Tom Harman and the 241

The Los Angeles Times featured an article on Monday that devastated the anti-241 toll road/enviro-nut crowd. The piece, “Flaws found in O.C. tollway foes' study” by Dan Weikel shows that the tree huggers paid for a fundamentally flawed, simplistic and propagandistic “study” by a third-rate Vermont consulting outfit to bolster their effort to stop completion of the 241 in South County.

Calling the study “flawed,” actual traffic planners point out that the Vermont firm “neglected to account for the planned carpool lanes, underestimated the cost of condemning homes and buildings, and unilaterally proposed narrowing frontage roads.”

In other words, the study wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on, and there remains no good reason to hold up completion of the 241.

What does this have to do with Senator Tom Harman?

Well, Harman is a famous opponent of completing the much-needed 241. He made his opposition to it a centerpiece of his campaign for the special election in the 35th Senate District in April of 2006. His opposition allowed him to appeal to liberal Democrat environmentalists, such as the lefty group Women For: Orange County who openly urged its membership to back Harman in the open primary rules used for the Special Elections (where Democrats could vote for Republicans). So, just as in his first election in 2000, when Harman lost big among Republican voters, but won big by appealing to Democrats, Harman used his opposition to the 241 to gain support from the tree huggers in the race he won by just 230 votes last year.

Now that the centerpiece of the lefties’ opposition to the 241 Toll Road has been shown to be a pack of lies, will Tom Harman flip-flop on the issue to support completing the road? We’ll see. Perhaps because his next election is a closed primary in 2008, he might because tree huggers can’t help him much next June.