NORTH COUNTY ---- Expecting as many as 2,000 people to gather next month for a meeting on the San Onofre toll road, the California Coastal Commission decided late Thursday to move the session from Oceanside to Del Mar.

Coastal Commission staff analyst Mark Delaplaine said the move was triggered by concerns that the 160-person capacity of the Oceanside City Council Chambers would be overwhelmed and that crowd control could become a significant problem.

Delaplaine said the meeting now will take place Feb. 6 in Wyland Hall at the Del Mar Fairgrounds, which can accommodate 3,000.

He said that if attendance comes anywhere close to 2,000, it will be a record for the commission, which regulates development along California's 1,100 miles of coastline.

"We've never had probably more than 500 in 30 years," Delaplaine said. "It would certainly smash all existing records."

The commission is scheduled to meet in San Diego County for three days in a row, or Feb. 6-8. And he stressed it will be only on the first day that the session will be held at the Del Mar venue. On the last two days, sessions will shift back to Oceanside City Hall.

The toll road is one of the more contentious issues to reach the commission in recent years.

The Foothill/Eastern Transportation Corridor Agency is trying to complete the last leg of Orange County's 67-mile toll road system by building a 16-mile section of Highway 241. Today, the 241 toll road starts at Highway 91 just west of the Orange-Riverside county line and ends south of Irvine. Orange County officials want to tie it into Interstate 5 near the San Diego-Orange county line.

Because any route through San Clemente would require bulldozing hundreds of homes, the road builder is trying to get permission to complete the last leg of its system in another county: San Diego.

The move has attracted much opposition from environmentalists who resent the plan to cross North San Diego County's San Onofre State Beach, the fifth-most popular of California's 278 state parks.

In a scathing report last fall, the commission concluded the highway would destroy 66 acres of sensitive habitat and wetlands, pushing the Pacific pocket mouse to the brink of extinction and quite possibly wiping out the only remaining population of endangered arroyo toads near the ocean. The toll builder struck back earlier this month with a lengthy rebuttal, charging that the commission staff got its facts wrong.

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