Planned Aquarium Road Protested : Some La Jolla Highlands Residents Decry Canyon Route

From their glass-walled living room, Milton and Edith Kodmur look out over ocean bluffs to a view of the Pacific Ocean surf. They aren’t too happy about the prospect of sharing that view with half a million other people each year.

To the Kodmurs and about 75 other families who live on view lots along Torrey Pines Road, a $6-million aquarium long sought by Scripps Institution of Oceanography is an unwanted neighbor.

Edith Kodmur points out that the 500,000 annual visitors expected at the aquarium will be traipsing practically through the backyards of La Jolla Highlands residents on the way to the facility.

Scripps and its parent, the University of California, have been planning the aquarium since 1966 and officially listed it in the university’s future development plans in 1981. It is scheduled to open in 1990 in a 32,000-square-foot building on a nearby knoll, sharing the same view as the Kodmurs.

The aquarium will be more than twice as large as the existing one. The new center also will include 15,000 square feet of outdoor space for tide pool exhibits, picnic areas, whale-watching and a dozen other public activities. An additional 15,000 square feet is planned as an expansion to the main building to house a restaurant, auditorium, historical museum and research laboratories.

The name Vaughn Aquarium probably will die with the old building. The new aquarium will be known as an “ocean science center,” probably to be named for the generous donor being sought to put up the $6 million or more for its construction.

But the grand new building is not really the rub for the La Jolla Highlands residents. The two-story aquarium might prove a good neighbor if, in Kodmur’s words, “they weren’t planning to build a road practically a mile long and dump all those people out on Torrey Pines Road.”

That means more traffic, a third stoplight in the short (about three-block) length of the road between Dunaway Drive--the Kodmurs’ egress--and La Jolla Village Drive.

It also means, to the Kodmurs and their neighbors, an added fire hazard, “rape of the canyon and displacement of wildlife in this nature preserve,” and a decided downturn in the quality of life for their neighborhood, Edith Kodmur said in a flier she is distributing in the neighborhood to recruit others to her cause.

To Scripps officials, the site on a knoll above the Scripps campus is the perfect place for the new aquarium. It is on an empty 120-acre tract of Scripps land with a sweeping view of the Pacific and a natural setting for study of the gray whale migrations, ocean currents, tides, waves and coastal origins.

Don Wilkie, aquarium director, admits that there is opposition to the aquarium access road but said he believes that when the facts are set straight, the opponents will be mollified if not satisfied.

In 1990, the year the aquarium is scheduled to open, its visitors would add only 2% to the traffic load on the four-lane Torrey Pines Road, he said. A much shorter and more direct access to the site from La Jolla Shores Drive--across the street from the Scripps campus--was ruled out because it would add to the already-congested state of the two-lane street.

Wilkie said that the direct road to the new building will remain as a service road, not for use by visitors. That decision was made by university committee members, he explained. The proposed aquarium plan already has passed muster at 12 committee hearings. It still has a few more committees to go before it is submitted for approval to the UCSD chancellor and the UC Board of Regents.

Patricia Collum, UCSD campus-community planner, said that the roundabout route into the aquarium site was adopted because of traffic studies done on Torrey Pines Road and La Jolla Shores Drive. The study showed that the Torrey Pines route would have less impact on surrounding residents, she explained.

The Torrey Pines access road to the aquarium also would open up the now-vacant land and serve other future expansions, Collum said.

Kodmur has heard a story more about community pressures than traffic patterns in her campaign rounds in La Jolla Highlands. Residents point out that university faculty and staff members who live on or near the La Jolla Shores route have lobbied, in committee and out, to have the aquarium road moved to Torrey Pines. La Jolla Shores residents also have voted overwhelmingly, through their community planning group, to place the access on Torrey Pines Road --which does not bisect their neighborhoods--and not on La Jolla Shores Drive, which does.

Collum hopes to get Scripps officials together with Kodmur’s opposition group to make peace before an Oct. 2 public hearing at which the environmental effects of the aquarium will be debated.

Kodmur is not optimistic that a compromise can be reached. “It’s university politics, and I can’t deal with that,” she said. “There were plans to build the aquarium on another site, with a parking garage off La Jolla Shores Drive and a tram to the site. That sounds like a good idea. Or, they could use a site on the present Scripps campus with that parking right across the street.”

Collum said that a university-hired consultant had labeled the aerial tram up the hillside as infeasible. Both Collum and Wilkie agree that a new aquarium on the Scripps campus would suffer from the same problems as the present one: lack of adequate parking and the bottleneck caused by the two-lane La Jolla Shores Drive.

Wilkie said the aquarium attendance had plummeted from 400,000 a year to less than 250,000 in 1972 when an adjacent parking lot was closed to the public. Attendance has risen to about 307,000 a year. “I would bet we are the only aquarium in the world with only nine parking spaces that can boast over 300,000 visitors a year,” Wilkie said.

Kodmur has done her homework on the subject of aquariums and cites the year-old Monterey Bay Aquarium as a case in point. When the $40-million museum opened in October, its operators anticipated 1 million visitors a year. Five months later, the 1 million mark had been passed and crowds continued to grow, inundating the small town with cars and people.

The Monterey aquarium is much larger and more elaborate than the Scripps proposal, Kodmur admits, “but what if a wealthy donor came along and said to Scripps: ‘Let’s do it right,’ and gave the money to build a much larger aquarium. That’s what happened in Monterey. I’m sure Scripps wouldn’t turn such an offer down.”

Wilkie disagrees. The Monterey aquarium is a “tourist attraction,” he said, and the Scripps aquarium is “a window to Scripps”--an educational facility designed to translate to the public the scientific research going on at the institution.

“We do not want to become another Sea World, and we never will be,” Wilkie said.

Despite the reassurances, Kodmur plans to continue her fight against the aquarium and especially against the roundabout access road that will run past her picture windows.

“They should put that thing on the downtown bayfront where all the people go, not out here in our backyards,” she said.