San Joaquin Hills Proposal : Irvine, Newport Mayors Write Toll Road Formula

In a sweeping plan that could set the tone for the entire San Joaquin Hills Toll Road, the mayors of Irvine and Newport Beach have proposed limiting the highway through their cities to six lanes, requiring a mass-transit guideway and formulating other regulations to encourage ride-sharing.

The agreement would also impose a partial ban on truck traffic and limit any future expansion to two more lanes, which would be restricted to car pools.

“It makes sense. It’s affordable. It’s not environmentally destructive on its scale and it points the way to a 21st-Century transportation system,” Irvine Mayor Larry Agran said Tuesday. “It’s not simply one person per vehicle, but a mix of incentives and disincentives” for mass transit and ride-sharing, he said.

Previous plans called for a 6- to 10-lane highway with a right of way wide enough, environmentalists fear, to accommodate up to 14 lanes of traffic. The entire highway would stretch between the Costa Mesa Freeway and San Juan Capistrano, running parallel to the San Diego and Interstate 5 freeways.

The mayors’ proposals, which affect the segment between Laguna Canyon Road and MacArthur Boulevard, must be approved by both the Irvine and Newport Beach city councils and the San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor Agency. The Irvine City Council was to receive the six-page joint policy statement Tuesday night and act on it at a later date. The Newport Beach City Council will act on it Nov. 14. Any plan to restrict truck traffic on such a state highway would require special legislation.

In a related development, county officials have advised Laguna Beach officials that they need a six-month extension of a 10-year-old agreement that gives the county the option to purchase land in that city for construction of the toll road.

The development puts the Laguna Beach City Council--which opposes the highway--in an interesting position. If the city challenges the extension--which county officials assert is legal under provisions of the agreement--and nullifies the sale, it could force the issue into a courtroom and delay the project, something that city officials would welcome.

Laguna Beach’s city council continued Tuesday’s night’s closed-door discussion of the matter until Nov. 14.

The joint policy statement, reached Monday between the mayors of Newport Beach and Irvine, seeks to minimize the impact of the road on existing residential neighborhoods in the area, as well as on undeveloped lands in its path.

“We envision a facility that will be designed as a 21st-Century approach to mobility--seeking to move as many people in as few vehicles as possible, along a scenic corridor that blends into the magnificent beauty of the San Joaquin Hills,” Newport Beach Mayor John Cox said in a prepared statement.

“It is a facility that accommodates the automobile while encouraging and providing for car-pooling, ride-sharing and mass transit.”

Under the plan, the highway’s median strip would be reserved for a “fixed guideway transit system”--possibly a monorail or a mass transit system using magnetic levitation to move the vehicles along the path, Agran said. The most effective method would be determined in a later study, but construction of the transit system should begin within the highway’s first 10 years, the agreement states.

The mayors’ plan limits the initial phase of the highway to six lanes, three in either direction. It could be expanded to eight lanes--with the two new lanes restricted to car pools--only if independent traffic and financial analyses determine that the extra lanes are necessary, according to the document.

It also states that no through truck traffic will be allowed because of steep grades, in an effort to minimize traffic and noise and to enhance air quality.

“We were very concerned about this area being environmentally sensitive,” Cox said.

Agran said the cities also advocate “an aggressive use of the toll policy,” so that commuters who are driving alone will pay more than people in car pools or ride-sharing vans.

The design for the rest of the toll road’s route is yet to be determined, but if the Irvine-Newport Beach proposal is adopted, it could set the standard for designing the remainder of the route, authorities agreed.

Susan Marzec, a spokeswoman for the San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor Agency, said she had received a copy of the Agran-Cox agreement Tuesday and at first glance, “by and large, it looks like a good document and we feel good about it.”

But an opponent of the highway was not pleased by news of the agreement.

“It looks like they had a lot of nice lunches,” Belinda Blacketer, a Laguna Greenbelt lawyer and slow-growth advocate, said of the agreement.

Blacketer, a longtime opponent of the corridor, said the Agran-Cox agreement is faulty because it does nothing to limit future development near the toll road, and consequently traffic will be even worse because of the new restrictions.

“You need more lanes based on future growth in the South County,” Blacketer said. “So what this agreement means is that you have a nice arterial winding through the Greenbelt. . . . “

“I’m sure that Larry (Agran) has a reason for what he’s doing, but since he hasn’t shared that with us, we don’t know what it is,” she added.

Cox and Agran worked out their agreement during a dozen meetings in the past six weeks. Representatives of the Irvine Co., which owns the property in the path of the highway through Irvine and Newport Beach, also were involved in the talks and were supportive, Agran said.

In Laguna Beach, the City Council was weighing its response to news that the county could not meet the Oct. 31 deadline on its option-to-buy agreement for the toll road land.

Under that agreement, the environmental review process must be completed before the county can exercise its option to buy. County officials said they need about six more months to certify an environmental impact report and that the agreement entitles them to the extension because the delay was beyond their control.

Laguna Beach City Atty. Philip Kohn said the City Council has four options. It could agree with the county’s interpretation that it is entitled to the extension, or it could disagree and effectively nullify the sale agreement, he said. The council also could “say and do nothing” or ask the county to elaborate on its reasons for the extension.

If the city considers the agreement null, the county could sue, or it might attempt to obtain the property through condemnation, Kohn said.

Laguna Beach Mayor Dan Kenney was not sympathetic to the county’s need for an extension.

“Ten years ago this (option-to-purchase agreement) was done. We’ve always said the clock is ticking,” Kenney said. “It’s a bit surprising, this is the 11th hour and they’re saying they didn’t have enough time.”

“I’m not unrealistic enough to think this is the single factor to bring the San Joaquin Hills Corridor to a screeching halt . . . but maybe this will slow it down,” he added.

But William Zaun, the county’s director of transportation, said delays in completing the EIR have been unavoidable.