Ranch Residents Want to Pay for Highway

How much is it worth to rid the roads of Rancho Santa Fe of their rumbling trucks and commuter cars? The answer is $24 million, and Ranch residents are ready to make a down payment.

After 25 years of watching traffic along their eucalyptus-shaded streets grow from a trickle to a torrent, Rancho Santa Fe leaders have hatched a plan to build another east-west route, a detour to take the daily parade of cars off the narrow roads that wind through the affluent estate community and shunt traffic to the south and east.

Before Bill Paul bought a home on Paseo Delicias in 1975, he asked about the chances of traffic clogging the neighborhood. No problem, assured the real estate salesman. Just look at county road plans, which show a wide new highway skirting the Rancho Santa Fe community to the south.

That highway, SF 728, is still on the county road plans and, Paul admits, likely to remain a paper highway for at least 10 years, unless money is found to build it sooner.

And that’s just what Paul and other Ranch leaders plan to do: provide about $8.4 million in front money to buy the right-of-way, do the engineering and construct a highway that will lure North County commuters off Rancho Santa Fe roads.

Computerized Estimate

County computers estimate that better than 20,000 cross-county travelers use Ranch roads to wend their way between Interstate 5 on the coast and Interstate 15 inland. If a bypass route were available, between 40% and 50% of those drivers would use it, the computers say.

“People don’t come through our community because they like our eucalyptus trees,” Paul said. “They come through here because it is the only way to go.”

In the past, Rancho Santa Fe residents have been completely reactive to the traffic problem, seeking to deter drivers with stop signs. They even considered, but rejected, a possible toll road through the posh community.

Now, Paul said, “We are trying to solve the problem, not avoid it.”

Gail MacLeod, former Rancho Santa Fe Assn. administrator and now a consultant to the association on road planning, calls the plan to privately finance a bypass highway unique.

“It’s the first time that we can find that one community has proposed to finance public improvements in another area, that private funds have been used to speed up a public project,” she explained. “If it works here, I think that other communities will want to take a look at this as a way of solving some of their problems.

Create an Assessment District

What Ranch leaders propose is creation of an assessment district under a law that’s been on the books since 1913. Bonds would be issued and sold, property owners benefiting from the new road would be assessed to pay the interest on the bonds so that the principal could be used to build the new highway now. Eventually, the County of San Diego would pay off the assessment bonds with funds received from its share of the half-cent sales tax for transportation purposes and from contributions of developers who need the road for access to future projects. “It’s more complicated than that, of course, and there are a lot of matters to be worked out before it becomes a reality,” MacLeod said. “But it is a new concept of financing, of providing up-front money, of getting a road built in a few years.”

For the past year, Paul and a team of volunteers have spread the word among Ranch residents and the surrounding communities of Whispering Palms, Rancho Del Rio and Hacienda Santa Fe--all of whom would benefit from less traffic along the current cross-county commuter route down Via de la Valle and Paseo Delicias to Del Dios Highway.

“It’s astounding and amazing,” Paul said of the results. “There’s hardly anyone who isn’t in favor of it. When you think about it, that we are asking people to voluntarily tax themselves to pay for a public road, that’s quite unusual.”

Citizens in Favor of Tax

Walt Ekard, manager of the Rancho Santa Fe Assn., the quasi-government of the unincorporated community, said a poll of citizens found only about 25 or 30 opposed to the idea. Petitions favoring the assessment have been signed by more than 1,000 people, he added.

He cautioned that “we are still very early in the process” of creating the assessment district and building the road, “and there could be problems that we will encounter as this moves closer to reality.”

One of the problems, all of the participants concede, is the path of the bypass highway. It would run through the affluent gated community of Fairbanks Ranch.

San Dieguito Road, which would be part of SF 728, is already in place. Developer Ray Watt built the road to link Fairbanks Ranch to El Camino Real on the west.

Scott Harvey, a consultant and spokesman for Fairbanks Ranch on the road issue, admits that Fairbanks residents aren’t too happy at the thought of 10,000 to 15,000 cars passing through the heart of their quiet community daily, but he admits that a road is needed to supplement the current narrow highways that run through Rancho Santa Fe.

Alternative Path

So the Fairbanks community has an alternative proposal to avoid this “worst possible scenario”--detour the Rancho Santa Fe bypass south along Camino Ruiz to link with future Interstate 56, a major highway that will link I-5 south of Del Mar with I-15 at Rancho Penasquitos.

“Most of the traffic that uses the Ranch roads now is headed in a southerly direction toward the coast,” he contends, “and the Camino Ruiz route to 56 would be much more direct.”

Harvey argues that the Rancho Santa Fe bypass through Fairbanks follows “a tortuous path” in its east-west course that well could boomerang on its creators and return frustrated travelers back to their former travel patterns through the streets of Rancho Santa Fe.

Fairbanks leaders have taken no stand on their neighbors’ proposed road assessment district, turning instead to the city of San Diego, in which a portion of the proposed bypass road lies.

The San Diego City Council’s transportation and land-use committee gave Fairbanks a unanimous but unofficial vote of confidence on its Camino Ruiz plan, ordering city staff to evaluate the assessment district to finance the Route 728 extension “after an ongoing San Diego County alignment study for Camino Ruiz is completed.”

Harvey said informal overtures to Rancho Santa Fe officials to add the Camino Ruiz extension to their road-funding plans were rebuffed because “they said anything that delays us, we’re not interested in.”

Paul admits that he wants to see the momentum that has built up in favor of the assessment to put the project on a fast-track to completion. He thinks that a bypass can be completed by 1992 at the rate that the project is moving.

More realistic estimates by county transportation planners put the road completion at five or six years off, still much sooner than if the county continued its pay-as-you-go road-building program.