More than 5 million California voters said yes on November 8 to Proposition 1B, the multi-billion dollar transportation bond. Now, more than three months later, the inevitable battle has begun: who gets how much money, and for which badly needed transportation projects?

That battle has become particularly heated over the last few days, after initial staff recommendations from the California Transportation Commission. So heated, in fact, that Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez openly suggested today that the Legislature may not agree to spend the Prop 1B funds if the project list isn’t modified.

Prop 1B authorized about $20 billion in borrowing, but only $4.5 billion of that was earmarked to help ease congestion on state roadways. Trouble is, when local government officials from around the state submitted their requests for a slice of that $4.5 billion, the requests totaled about $11.3 billion.

No surprise, then, that a lot of folks were going to be left out… and unhappy about it.

This morning, Speaker Nunez said the state transportation commission staff “needs to be a lot smarter” about the projects selected. And Nunez suggested that if $4.5 billion isn’t enough, he’s prepared to ask the voters for an additional $5 billion on the November 2008 ballot. Those comments follow Monday’s photo op by LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa handling out flyers to drivers urging them to call lawmakers and complain about what he sees as the city’s paltry share of the cash– about 12% of the money, even though Villaraigosa and Nunez say that Los Angeles has about 42% of the state’s traffic congestion.

Nunez even suggested that maybe the CTC can’t handle the job, and that an outside panel may need to get involved. [Listen to those comments here.]

And the staff recommendations didn’t seem all that more popular when commissioners met this afternoon for an information hearing on the issue. Some commissioners criticized the fact that 20% of the $4.5 billion has been earmarked for “connectivity” projects, rather than congestion relief– in other words, roadway projects that better connect one region or locale to another. Other commissioners took aim at the suggestion that bond money be allocated to projects that still didn’t have full funding. Why allow a traffic relief project to break ground, they said, if that project may not be completed due to a lack of sufficient funds?

Suffice it to say, voters had no idea how much bottled up demand there is in California for transportation cash… and no idea, either, that a lot of worthy proposals in their own neck of the woods still may not get off the drawing board.

The CTC is scheduled to vote on which projects to fund at its meeting next week.