Toll road not worth it

By: North County Times Opinion staff | Saturday, October 6, 2007 3:32 PM PDT ∞

Our view: Coastal Commission should reject pavement proposed for state park near Trestles

Given the terrible toll that traffic takes on our lives here in North County, faithful readers would have to go pretty far back to recall a road project we didn't support. Look no further.

The toll road proposed for a sliver of San Onofre State Beach park is that rare exception: a road that doesn't need to be built, that will do little to ease our traffic congestion, and whose negatives far outweigh its positives. We urge the California Coastal Commission to reject this proposal when it meets Thursday in Los Angeles.

Building the toll road is the last task before the Foothill/Eastern Transportation Corridor Agency, which is managed by representatives of 12 Orange County cities and three Orange County supervisors. This 16-mile extension of Highway 241 would link Interstate 5 to Highway 91, and would complete Orange County's enviable 67-mile network of toll roads. But this leg would slice through a sliver of San Diego County ---- our turf. Not just any turf, either: This road would pave over an important patch of San Onofre State Beach, just south of the Orange County line, on property owned by Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base and leased by the state.

If you've heard of this project, chances are you associate it with Trestles, the world-famous surf break directly west of where this toll road would link up with I-5. Surfers have joined environmentalists and American Indians in opposing this toll road, and on Sept. 28, they got a big boost from the California Coastal Commission staff.

The commission's staff analysis concluded: "It's difficult to imagine a more environmentally damaging alternative location. No measures exist that would enable the proposed alignment to be found consistent with the California Coastal Act."

Would it hurt habitat needed by endangered species? Check; six of them, including some that swim, fly, hop and scurry. The road would also run up next to San Mateo Creek, a uniquely preserved waterway that could be key to bringing steelhead trout back to Southern California.

Worse still, the toll road would eat into two areas already set aside in response to environmental degradation elsewhere. The 1,200-acre Donna O'Neill Land Conservancy in southeastern Orange County was created to offset development in San Clemente. The San Mateo Campground was created to compensate for the environmental impact of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. You just can't keep carving up the areas we set aside to make up for past development without degrading our natural resources past a point of no return.

Would this proposed toll road endanger archaeological or cultural treasures? Check: A 4,000-year-old Juaneno Indian village called Panhe, still sacred to the tribe's descendants, lies not far from the proposed pavement.

Would it threaten the water quality or surf break at Trestles or San Onofre State Beach, the state's fifth-most visited park? Well, the jury's still out on that one ---- stringent water-runoff laws would almost certainly prevent the toll-road agency from sending anything but filtered water flowing downstream. The Coastal Commission refused to rule out a potential problem, and the masses who promise to pack the Crowne Plaza Los Angeles Harbor Hotel in San Pedro on Thursday need no convincing.

But every road project proposed in coastal California today would run the same risks. What makes this one stand out, however, is how little it would deliver in exchange for the sacrifices it demands.

The Transportation Corridor Agency wants to build in perhaps the one corner of Orange and San Diego counties in which there is no traffic emergency. Sure, the I-5 is backed up, but this segment wouldn't get rid of the bottleneck directly south through Camp Pendleton. It may, however, open up more of rapidly developing south Orange County to suburban sprawl and new traffic.

It's also still not clear that the toll road's goal couldn't be better accomplished by widening I-5 itself. The Transportation Corridor Agency says that widening would prove too expensive and would require too many homes to be seized and demolished. But its cost estimates only pencil out when the value of unspoiled, undeveloped coastal land in Southern California is left out of the equation.

On Thursday, the Coastal Commission should send the Transportation Corridor Agency back to the drawing board. There have to be better traffic solutions than this.