Oceanside Tries to Set 76 Straight : Coastal Commission Considers New Path for Highway

Years ago, when North County was one big agricultural crop and this burgeoning city was a mere speck on the map, California 76 was a curvy, lightly traveled country road snaking eastward from the Pacific Ocean through the San Luis Rey Valley to Fallbrook.

Today, State Route 76, also known as Mission Avenue, is still curvy, and still links coastal Oceanside with inland communities --but its days as a little-used rural track are long gone.

More than 40,000 cars use the four-lane road on an average weekday, and at peak hours traffic tie-ups along the route rival Los Angeles-style congestion.

City and Caltrans officials have pondered ways to improve the highway’s traffic flow since the late 1950s. They have a solution. Build a six-lane bypass that skirts the busy westerly stretch of Mission Avenue and hooks up with the existing Route 76 about three miles east of Interstate 5.

Sounds simple enough. But the proposed bypass would run through a narrow canyon and alongside the San Luis Rey River, through a sensitive wetland area that is home to numerous rare plants and animals, including a bird destined for the federal endangered species list.

Therein lies the heart of the longstanding conflict that has for years prevented Oceanside from winning state Coastal Commission approval of the highway project. Today, coastal commissioners will once again scrutinize the proposed bypass when city officials present their coastal land-use plan at the panel’s meeting in Laguna Beach.

As planned, the bypass would spin off of Interstate 5 just north of downtown Oceanside near the Hill Street off-ramp. It would then curve through a portion of the valley known as “the Narrows,” connecting with Mission Avenue near Frontier Drive. Long-range plans call for the expressway to eventually connect with Interstate 15.

City and county officials say the bypass is needed not only to relieve congestion on the existing route but to increase coastal access for the 76,000 or more residents of eastern Oceanside and the unincorporated communities of Bonsall and Fallbrook.

“One of the commission’s primary goals is to promote beach access, and a highway is access in the most fundamental sense,” said Oceanside Special Projects Director Dana Whitson. “We’ve got 10,000 homes approved for the valley. Unless we want to say no to every future development, we’ve got to have that highway.”

Councilman Ted Marioncelli sees another need for the bypass.

“Sociologically, we’re administering two separate cities now, one on the coast and one in the valley,” Marioncelli said. “We need an improved Highway 76 to link the whole city together.”

Oceanside leaders also note that the traffic fatality rate on Route 76 is 222% higher than on comparable highways statewide. In 1984, Whitson said, five persons were killed in traffic accidents on the busy roadway, more than the neighboring cities of Carlsbad, Vista and San Marcos had in their entire jurisdictions during the same year.

Construction of a wider highway without dangerous curves is likely to reduce that fatality rate, Whitson said.

More than $12 million from the state Transportation Commission and the San Diego Assn. of Governments has already been earmarked for the $17.5-million bypass project, she said.

Until recently, city leaders were confident that this time the commission would see fit to approve the bypass, about one-third of which crosses land under that agency’s jurisdiction. Their confidence was based on their work since 1981, when the commission approved the bulk of Oceanside’s plan but deleted the proposed highway from it, to address commissioners’ concerns about the riverbed.

They realigned the highway’s route to the southern edge of the valley, cutting in half the number of sensitive acres affected by the project; offered to replace each acre of riparian habitat lost to the highway with an acre elsewhere in the valley, and vowed to relocate sensitive plants to areas where they will not be disturbed by human encroachment.

“We went all out and did a good job to make sure this was a sensitive proposal,” said Marioncelli, who calls the proposed highway “the No. 1 project” in Oceanside.

Then came the Coastal Commission’s staff report and recommendation on the land-use plan. That 42-page document called the city’s proposed environmental mitigation measures insufficient and advised the commission to delay action on the project pending further studies.

The report also recommends certain conditions that commissioners might attach to the project should they decide to approve the bypass. These include the replacement of lost habitat on a 4-1 ratio and reduction of the new stretch of highway from six to four lanes.

“We don’t dispute that statistics show a need for some sort of route improvement to accommodate growth,” said Chuck Damm, assistant district director in the Coastal Commission’s San Diego area office. “What we’re questioning is whether the environmental impact of the project has been adequately studied and whether the city has seriously considered alternate routes for the highway.”

Whitson responds that “the issue has been studied to death” and contends that the Coastal Commission staff “wants to make the San Luis Rey River and our project pay for the sinful loss of all natural resources to development throughout California.”

She notes that Caltrans has studied a dozen alternate routes for the bypass and has concluded that the only feasible alignment is through the river valley. Bill Dotson, district director for Caltrans in San Diego, agreed, saying that “for social and economic reasons, the only logical place for an expressway is along that riverbed.”

“We studied widening the existing route, but that would mean wiping out and relocating many, many businesses, and that’s simply too disruptive and expensive,” Dotson said. “Another alternative was to route the highway through Camp Pendleton, but that would interfere with the base and still impact the river valley.”

As for the 4-to-1 replacement of sensitive habitat, various council members have called that request “excessive, outrageous and ridiculous.”

Damm, however, maintains that such a condition is frequently imposed on highway projects because “there is no guarantee that any replacement acre is ever going to function as well ecologically as the acre that is lost.”

Further, he notes that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recommends the commission require replacement on a 5- or even 7-to-1 ratio.

Today, two busloads of Oceanside officials and supportive residents will journey to Laguna Beach to make their pitch to the Coastal Commission. If commissioners follow the advice of their staff and again delete the highway from the plan, city leaders say they will refuse to accept certification of any portion of the document.

“The city’s not going to give on this because if they don’t approve the highway, it cuts the heart right out of our plan,” Whitson said. “That would be very frustrating and would send us back to the drawing board to try to resolve our problems with the staff.”