Public Interest Briefs

The road to completing the $2.5 billion Century Freeway hasn’t been easy. Provisions demanding minority hiring and participation and requiring that hundreds of millions of dollars be spent to build affordable replacement housing have been especially difficult to achieve. But two recent CLIPI-supported proposals may smooth things considerably. 

To oversee the management of the massive, complex project, court-appointed consultants are advising federal Judge Harry Pregerson to appoint a “special master” to better coordinate the various interests involved in building the 17.3-mile freeway as well as the replacement housing for the units that were razed for its construction. Pregerson presided over the 1981 consent decree that established guidelines for construction of the freeway.

At the same time, CLIPI urged that the existing, over-staffed state housing authority that has been administering construction of the new affordable housing units be replaced with a new, non-profit public-private housing partnership to complete the remaining housing program which involves $126 million in federal and state funds. 

Under Pregerson’s guidelines and supervision, the court-appointed master would oversee the California Department of Transportation, which is building the freeway, and the state Department, which is supervising the housing element 

Edward K. Hamilton, of consultants Hamilton, Rabinovitz & Alschuler, concurred, saying “there is a need for someone who stands in the middle and drives this whole thing.”

CLIPI’s John Phillips is a proponent of this strategy.

“This is such an ambitious, complex and unprecedented undertaking that it requires constant supervision and oversight to be sure that all the great goals that are heralded in the courtroom are not lost out in the bureaucracy.”

Attorneys representing Caltrans and the Federal Highway Administration, which provides 92.1% of the project’s money, are expected to reply to Pregerson soon.

Of equal importance is the replacement housing issue: what is the most cost-effective and productive way to meet the goal of providing the greatest number of housing units with the remaining $126 million still available for building as many as 4,000 new or refurbished units?

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