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Health & Fitness

The Fountain Valley Express

Did Fountain Valley need its own redundant bus system? Apparently not, but it cost $100,000 to find out.

Three years ago this month, Fountain Valley received a 102-page recommendation from The Solis Group of Pasadena. Its object was to choose a mode of transit and then find ways using it to commute city residents to and from the few Metrolink commuter rail stations closest to us. As happens so often with busy work, the study's never been acted on.

The study was funded via the Orange County Transportation Authority's Go Local program.  The city's share of it was a $100,000 grant extracted from the half-cent Measure M sales tax add-on we levied on ourselves in the late 1990s, and barely renewed in 2008. The city chose to partner with Stanton, Westminster and Huntington Beach, but abdicated a leadership role and any real responsibility in the study, allowing Westminster Public Works to take the lead. 

In total, the four cities spent $400,000 of sales tax to find out we needed more buses when the OCTA's own bus system, which already connects with Metrolink, is winning awards for its effectiveness. Did Solis look at any alternatives? No. Did Solis attempt to estimate the NEED for FV residents to reach the Metrolink stations for ANY reason? No. Did Solis find out who in FV actually used the Metrolink for anything? No. Did they estimate the potential ridership of these extra buses and develop a cost estimate and justification for them? No. Did they get paid anyway? Of course.

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No one's heard of the Solis Group, and a review of its website finds they're hardly experts on Orange County transportation. Three years later, has anything come of a $400,000 expenditure of scarce resources by either the city or the OCTA? No.

Fountain Valley isn't alone in wasting funds via the Go Local kluge (which totals about $6 million of Measure M funds for its various lengthy phases). Anaheim, for example, is spending millions to investigate a transit system to connect Disneyland to their planned ARTIC facility (a new train station replacing the perfectly good one at Angel Stadium), which will accommodate the boondoggle high-speed bullet train from San Francisco that will NEVER be built.

Find out what's happening in Fountain Valleywith free, real-time updates from Patch.

When the OCTA next asks, around 2030, for another Measure M renewal, let's be a little more careful with our votes and our money. Times are tough enough to be wasting funds on nonsense like redundant, overlapping, competint bus systems, especially when it becomes just another study to gather dust on the city manager's bookshelf. The OCTA is famous for this -- it's the largest government agency in Orange County for which its board is unelected.  Its 2010-11 budget is $1.16 billion. Its basic tasks are to build freeway lanes (the $50M over budget and late 22 Freeway extension was its last big effort, and it produced little more than a car pool lane), run the buses (with their now diminishing service level even though fares have increased), run an unprofitable toll road and our portion of the regional Metrolink system (and hope it kills no one else). Both the bus and train systems, which could be privatized, require enormous subsidies to stay in business. 

For our future "benefit", OCTA is spending $600 million, plus overruns, to connect the car pool lanes between the 405, 605 and 22 freeways in Long Beach -- how few of us will benefit from that, especially considering that no regular traffic lanes are also being constructed?

We won't be riding the Fountain Valley Express anytime soon, whether we need to or not.  The city needs to explain why these funds were squandered, and where the accountability was for this unnecessary study that wasted so much resource and time.

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