Developers struggle for names

By: CHRIS BAGLEY - The Californian
'Old Newport' ran aground, but Sheriff Lucas will ride anew on Menifee asphalt | Sunday, January 13, 2008 12:31 AM PST ∞

MENIFEE - The permits are mostly in order and builders are prepared to put up the first houses next month.

But after years of planning and of navigating Riverside County's development code, even as bulldozers sculpt roadbeds out of the earth, developers are still trying to come up with the names for the last 100 or so courts, cortes, caminos and culs-de-sac.

With 2,100 houses, Audie Murphy Ranch would become one of the largest developments in the county. Over the course of five years, developers have planned around everything from kangaroo rats to a site considered sacred by an Indian tribe native to the area.

Road crews have crisscrossed the county with thousands of miles of asphalt in the last decade, and coming up with new names for new streets has proven to be a hurdle for developers in Audie Murphy Ranch and elsewhere.

The county's surveying department rejected many of the names suggested for the huge subdivision, a project manager for one of its two developers said.

"There are a ton of little cul-de-sacs," said Jeremy Telford, of Woodside Homes. "For every street, we have to come up with at least three ... times that many names."

In most cases, the names were too similar to names of existing streets within a few miles, Telford and county surveyors agreed. County standards are designed to bar names that could delay or confuse ambulances, fire engines and law enforcement officers responding to emergencies, when every second is critical, said Brian Hess, the county's chief surveyor.

For Audie Murphy Ranch, those conflicts start right out front, where two-lane Newport Road leads across the middle of the developers' 1,100 acres. The county approved plans on the condition that developers pay to build a one-mile section of pavement that will bring it into alignment with Railroad Canyon Road, a four-lane thoroughfare that continues west to Interstate 15 in Lake Elsinore. Because the new mile will be considered "Newport Road," a new name is needed for the last 3,500 feet of Newport that lead to Goetz Road at the eastern edge of Quail Valley.

Telford said his employer suggested "Old Newport Road," the sort of renaming that's still common in many parts of the country when a newer, wider road is built alongside an existing thoroughfare.

But that wasn't unique enough to satisfy the safety concerns. Woodside then suggested Normandy Road, which was.

The name was one of several in a patriotic vein selected by Woodside and Brookfield Homes, in keeping with soldier Audie Murphy's service in World War II. Telford said Woodside intended it as a salute to American soldiers who served and died on the shores of northern France in June 1944.

Todd Reed, a history buff who lives in Sun City, said he and several of his friends hope that's the case and that it doesn't refer specifically to Audie Murphy. The soldier earned numerous decorations in the war, but he wasn't at Normandy.

By the time tens of thousands of American and British soldiers were pouring over the northern ramparts of the Nazi empire, Murphy and other allied soldiers had already begun rolling up its southern flank, first in northern Africa, then on Sicily and then on the Italian mainland, according to Larryann Willis, director of the Audie Murphy Research Foundation, a Tracy-based organization founded by the soldier's son, Terry Murphy.

"I'm afraid somebody might be trying to pay a well-deserved tribute to Audie Murphy based on misinformation," Reed said.

The baby-faced soldier became a baby-faced actor after the war, starring in several dozen westerns before his retirement in 1969. He amassed several ranches, including a dude ranch in the Menifee area.

Names planned for other streets in Woodside's and Brookfield's developments include Dapple Gray Way, Wide Plains Court and Wagon Trail Lane. In one neighborhood, several are to be named after Murphy's characters, including Logan Keliher from the 1964 movie "Bullet for a Badman" and Chad Lucas, a Colorado sheriff who pursued a gang of bandits into New Mexico in the 1966 movie "Gunpoint."

The first few homes will be available for occupancy early next year, Telford said. Meanwhile, he said, the two developers are going back to their advertising agency for more street-name suggestions.

"We provided a list of hundreds and hundreds of names" to the county, Telford said. "And we still have to name two-thirds of the streets."

Contact staff writer Chris Bagley at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2615, or cbagley@californian.com.

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