REGIONAL REPORT: TRANSPORTATION : A Missing Link in Transit Planning : Traffic: Orange County voters’ refusal to approve higher taxes has thwarted its road and rail projects and also hindered long-range proposals for the Southland.

SANTA ANA — One by one, Southern California counties have reluctantly stepped up to pay their share of the region’s soaring transportation bill. All but one, that is.

After several failed attempts, Los Angeles County voters approved a half-cent sales tax in 1980 and will get a chance to tack on another half-cent in November. In 1987, San Diego passed a tax on its first try. And Riverside and San Bernardino residents each voted within the last two years to tax themselves for new trains, highways and other transportation improvements.

Combined, those taxes have established an enormous pool of funds to complete regional highway and rail systems. But as planners have filled in the transportation map, Orange County has remained conspicuously blank. Voters there have twice rejected transportation taxes, and a half-cent sales tax slated for the November ballot faces what even proponents concede will be a tough battle.

That has left planners deeply frustrated, and many complain that the unwillingness of Orange County residents to tax themselves is blocking long-range plans for an effective approach to the regional problem of traffic.

“It doesn’t do us any good if we’re not working as a region,” said Tek Tanaka, deputy transportation director of Riverside County. “If Orange County doesn’t hurry up and get a tax, people coming down out of Riverside will go like hell for a couple of miles, and then just come to a stop at the county line.”

Those complaints are echoed in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Bernardino counties, and they have reached Orange County leaders as well.

“We’re sort of the Rodney Dangerfields of transportation,” said Monte Ward, director of governmental relations for the Orange County Transportation Commission. “We get no respect.”

Most blame Orange County’s unwillingness to approve a higher sales tax on its staunchly conservative population. Voters in the county, where Republicans hold a 55% to 35% registration edge over Democrats, have rejected every countywide bond measure introduced since 1957. But others are less inclined to attribute it entirely to ideology. San Diego County, after all, has 11% more Republicans than Democrats, and yet voters there handily approved a sales tax in 1987.

“We have a Republican, conservative electorate, and they’re inclined to vote against tax increases too,” said former state Sen. Jim Mills, chairman of the San Diego Metropolitan Transit Development Board and the leader of San Diego’s successful sales tax campaign. “I think the reasons for Orange County’s failure are more complicated than that.”

Instead, Mills and other observers believe much of the blame for the defeat of last year’s half-cent sales tax proposal in Orange County belongs to the proponents themselves, who put the measure up in a special election, dooming it to low turnout and, ultimately, failure.

And a sizable group says the county would get its tax--and the region its final transportation link--if life just weren’t quite so good in Orange County. According to that reasoning, voters have rejected the tax because transportation systems still don’t strike them as bad enough to pay for fixing.

For backers of the measure, the good news is that it gets worse all the time.

“I think that by November, people will be back from vacation, and traffic here will be a mess,” said Reed Royalty, chairman of Orange County’s Foundation for Consensus and a leader of the sales tax drive. “Then, finally, when this county is strangling, people might be ready to vote for it.”

Until they do, Royalty and others add, the region as a whole will pay for Orange County’s frugality.

“It’s ultimately a problem for everyone if some areas don’t have the funding to make needed improvements,” said Judy Weiss, deputy executive director of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission. “The motorist doesn’t want to hear that different areas have different funding structures or that some areas have the tax and some don’t. He just wants to get to his destination.”

Most of the consequences of Orange County’s inaction are confined to its own borders, but several highway and rail projects have implications that ripple into the region at large. For instance, Interstate 5, which links downtown Los Angeles to downtown San Diego, is scheduled for widening from the Los Angeles County line to San Clemente, but the project will be delayed by at least a decade if Orange County residents turn down the transportation tax for the third time.

Likewise, improvements to the congested intersection of Interstate 405 and Interstate 5 in Orange County have long been on the drawing board but lack local funds to begin them. Those improvements would be postponed indefinitely without the tax.

For San Diegans commuting into Orange or Los Angeles counties--or for Los Angeles residents going the other direction--that would mean no relief from snarled traffic and dirty air.

The price for Orange County’s resistance to higher taxes is rapidly spreading north and east as well. Cheaper housing has driven scores of new residents to the Inland Empire, but a shortage of jobs in Riverside and San Bernardino counties means that 260,000 cars use the Riverside Freeway (California 91) to get in and out of those areas every day, some continuing on into Los Angeles and others breaking south toward job-rich central Orange County.

By the year 2000, traffic in that Orange County corridor is expected to increase to 410,000 cars a day. “That’s a hell of an increase,” said Albert Miranda, a Caltrans spokesman. “And if Orange County doesn’t do something about it, it’s going to be quite a backup.”

Riverside County has committed a portion of its sales tax to widening the Riverside Freeway, but Orange County so far has no money to pick up the project as it crosses the county line.

Likewise, commuter rail, which has been the focus of the half-cent sales tax that Los Angeles County approved in 1980, has lagged far behind in Orange County, stymieing completion of a more ambitious rail system to serve the region.

While San Diego and Los Angeles each are planning to apply for state matching funds to improve the rail corridor that links them, Orange County has no money of its own to put up for the project. Without it, the Orange County stretch of the line would remain as is.

New commuter lines, including one that would run from central Orange County into Los Angeles and another that would link Irvine with Riverside County, are also on hold pending passage of a local sales tax.

In the long run, fewer trains and unwidened highways inevitably translate into more congested traffic, a prospect that does little to endear Orange County to its neighbors, who would inherit their share of the increased congestion.

For their part, Orange County officials admit that their area is blocking the region’s plans to grapple with its mushrooming traffic problem. But they argue that there’s only so much they can do, and that ultimately, only the county’s voters can change their own lot.

“Taken as a whole, the freeway program and transit program in Southern California depends on Orange County paying its share,” Ward said. “We hear the resentment: People are angry that we’re not contributing to our share of the regional transportation system, but voters are, and continue to be, skeptical.”