Irvine to Reevaluate Its Support for Proposed Foothill Freeway

Firing the latest salvo in a continuing turf war over traffic congestion in southeastern Orange County, Irvine officials said Thursday that the city is reevaluting its support for the proposed Foothill Freeway.

The City Council early Wednesday asked its staff to look at “the possible downgrading or elimination of the (freeway) corridor as a means of easing an expected traffic bottleneck along the Santa Ana Freeway near Tustin and Irvine.

“It seems to me we’re very close to reevaluating our position, and, I hope, removing our support from a freeway that has absolutely no justification from the point of view of the public,” Councilman Larry Agran, a longtime opponent of the freeway, said of the council’s action.

Mayor David Baker, who has been a supporter of the freeway, said the unanimous vote was in part a response to a continuing dispute with nearby Tustin over the alignment of the proposed Eastern Freeway, which is supposed to link the Foothill Freeway with the Santa Ana Freeway.

Irvine and Tustin officials so far have been unsuccessful in negotiating an acceptable route for the Eastern Freeway, which is supposed to join Interstate 5 somewhere near Myford Road.

While Tustin officials have pushed to move the freeway route outside their borders to the east of Myford Road, Irvine, seeking to protect residences in Northwood and College Park and the Irvine Agricultural Center, want an alignment that loops slightly toward Tustin.

How the routing dispute over the Eastern Freeway has spilled over to affect the Foothill Freeway is essentially a matter of politics.

Tustin officials have threatened to sue Irvine over the city’s recent approval of a zone change that will allow three of the county’s largest corporations to build hotels, restaurants and office buildings on their corporate landholdings.

While Irvine officials say the new zoning will not mean more traffic than would have been generated under the old zoning, Tustin officials say they aren’t convinced.

Accordingly, the Irvine council went behind closed doors in the early hours of Wednesday and asked its staff to look at how Tustin’s pending approval of a 9,000-home development in east Tustin, near the Eastern Freeway, will affect traffic congestion and what the city’s “legal options” to challenge it might be.

Most county transportation officials look at the legal maneuvering as a bit of political swaggering that is really rooted in the dispute over the freeway routes, and both Baker and Tustin City Manager William Huston conceded Thursday there was a bit of truth to that.

But both sides said they also have genuine concerns about the impacts of the proposed freeway routes on their citizens and about future traffic patterns in the heavily congested area of the Santa Ana Freeway near Myford Road and surrounding surface streets.

A key issue is a so-called “bottleneck” on the Santa Ana Freeway that county traffic forecasters say will occur when the Eastern and Foothill freeways dump their traffic onto I-5 with no other outlet into central Orange County.

A preliminary study released this week shows that the ideal solution would be to build a new freeway connection from the Eastern Freeway through to the Garden Grove Freeway, a route that would cut through some of the most exclusive neighborhoods of the Tustin foothills.

Other options, such as large-scale improvements to nearby surface streets, would help the problem somewhat but would not really ease the impending traffic jams on the Santa Ana Freeway, the study showed.

Baker said Irvine has already taken a position that it will support the Foothill Freeway, which opens up vast areas of the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains to new development, only if a solution to the anticipated bottleneck can be found.

The city’s action Wednesday morning to “evaluate the ramifications” of “downgrading or elimination” of the freeway is in accordance with that policy, Baker said. The council also directed its staff to look at the impact of the city’s withdrawal from financing of the freeway--a decision that could prove a severe blow to plans for the freeway, since Irvine is expected to generate about a fourth of the fees assessed on new development to help pay for it.

“One of the alternatives may be elimination of the Foothill (freeway) Corridor,” Baker said. “That would resolve the bottleneck problem, wouldn’t it.”

Both Agran and Councilman Ray Catalano have urged the city to drop its support for the Foothill Freeway.

“It serves no interest that the city has with respect to traffic and its control,” Agran said. “The Foothill Freeway is intended, and would in fact be used principally, to facilitate and accommodate new growth in the county. It has nothing to do with relieving traffic on existing freeways, nothing whatsoever.”

County transportation planning manager Jerry Bennett said elimination of the Foothill Freeway would simply extend the bottleneck problem “down the entire length of the Santa Ana Freeway” unless corresponding reductions in development approvals were made.

“I guess nobody can really tell how bad the traffic situation has to get on I-5 before development will be stifled,” Bennett added. “Nobody knows.”

Meanwhile, neither Tustin nor Irvine were able to join the inaugural meeting of a newly created government agency formed to oversee construction of the Foothill and Eastern freeways because neither city is formally collecting developer fees that are expected to pay about half the projected costs of $516 million for the facilities.

Tustin has delayed its fee collection until March 1 as part of its routing dispute with Irvine, and Irvine’s fees are being held in an impound account pending resolution of a lawsuit over a citizens’ initiative seeking to block imposition of the fees.

Santa Ana, which also will not be collecting fees until March 1, was also prevented from taking a seat on the new agency, which includes representatives of the county, Anaheim, Orange, San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, Tustin and Yorba Linda.

However, all three cities are expected to be full voting members within the next few months, transportation officials said. Anaheim Councilman Ben Bay was elected chairman of the new joint powers agency.