“We're going to spend millions of dollars on 1,700 people? Why don't we just buy them all Mercedes-Benzes?”
-Orange County Supervisor John Moorlach, in his dual role as an Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) board member, ridiculing daily ridership projections of 1,700 people for a $238 million streetcar project for downtown Santa Ana that would link with a new Garden Grove transportation center.
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Moorlach also called the streetcar project, which hopes to tap into $125 million in federal funding, a “boondoggle” and said it would be more efficient to have buses ferry workers and shoppers from the Santa Ana area to the Metrolink train and businesses.
Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait joined Moorlach Monday in voting against the OCTA taking over the project from the cities of Santa Ana and Garden Grove. Unfortunately for them, 13 other OCTA board members supported the plan.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.