come out about how this shell game is working to avoid following the law and putting the health and safety of students at Tesoro High at risk, great information can be found here.

I met with Jeff Bott and Todd Nicholson of the TCA in late October 2018 to discuss what was going on and peoples concerns and what they told me was pretty disturbing, in addition to some relevant facts. When I mentioned the sensitive receptors situation, what they told me is that the TCA was stopped from building that road by environmental groups, but RMV had to create an access route to the high school, so they were the ones that built the road. On further questioning, they told me that RMV built the road with money “borrowed” from the TCA. I asked about the proposed connection of the toll road with the new road under Oso Pkwy and was told they were moving forward with that (not sure how that got approved either). So I asked if that current free road would continue to be free, and they said that they were still trying to decide that. Huh? So, the TCA was stopped from extending the toll road, the TCA lent money to the city of RMV to create an access road, which basically means the TCA owns the road, the TCA is going to connect it to the toll road, and I can’t imagine a scenario where they wouldn’t charge a toll if they are free to charge one. So, through some of the best sleight of hand I’ve seen since the last episode of Penn & Teller “Fool Us”, the TCA got their toll road and created an scenario so complex that there was no organization to tell “STOP” to while construction was going on.

This all prompted me to run an informal survey in the Rancho Santa Margarita Facebook group, which has about 10,000 members. Since Councilman Beall in his November 28 report had stated that the residents of RSM were one of the single biggest users o the toll road, I thought it would be useful to know what percentage of the time people in RSM went south on a regular basis. The result was that out of 228 responses, 58% of people never went south, 29% did rarely, 7% split evenly, 3% went south mostly and 2% went exclusively.

What I learned in my research is that the TCA is essentially playing a shell game to keep itself in existence and the senior employees keep drawing those nice, fat paychecks. In my opinion, we are likely to have self-driving cars before any new toll road could be built, and frankly, that’s the only way you are going to deal with the growing population and the existing infrastructure. The TCA reps I met with did make a good point that people don’t want you to build it ahead of time because you are spoiling the landscape, and then they don’t want you to build it afterward because there is no room or they don’t want more people, so you do get a bit stuck. That said, you can never build enough road, fast enough around here to cope with the scale of construction. With self-driving cars, you can have a lot more vehicles in the same space and keep people moving. There are some various road enhancements that could be done where pinch points exist, but it is time for the TCA to be shut down and the toll roads be made open and free roads. They have been long paid for at this point and now we have that extra gas tax that is supposed to be paying for road maintenance. Follow Not My Tollroad on Facebook to stay up to date (I am not affiliated with the group).