State budget shortfall could delay start of 405 repair work until 2008. (Up Front).

The start of a Caltrans project to improve the severely congested 10-mile stretch of the San Diego (405) Freeway between the Westside and the San Fernando Valley could be delayed by at least two years, to 2008, because of state budget cuts.

The project, which will stretch from National Boulevard to the south to Ventura Boulevard to the north, is estimated to cost between $400 million and $1.4 billion, depending on which one of the four options proposed by the California Department of Transportation is ultimately chosen.

"We've already lost $75 million in funding' Ron Kosinski, deputy district director for environmental planning at Caltrans, told 75 members of a coalition of Westside neighborhood groups in Westwood last week. "Things get built because we have funding, and we don't know how we're going to get it."

Among the four options discussed at last week's meeting:

* Double-decking the freeway in order to accommodate four high occupancy vehicle lanes -- similar to the Harbor (110) Freeway south of downtown Los Angeles.

* Adding an HOV lane to the northbound side of the freeway.

* Adding a northbound HOV lane while standardizing lane, median and shoulder widths southbound. This latter plan would widen the freeway by about 40 feet, forcing the reconfiguration of all on- and off-ramps in the area and potentially creating a scenario where 42 houses - most of which are along the west side of Church Lane just west of the freeway in Brent-wood Glen - would need to be taken by eminent domain. Also included would be the rebuilding of problematic ramps in both directions.

* Double-decking for cars and potential rail, as well as HOV lanes and widening. Because of cost constraints, this is considered the least likely option.

The improvements are part of a broader plan to allow a high-occupancy vehicle lane to run uninterrupted from the Orange County line to the Golden State (5) Freeway near San Fernando.

Budget cuts already have pushed back completion of the project's environmental impact report from August until early next year, according to Caltrans project manager Edward Andreos.

Last month, Gov. Gray Davis proposed $1.7 billion in transportation-related cuts and proposed combining the state's $5.3 billion Traffic Congestion Relief Program with the State Transportation Improvement Program, cutting funds for local projects in the process.

"The loss of the TCRP is a $1.4 billion problem," said David Yale, director of regional programming at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, referring to the share of the TCRP allocated for L.A. County.

Due to the shortfall, federal, state and local gasoline taxes earmarked for the 405 project will be shifted to programs further along in the planning process. "We've got to re-evaluate all of our priorities to figure out what to fund with what's left," said Yale.

The budget cuts will delay relief for a portion of the freeway that had reached its capacity of 2,000 cars per lane per hour early last year, and an average of 331,000 cars per day, according to Caltrans.

They also will prolong the protests from community groups fearing the worst for their neighborhoods due to the construction. Reaction to the four proposals at last week's meeting was not positive.

"There has to be a viable solution that can work without destroying that neighborhood and taking 31 homes that are each closer to $1 million than not' said David Heldman, president of Brentwood Glen Homeowners Association. "That's a lot of money to throw at real estate."

Added Carole Magnuson, president of the Westwood Hills Property Owners Association, "Not too much imagination appears to have been brought to the problem of increasing the freeway's capacity'

She called "Draconian" a plan for a reconfigured Montana Avenue off-ramp that would curl around an apartment complex at Montana and Sepulveda Boulevard and take out eight houses on Dalkeith and Montana avenues.

So far, recent changes to the 405 have been limited to the completion of an eight-mile southbound HOV lane between the Ventura (101) Freeway and Waterford Street last February and the addition of a 1.5-mile northbound auxiliary lane between Mulholland Drive and Ventura Boulevard, which was completed last month.

Another connector lane between the northbound San Diego and southbound Ventura freeways, which was begun last July, will be finished in the summer of 2004, while a multilevel project to relieve congestion on the transition road between the northbound San Diego Freeway and Ventura Freeway on-ramps will begin construction in summer 2004 and be completed in the fall of 2008.