Toll road delay rejected

By: DAVE DOWNEY - Staff Writer
Coastal commission staff refuses to take project off Oct. 11 agenda | Thursday, October 4, 2007 10:42 PM PDT ∞

An Irvine-based agency that wants to build a six-lane toll road across a popular state park at San Onofre has asked for the delay of a key decision amid signs the project might be rejected.

The California Coastal Commission's staff, however, refused Thursday to pull the North County road project off the agenda for a meeting next Thursday in Los Angeles.

The commission's approval is required in order for the Foothill/Eastern Transportation Corridor Agency, the project proponent, to begin construction.

The agency is governed by a board composed of elected officials from Anaheim, Dana Point, Irvine, Lake Forest, Mission Viejo, Orange, Rancho Santa Margarita, San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, Santa Ana, Tustin, Yorba Linda and the Orange County Board of Supervisors. It now intends to ask commissioners at the meeting to postpone action.

The agency is trying to complete the last leg of Orange County's 67-mile toll road system, a 16-mile section of Highway 241. The 241 toll road starts at Highway 91 near the Orange-Riverside county line and was designed to connect with Interstate 5.

Because other routes to I-5 would displace between 112 and 263 Orange County houses, the agency proposed building the highway across the 2,000-acre state park.

In a major blow to the $875 million project, the staff issued a 236-page report a week ago recommending the commission deny a permit.

The report stated that the project would severely damage San Onofre State Beach, the fifth-most visited of California's 278 state parks. The park is in the northern sliver of San Diego County just south of the Orange County line, on the property of Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base.

The report also said the road would jeopardize imperiled species and trample on state environmental laws.

"The report was issued very late," said Jennifer Seaton, a spokeswoman for the transportation agency. "It's a very long document for ... both sides to digest in just a week."

Coastal Commission staff analyst Mark Delaplaine said the request makes little sense given the voluminous material the toll-building agency submitted months ago in applying for a permit.

"I had to read 20,000 pages," Delaplaine said by telephone Thursday. "I didn't have to read it in a week, but I did have to read 20,000 pages. So don't talk to me about a lot of paper."

Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the California State Parks Foundation, a park advocacy group that opposes the road, said her group would prefer to go forward without delay.

"I think that it is highly regrettable that the TCA would want more time to prepare," Goldstein said. "We've all been preparing for this for a very long time."

The powerful state commission has authority to approve or reject development projects along California's 1,100-mile coastline within a corridor that extends from 1,000 feet to 10 miles inland, depending on the location. In North County, the commission's influence is limited primarily to the area between Interstate 5 and the ocean.

Next week's commission meeting is scheduled for 9 a.m. Thursday in the San Pedro area of Los Angeles.

With months of preparation already having been made and as many as 500 people expected to attend, Delaplaine said, the staff felt the hearing should go forward as planned. The commission is expected to hear at least eight hours of testimony on the matter.

"A lot of it had to do with workload considerations," he said. "We just thought it was a call that the commission should make and not the staff."

Delaplaine said the commission's November agenda in San Diego is already full and the December meeting is in San Francisco. The commission addresses Southern California issues at Southern California venues.

Seaton said that, although the agency's written request for a delay was not granted, it intends to ask commissioners during the meeting next week to put off action until January.

If commissioners were to grant such a request, Delaplaine said, next week's hearing would be postponed and the public would have to wait until later to talk about the proposal.

Whenever the hearing is held, he said, the commission likely will give people two minutes apiece to speak.

Besides the long staff report, Seaton said, the transportation agency wanted more time because the staff hadn't had time to evaluate its offer last Friday to contribute $100 million toward state park improvements.

If the agency is denied a permit, it could appeal the decision to the U.S. Department of Commerce because the park is on federal land.

With 2.7 million annual visitors, San Onofre is home to the world-class Trestles surfing spot, campgrounds and the free-flowing San Mateo Creek, one of the most promising candidate streams for bringing the imperiled Steelhead trout back to Southern California.

Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (760) 745-6611, Ext. 2623, or ddowney@nctimes.com.