Local governments seek state roads to assure proper upkeep.

Looking to speed-up long-awaited road improvements and frustrated by lengthy delays from Sacramento, local jurisdictions are pushing the state to relinquish responsibility for maintaining California roads.

Two bills on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk would force the California Department of Transportation to turn over responsibility for two local routes.

Highland Avenue (State Route 170) through the heart of Hollywood would be relinquished to the city of Los Angeles, which has street widening and safety improvements on tap.

And a three-mile stretch of Rosemead Boulevard (State Route 19) just south of Pasadena would be turned over to Los Angeles County so that work could go ahead to improve the median and upgrade the pavement.

"Clearly, our local communities benefit when local officials are accountable for the maintenance and improvements on city streets," said Assemblyman Paul Koretz, D-West Hollywood.

As a West Hollywood city councilman, Koretz helped lead efforts to have Caltrans turn over Santa Monica Boulevard to the city; now, he's spearheading the drive to have Caltrans relinquish Highland Avenue to the city of L.A.

Both Highland and Rosemead Boulevard are remnants of a state road system that was built out decades ago, before freeways became widespread. At the time, they were the major connectors between small urban centers. Now, they and many other state routes (including Santa Monica Boulevard through West Los Angeles and Hawthorne Boulevard in the South Bay) have been overshadowed as connectors by the freeway system.

Caltrans, meanwhile, has focused its resources on maintaining the freeway system, much to the frustration of local officials who have watched the state-owned roads decay or become heavily congested.

"This is an idea whose time has come in certain areas," said Paul Novak, planning deputy for L.A. County Supervisor Michael Antonovich, who has led the effort to get the state to relinquish Rosemead Boulevard. "Local jurisdictions have much more familiarity with the roads and their surroundings. They are much more motivated to move ahead with improvement projects."

Haggling over money

The transition started nearly a decade ago, when West Hollywood sought control over Santa Monica Boulevard so it could proceed with a 534 million overhaul that the state had dithered over for years. Since then, portions of Lakewood Boulevard in Downey and Foothill Boulevard in the east San Fernando Valley have been turned over to Downey and Los Angeles, respectively.

There had been some initial resistance from Caltrans to turning over the roads to local jurisdictions, but now the only haggling is over how much money the department must put in to bring the roads up to code before a transfer takes place.

"Caltrans welcomes the opportunity to turn over roads that in effect have become the main streets of local cities. In many other cities, these roads are the entranceways to busy commercial areas," said Deborah Hams, spokeswoman for Caltrans' Los Angeles district office.

That's what residents around Rosemead Boulevard just south of Pasadena have been pushing for since the early 1990s.

"This is a road that's not been maintained properly for 20 years," said Mitchell Kauffman, a financial planner who lives in the Chapman Woods neighborhood just off Rosemead Boulevard. "There's been a lack of response from Caltrans to our concerns, which is why we went to the county to get the state to turn over jurisdiction."

Kauffman and other residents and nearby businesses want the median and sidewalks improved and the road repaved. They view as a model what Downey is now doing with the same state road a few miles to the south. There, city officials are in the midst of a $20 million makeover of Lakewood Boulevard that includes sound walls, more landscaping, street widening and upgrades to traffic signals.

Harris said that budgetary constraints are partly to blame for the relative lack of attention to proposed projects like the Rosemead Boulevard rehabilitation.

"Caltrans maintains the roads based upon the resources that are available to us. Safety is our No. 1 priority, preservation of the roadbed is second and service--removal of graffiti and litter--is third," she said.

Projects like Highland Avenue that require widening the roadway or making other substantial changes must compete for funding with thousands of other projects up and down the state, she said. Those decisions are up to the California Transportation Commission; thanks to years of budget crises, the commission has limited funding to go around.

Hollywood Bowl traffic

Ever since 1997, L.A. city officials have been trying to get Caltrans to improve Highland Avenue around Franklin Avenue--one of the city's most congested intersections, especially when there are events at the nearby Hollywood Bowl. It's also one of the most dangerous: in the first six months of 2004 alone the Los Angeles Police Department recorded 63 accidents.

Efforts to lobby Caltrans intensified as plans moved ahead to build the Hollywood & Highland shopping center one block to the south of Highland and Franklin. As part of the mitigation for the shopping center complex, then-owners Trizee Properties Inc. agreed to pay $600,000 into a fund to widen Highland.

But Koretz said Caltrans rejected the city's plans. Five years later, virtually all of the money that Trizec put into the fund remains unspent.

Caltrans' inaction prompted city officials--with the support of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and other local business groups--to persuade Koretz, whose district includes the intersection, to carry a bill to transfer jurisdiction over to the city.

"I have some experience with the state highway relinquishment process, dating back to my involvement with the relinquishment of Santa Monica Boulevard within the city of West Hollywood," Koretz said. "Clearly, now that the boulevard has been relinquished to the city of West Hollywood and the road has been redone, the community and the commuting public have benefited greatly from the improvements."

But the intersection of Highland and Franklin is only a small part of the improvements the city wants to make to Highland. Those include widening and upgrading a two-mile stretch from where it branches off from the Hollywood (101) Freeway down to Santa Monica Boulevard.

In part because it's unclear how much Caltrans is willing to contribute to bring Highland up to code, cost figures for the project have yet to be finalized.

Nonetheless, city officials are eagerly awaiting the transfer of jurisdiction.

"We want to begin the work on the rest of Highland Avenue fight away, since the need is so great," said Saba Engineer, project manager of the city's street program for the Bureau of Engineering.