Community Commentary:

Lobbyist Nat Read paints quite a rosy picture of the proposed 710 tunnel (“710 tunnel would benefit Glendale,” June 5), which will supposedly reduce congestion, pollution and accidents regionally, according to an 11-year-old study. Read, however, neglects to mention a number of pertinent facts that may be of interest to taxpayers and voters concerned about this project.

The purpose of the tunnel is to maximize the capacity of an important regional goods-movement corridor by creating a direct path for heavy-duty diesel trucks from the Port of Los Angeles to the 210 Freeway. That was never the intention of the California Department of Transportation or the Federal Highway Administration when they were still considering a surface alternative route in the same 1998 study cited by Read, which contains a specific mitigation “allowing no truck traffic on SR-710 between I-10 and I-210, except for local delivery trucks.”

The 710 tunnel as currently envisioned would be a revenue-supported project, meaning that it would be built and operated by a public-private partnership and charge tolls of $5 to $10 per vehicle. Taxpayers would be required to fund the environmental review for the project, and the proposed procurement methods disallow competitive bidding and citizen scrutiny of potential contractor proposals.

Major highway projects used to be funded by gasoline taxes until shrinking availability, coupled with a drive toward privatization of infrastructure, led to the funding of major projects using private capital through public-private partnerships. As Federico Pena, secretary of transportation under President Bill Clinton, said in 1996, “Road building is not a government monopoly anymore. Those days are over.” We now have an era of privatization with the selling of public bridges, airports, tunnels and roads to private investors like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts. California law generally doesn’t allow the procurement of highway projects without competitive bidding, and doesn’t provide authority to impose tolls or enter into public-private partnership agreements for public highways. The state Legislature therefore must pass legislation to authorize a revenue-supported project and permit private participation in its financing and operation.