OCTA Needs All Sides on Board

A jurisdictional tug-of-war over board representation seems to be a continuing fact of life for the Orange County Transportation Authority.

The formation of the agency was completed in 1990 when the state Legislature finally approved merging the Orange County Transportation Commission, a planning body, with the Orange County Transit District, which ran the county’s bus system. The negotiations leading up to that merger were punctuated by a struggle for power between county supervisors and city council representatives over the makeup of the new agency.

The final compromise left supervisors in a minority role on the board, giving them four seats, city representatives six seats and one public member selected by the other 10. (There is also a nonvoting public member appointed by the governor.) That makeup has worked well and still stands.

But there’s another jurisdictional battle brewing now. It was launched by Assemblyman Tom Harman (R-Huntington Beach), who has introduced a bill in Sacramento to restructure OCTA’s 11-member board to 13 voting members and, in the process, give the cities three more votes. He proposes adding two city members and shifting one seat from the county supervisors to the cities.

In addition to wanting more power for cities, Harman argues that only 5% of the county’s population is in the unincorporated area represented by supervisors, who have a substantial bloc of votes. That argument would have more weight if supervisors were elected only by that 5%, but they’re not. Residents in all cities vote for their district supervisor, making them accountable on city issues.

The real competition this time seems to be between city representatives, not with the supervisors. Harman, a former Huntington Beach city councilman, says his city (the county’s third largest) hasn’t had a city representative on the OCTA board in 14 years. His bill proposes that four of the nine seats that cities would get should go to the county’s four largest cities. The other 30 county cities would get the five remaining seats.

There are more cities now than there were when the OCTA was created, and having more representatives closer to residents whose transportation needs are being most affected is an argument in favor of Harman’s proposal. Other regional agencies, such as SCAG, periodically add more city representation as cities grow.

The OCTA, county supervisors and the county chapter of the League of California Cities, which selects the city representatives to the OCTA, have started meeting to discuss Harman’s bill, which is scheduled for a hearing in Sacramento on April 23. There are bound to be some political turf issues to resolve. The restructuring discussions, however, don’t need to be as controversial as the original organizational sessions.

A change isn’t necessary, but if it is made, care must be taken that the selection process ensures balanced representation. Adding two members and giving automatic seating to the county’s largest cities, primarily located in the north central area, is fine. However, smaller cities need access to the board, and its geographic representation still must be balanced.