Billions of dollars in business and millions of minutes in roadway congestion are in play as a pair of San Diegans take the reins of newly state-fortified transportation agencies. What they accomplish in 2003 could reshape the way people get to work in 20 years and what airport they use for business and pleasure. The two individuals, Gary Gallegos at the San Diego Association of Governments, and Thella Bowens at the San Diego Regional Airport Authority, came to their positions in widely different ways.

Gallegos, 42, is a personable and outgoing executive who put aside dreams of being a rancher for the more practical field of herding commuters. He served as district director for the regional California Department of Transportation office until joining Sandag in July 2001, filling the executive director’s position that opened following the retirement of Ken Sulzer. Widely considered an up-and-comer in San Diego and one of the region’s ranking Hispanic government leaders, Gallegos took the agency’s helm at a time when it was a top candidate to lead a state-orchestrated experiment in regional infrastructure governance.

Bowens, 54, has spent most of her career in government. Her expertise in budgets landed her a job in 1987 with the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. Having found her calling, she moved to San Diego in 1996, leaving a position as deputy director of the city aviation department in Kansas City. When state legislation carved the airport authority from the San Diego Unified Port District, Bowens’ position as senior director of aviation at Lindbergh Field was singled out to serve as the new agency’s interim executive director. With no avowed interest in politics or the limelight, Bowens’ strengths are a cool, professional manner and a head for facts and figures. She seems remarkably suited for the emotionally charged atmosphere of airport siting.

Flying Into Certain Flak

In the short run, Bowens will be most challenged. She spent the holidays finalizing a delicate transfer of $125 million in funds from the Port, money without which the FAA would have declined to license the authority as Lindbergh’s operator. She has a new nine-member board that really starts working this month (the first meeting is Jan. 9) and her title still carries the “interim” tag.

Working from third-floor offices above the commuter terminal at Lindbergh Field, Bowens oversees a staff of about 200 and an operating budget of $100 million. Models and photos of aircraft, and views of the real McCoy, dominate the airy space, providing visual reminders to board members of the task at hand as they get up to speed on running the nation’s 29th busiest airport.

The board also will hear from Bowens this month on the status of the Air Transportation Action Program, the high-profile effort to identify the best way to meet the region’s future air transportation needs. An economic model shows Lindbergh’s constraints costing the economy between $29.6 billion and $93.8 billion in gross regional product over a 30-year time frame.

With its 18 sites and 21 scenarios, the action is being watched warily from the hillside of Loma Portal to rural Ramona, from the border with Mexico to Oceanside, and from many places in between. A list of up to eight finalists likely will be released in the next few months, although Bowens says the exact scheduling is up to the board.

Once the list goes public, the posturing — let’s be blunt, the howling — from potentially offered communities will begin. Bowens insists everyone will get a chance to be heard. “We certainly will have a process in place to make sure that people have an opportunity to not only see what we are proposing at that point, but to give us their feedback on the issues surrounding the proposals,” she says.

Ultimately, the legislation signed by Gov. Gray Davis requires an airport proposal go before county voters no earlier than November 2004 and no later than November 2006. (Nearly exactly between those times falls Sept. 8, 2005, the date when the Federal Base Closure and Realignment Commission must present to the U.S. president its updated list of military bases to close. Separate properties now housing the Marine Corps Recruit Depot and Marine Corps Air Station Miramar figure into various airport scenarios. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has promised to shed as much military infrastructure in this round as in the previous four combined.)

The consequences of the airport decision are both political and economic.

“Airports drive regional competitiveness in the 21st century,” says Erik Bruvold, vice president of public policy at the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp. “They are critical in whether regions do well or whether regions fall behind. The airport authority in 2003 is really charged with charting the course for what I will say is the next 100 years of San Diego’s aviation future. Those decisions won’t be made in 2003, but the direction and the leadership and the ideas that the new authority sets forth will go a long way to determining whether we have an aviation infrastructure adequate for our needs.”

Bruvold also acknowledges the possibility that San Diegans may choose the status quo.

“If the region ultimately determines it has no political stomach for relocating the airport, that there is not the political consensus or will to do it, then we can put that task to bed and get on with making Lindbergh the best small airport in the world.”

The $42 Billion Solution

The Grinch stole some of Gallegos’ presents with the year-ending news that California’s budget woes may strip the region of nearly a third of $1.5 billion in transportation funds slated to be spent through 2007. Projects in jeopardy include upgrading busy State Route 905 at the border to freeway status, delaying doubletracking of the coastal railroad tracks and pushing back plans for 20 miles of movable lanes that would ease the Interstate 15 commute between San Diego and Escondido.

It wasn’t supposed to start so tough.

After stewing for three years in Sacramento, a regional government bill was signed in late 2001 by Davis. Proposals to have the show run by an enlarged County Board of Supervisors or a new elected entity eventually were tossed in favor of Sandag, a known player where the county and each of the region’s 18 cities have a representative at the table. As a result, as of Jan. 1, Gallegos not only oversees his agency’s $262 million annual budget, but also the Metropolitan Transit Development Board’s $161 million and North County Transit District’s $62 million. Combined, those two agencies, and the buses, trains, vans and trolleys they represent, carry more than 96 million passengers each year.

All this change is taking place while Sandag puts the finishing touches on a $42 billion transportation program that by the year 2030 should make your commute shorter. To pay for this effort, Gallegos’ staff has identified $31 billion in funding. Of the deficit, a huge key is the extension of the half-cent local sales tax expected to go before county voters in 2004. The TransNet funds would generate $7 billion. Gallegos figures the remaining $4 billion is money that will come naturally as budgets increase.

The key to winning passage of TransNet is crafting a proposal that, in essence, has something for everyone. It is that fine tuning the Sandag board will do this year, before the final product goes on the road next year. It must win support of two-thirds of the voters to pass. Already controversy is brewing about whether the projects should include environmental expenditures.

The Building Industry Association of San Diego County considers important bonds to fund transit and environmental programs. But it is holding off support for TransNet until the projects are clarified. “Let’s see the language,” says Matt Adams, the BIA’s director of governmental affairs. “Is it to include habitat, open space and water quality? Or is it straight transportation.” The EDC’s Bruvold expects a pure transportation agenda, with the environmental expenditures in a separate ballot item.

How much of a monkey wrench the state’s budget deficit throws into the $42 billion, 30-year plan is unknown. In late December, Gallegos described himself as a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist. Indeed, whether the worst-case scenario will play out won’t be known until mid-January and beyond. In surveys and polls, traffic is a primary concern of San Diegans. Politicians of both parties get elected in part by promising some relief. Letting down their commuting constituents is not a prescription for re-election.

Equally long-term and more ambitious than the transportation program is Sandag’s Regional Comprehensive Plan. A draft is due by year’s end. This document will encompass the goals of every general plan in the county and tie them together. In addition, it will encompass the county’s connections to Mexico, southern Riverside and Imperial counties. A desire for closer relations with the region’s 18 Native American tribes will spur the creation this month of Sandag’s first tribal liaison position. “We want to evolve from 18 cities in isolation and then link these plans with how we are being impacted by what is happening around us,” Gallegos says.

When combined with the transportation spending, the RCP will give Sandag unparalleled authority for not only planning where the roads, trains and buses go, but also making sure those plans are carried out.

“We really transform ourselves from merely a planner to a planner that has to implement what it plans,” he says. “In the long term it strengthens us.”

The hammer? Transit improvements are an ongoing civic issue. Every city needs a wider intersection, better bus stop or new traffic control signals. Now, for example, if a city declines to approve within its limits an arterial road that would improve traffic flow, Sandag directors can hold off funding other projects in that city. It couldn’t do that before.

In order for anything to be approved now at Sandag, it must gain the support of at least 10 of the 19 entities voting, and those 10 must represent 50 percent plus one of the population.

Pulling It Off

Roadway congestion and airport siting remain two of the most contentious civic topics in San Diego. Billions of dollars are at stake, as well as potential career-charting accomplishments for Bowens and Gallegos. At the same time, it is clear that both are as much focused on tomorrow as they are the nitty-gritty of today, whether it is keeping funding in place for the nearly complete State Route 56 or ensuring Lindbergh Field runs smoothly as a $4.2 billion contributor to the region’s economy. Really, they have no choice.

“We can all focus on the new airport and lose sight of what needs to be done at Lindbergh and we will see this airport deteriorate back to the state it was a few years ago,” says Bowens. She expects better.