Public Interest Briefs

Los Angeles’ long romance with the freeway appears to be ending. And a determined Center for Law in the Public Interest is doing all it can to speed the dissolution along.

Recently, San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson, Congressman Glenn Anderson and Californians Against Smog asked to join a list of plaintiffs in a suit filed by the Center seeking expenditure of gasoline tax revenues for financing of mass rapid transit.

Mayor Tom Bradley, City Councilman Edmund Edelman and the City of Riverside are already plaintiffs in the case, which was filed in late July in the state supreme court.

If the case is won, local governments will be allowed to spend their share of the annual $1.4 billion state highway trust fund for construction and maintenance of rapid transit networks. Currently, expenditure of the trust fund is limited to streets, roads and freeways. The limitation is based on an official interpretation of Article 26 of the State Constitution, which controls gas tax spending.

The gas tax funding case, Bradley v. State Highway Trust Fund, is only one of several actions taken by the Center in an effort to curb Southern California’s dependence on the freeway as a primary transportation system. 

In the two-year history of the Center, staff attorney’s also have taken cases attempting to halt planned freeways that have unlawfully ignored the environmental consequences of traffic padded air and noise pollution and/or summarily planned to sweep aside thousands of residents from paths of projected highspeed, eight-lane blacktops. By law, environmental and housing impact reports must be prepared and approved on all proposed state and federal freeways.

The Battle of the Century

The fate of the now-stalled $530 million Century Freeway, halted last year by Center action, took a new turn recently when Mayor Bradley proposed that funds committed to construction of the Freeway be transferred to a new fund to pay for development of mass rapid transit in Los Angeles.

Bradley proposed that the federal Environmental Protection Agency implement provision of the 1973 Federal Highway Aid Act and transfer some $300 million in Century Freeway construction monies to a new transit development fund.

Citing the possibility of indefinite delay in construction of the Freeway, Bradley said he and other mayors from cities along the 17-mile Freeway route would soon ask for the fund exchange.

The Mayor repeated his strong commitment to end Los Angeles’ dependence on the freeway system in order to meet federal clean air standards and conserve depleting energy.

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