El Cajon ‘Shut-ins’ Get Court Order Reopening Bike Pathway to Town

Residents of a quiet El Cajon neighborhood won a court victory Monday over city officials who had closed a shortcut from their side of the busy Interstate 8 freeway to the rest of town.

Superior Court Judge Richard Huffman ordered El Cajon city officials to reopen the Pine Drive pathway and to keep it open until all the legal and environmental steps have been taken to close it properly. Pine Drive residents don’t think that will ever happen.

The pathway runs for 660 feet from Pine Drive along the south side of the freeway to link with Shadow Road and thence to the north side of the freeway and Grossmont High School.

For 25 years, the pathway was used by school-bound teen-agers riding bicycles, people walking their dogs, joggers and walkers. Without it, Pine Drive area residents had only one outlet to the outside world--Pine Drive--after the eight-lane freeway sliced them off.

Then, last spring, without notice to the users or the neighborhood, residents claim, the El Cajon City Council voted unanimously to order the bike path closed, fenced off with locked gates, covered with six inches of walnut-sized gravel and posted with signs detouring anyone seeking to use it to busy El Cajon Boulevard.

Doug Sherburne, a Pine Drive area resident and former jogger, learned of the upcoming closure while attending a bikeway advisory meeting in San Diego last April. He had no time to gather support for his opposing view and appeared, a lone dissident to the closure, when the El Cajon council voted April 22.

Favoring the closure were a contingent of Shadow Road residents who claimed that the pathway passing by their property brought in vagrants and crime, invading their privacy and threatening their safety.

“I don’t believe the pathway is a factor in neighborhood crime,” Sherburne said Monday. “There is crime everywhere. Just the other day my neighbor was a victim. . . . They just backed up their pickup truck and loaded in $1,000 worth of his property.”

A week after the City Council ordered the pathway closed, providence intervened on Sherburne’s side. While he was busy gathering signatures designed to persuade the City Council to reverse its action on the pathway, a huge tree fell, blocking Pine Drive and bottling up about 102 residences.

“One guy even accused me of pushing that tree down,” recalled Sherburne. “I think he was joking. Then, just after that we had a pretty strong earthquake which they couldn’t blame on me. It proved my point that we need the pathway as an emergency exit.”

Sherburne gathered 90 signatures in three days on a petition asking for the pathway to stay open, but El Cajon council members reconfirmed the closure, once, twice, three more times.

Sherburne contends that the main reason Shadow Road residents want the pathway closed is to add the pathway property to their own property, but he admits he has no evidence to back up that claim.

He kept fighting through the summer, although the City Council showed no signs of melting, and didn’t admit defeat even when, in August, state Department of Transportation crews completed work on a stone sound buffer along the freeway and padlocked the sturdy steel gates to the pathway between Shadow Road and Pine Drive.

“Lots of people used to use that, especially kids riding their bikes to Grossmont High,” Jean Sherburne said. Now, with gravel half a foot deep along the path and locked gates at each end, the usage has dropped to half a dozen students who climb the gates and walk the shortcut to school.

“It was a pleasurable pathway,” said Judy Williams, a Hawthorne Avenue resident from the north side of the freeway. “We used to walk down there quite a bit. It is a lovely area.”

El Cajon Councilwoman Harriet Stockwell remains unconvinced that the pathway should be reopened, although the city attorney has informed council members that Monday’s ruling to reopen it must be followed until the city has completed an environmental impact report on the closure.

When Caltrans built the tall stone noise wall along the freeway, Stockwell explained, “the pathway became a very dark place where anything could happen, and did.”

Although safety of bike-riding students in the traffic at the Shadow Road intersection was one consideration in closing the pathway, Stockwell said, “it was the fact that young people, especially young girls, shouldn’t be walking along there. It’s just not safe.”

Sherburne said he expects that the pathway will be opened, “maybe by the end of the week,” and he hopes it will remain open “for a long, long time.”