Local residents continue to grapple with issues regarding I- 5/State Route 56 connector project

By Max Sutton-Smolin

Tempers flared Dec. 18 at the Carmel Valley Library, where officials from the California Department of Transportation and the city of San Diego met with community planning boards and homeowners associations to discuss new developments and review new Caltrans visuals for the Interstate 5/State Route 56 connector project.
Five alternatives were discussed at the Steering Committee meeting for the connectors, but residents were more concerned with the widening of the 56, said Dennis Ridz, a member of the Torrey Pines Planning Board and co-chair of the subcommittee for the I-5/SR-56 connector.
The Caltrans Steering Committee consists of planning board members and Caltrans officials and is separate from the Torrey Pines Planning Board subcommittee, Ridz said.
“It’s the impression of the people who were there, plus some of the subcommittee members, that this is sort of backwards,” Ridz said. “If you build the connector and you don’t plan or don’t widen the lanes on 56, you’re just creating backup onto 5.”
The idea behind San Diego’s Regional Transportation Plan, which has all the transportation projects in the region for the next 20 years, is that they will all be completed by a certain date, 2030 in this case, said Allan Kosup, the I-5 corridor director for Caltrans.
“That 20-year time frame is subject to continual reprioritization and available funds that come in, so it wouldn’t be fair to say that [new lanes on the 56] are going to be built in 2030,” Kosup said. “They’ll be built by 2030 or sooner, and that’s kind of an ongoing regional process.”
There are five alternatives Caltrans is currently considering, Kosup said: 1) the no-build alternative, which involves some improvements but no connectors; 2) the auxiliary alternative, which would consist of some widening and operational improvements of existing facilities; 3) the full connectors alternative, which would connect I-5 and SR-56 in both the west-to-north and the south-to-east directions, including an enormous flyover for the south-to-east connector; 4) the hybrid alternative, in which they would build the west-to-north connector but not the south-to-east connector and instead build a portion of the operational alternatives from the auxiliary alternative, eliminating the flyover; and 5) a variation on the hybrid alternative that would include a flyover bridging the El Camino Real intersection.
“There are different stakeholders and they have different priorities,” Kosup said. “There’s a lot of folks on the east side of the freeway who feel there’s local congestion caused by not having the connector, so they’re big advocates for building the connectors … People on the west side of the freeway are concerned with the impacts the connectors are going to have in terms of noise and visual, primarily.”
Susan Algaze, 51, a former speech therapist who lives on Mango Drive on the west side of I-5, is opposed to the connector project because it would significantly increase the noise level in her neighborhood, she said.
“The entire neighborhood is going to be affected by both projects, the widening of the 5, which I think is inevitable, and the 56 connector, which I think is stupid,” Algaze said. “I think what’s going on is they’re sacrificing an already established community to be able to build up the whole Carmel Valley eastern corridor. I think that’s not a good thing for San Diego in general and my community in particular.”
Caltrans is working on cost estimates for the alternatives along with obtaining new and better visuals and projections, Kosup said.
In the end, Caltrans can only recommend how the San Diego Association of Government (SANDAG) decides to spend its funds, Kosup said.
In order to influence Caltrans’ recommendation, the subcommittee puts together agendas and public forums for residents, invites city council members, gets feedback from residents about their concerns, and provides information, Ridz said.
“We’re sort of an information forum and what we have been I think instrumental in doing is getting the two homeowners associations that are impacted the most to get organized so they can take on some of the issues themselves directly,” Ridz said.
The two homeowners associations are Del Mar Villas and Pointe Del Mar.
Members of the subcommittee and the Torrey Pines Planning Board support the no-build alternative, meaning that I-5 would still be widened, and they have no objections to a connector on the east side of I-5, Ridz said.
Discussion over the connectors has been ongoing for a year and a half. A year ago, the planning board voted against the flyover and the taking of property for construction purposes, but the planning board is just “an advisory group to the city,” Ridz said.
“We have issued our thoughts on it … but it’s not force of law or anything else,” Ridz said. “We are speaking for the public in our Torrey Pines region.”
Caltrans should come to some sort of conclusion to the issue by 2010, Kosup said.
“I think projects of this size are very complex,” Kosup said. “There are different issues that are going to be looked at before a decision is made, and it’s always difficult to communicate to everyone. And that’s why we have a lot of these meetings, so that we can reduce the miscommunication and make sure that we’ll ultimately make a selection based on the best information.”
Caltrans still has yet to do an Environmental Impact Report, and “then there would be a lengthy public input to that process, so this will continue for several years,” Ridz said. “The point of that is the residents can’t sell their homes. You can’t tell a prospective buyer for Portofino Circle what the noise is going to be, if this highway’s going to get built, and so obviously in a bad housing market this creates a different problem.”
Algaze, who has been to many Steering Committee and Torrey Pines Planning Board meetings, supports either the no-build alternative, which she doesn’t think will happen, or the auxiliary lane enhancement alternative, she said.
She is most strongly opposed to the direct connector flyover.
“The direct connector would create this—I’ll call it an abomination, that’s probably too strong a term—but a 50-foot-high wall going from the Del Mar Heights bridge down to Pointe Del Mar and then this 70-foot flyover,” Ridz said. “I mean, that’s just not attractive, let alone the impact on the people.”