Tunnel Group Disbands

The Riverside Orange Corridor Authority, a government group set up to study and possibly build a tunnel linking Orange and Riverside counties, has quietly disbanded.

Critics of the move to disband the group, made up of transportation and water officials, call it a power play to kill the tunnel

"I don't see how you can build the multiuse tunnel without the (Riverside Orange Corridor Authority), which gives everyone an equal seat at the table," said Brett R. Barbre, a board member of the Fountain Valley-based Municipal Water District of Orange County.

Water officials are among the biggest backers of a tunnel as a way to bring water to OC from Northern California and the Colorado River. Roughly half of OC's water supply is imported.

Southern California water agencies have had plans for decades to build a tunnel through the forest region to give OC a secondary source of water.

The Riverside Orange Corridor Authority was set up as a joint powers authority to work with local governments with an interest in the proposed tunnel.

The group also sought to be the lead agency in going after some $16 million in federal money to study whether it could be built.

Some government officials worried the authority could become a big bureaucracy that would siphon money away from other transportation projects.

Others said it could deflect efforts away from getting a renewal of Measure M, Orange County's half-cent sales tax for transportation projects.

Congressman Ken Calvert, a Republican lawmaker whose district encompasses most of the area where the tunnel would be built, downplayed the significance of disbanding the authority.

The group never got off the ground, he said.

"Nothing has been disbanded. There never was a (joint powers authority)," he said. "Something else is happening, and we are working on a cooperative agreement between many agencies to get geological and technical data on a tunnel. If that data comes in reasonable, then if necessary we'd come up with a (joint powers authority) to do a tunnel."

-Pat Maio