Inland-Coast Freeway Plan Moves Onto the Fast Track : Transportation: But residents of housing developments and environmentalists are already raising objections to east-west Route 56.

A freeway project that has been debated and deferred since 1966 now is on the fast track to reality. To North County residents, it’s the answer to a dream--an east-west freeway from inland to coast.

At present, no major road runs east and west for a 22-mile stretch from California 78, which links inland Escondido and coastal Oceanside, south to California 52, which links Interstate 15 to Interstate 5 at La Jolla.

Route 56, a freeway connecting the rapidly growing Rancho Bernardo-Rancho Penasquitos areas with the coast at Del Mar, was a glint in some Caltrans planner’s eye before Interstates 5 and 15 were completed.

Now, with traffic snarling on inland and coastal north-south routes, the cross-county route is being touted as one answer to easing traffic flows by allowing drivers to head directly to where they are going instead of being forced to go miles out of their way.

Like most road-building projects in the state, the east-west freeway had been on the back burner, awaiting money from developers or the state. Then, with the passage last year of Proposition A, raising sales taxes half a cent to finance transportation projects, Route 56 came to life.

Now, local planners have shifted into high gear with the goal of getting parts of the route qualified for state matching money. In order to qualify for matching funds, parts of the road must be under contract and ready for construction by July 1, 1991. That may seem a generous amount of time for planning and design, but state Department of Transportation planners warn that there is little slack in the schedule, which must include approvals by the San Diego Assn. of Governments, San Diego planning commissioners, City Council committees and the full council, and the state Coastal Commission.

San Diego city planning commissioners took a preliminary look at a small western stretch of the 9-mile-long, $87-million-dollar project this week and decided they wanted a much more in-depth briefing before holding formal public hearings.

Commissioner Lynn Benn, who lives near the coastal end of the proposed route on Carmel Valley Road, expressed concern that the speedup of the freeway project in order to gain state matching funds could leave a lot of legitimate technical and environmental issues in the dust.

“Those people who are seeking to fast-track this in order to qualify for the money may use the pressures of time to overrule any objections,” Benn said.

And objections are surfacing even before the project emerges from its comment period. Residents of Pointe Del Mar, an exclusive development perched on a Del Mar Heights hillside across Interstate 5 from the proposed Route 56 interchange with I-5 have awakened to the fact that a flyover bridge to carry 56 traffic south on I-5 would rise 70 feet in the air and block their views of hills and valleys.

North City West residents, treated to a Caltrans presentation of the project that splits their new community, went away less than thrilled with the prospect of concrete freeway fences to cut down on traffic noise and also cut down on views.

Several hundred North City West and Del Mar Heights residents signed petitions protesting the location of Route 56 in the flood plain of Carmel Creek, the main tributary to Penasquitos Lagoon, and asked that the route be shifted south a mile or so, to higher land away from residential areas. That possibility was not addressed in the preliminary environmental report on the freeway.

James Whalen, vice president of Newland California, developers of that high land to the south, said the topography does not allow such a route through its Sorrento Highlands development scheduled to begin construction within the year.

There is too little distance between interchanges to add another freeway interchange at Carmel Mountain Road, he said, and the route would have to rise steeply 300 to 400 feet.

Benn, who is familiar with the Newland development, points out that plans call for 1 million cubic yards of earth-moving per acre, “and as long as they are going to tear down the hill, they might as well build the freeway through there.”

But outgoing San Diego City Councilman Ed Struiksma, at his last official Sandag executive committee session Friday, said the freeway should stay where it is, in Carmel Valley, but for different reasons.

“We need that freeway now. We’ve needed it for years. And I would oppose anything that would slow down its construction,” Struiksma said. “Environmentalists on the coast will probably launch some kind of drive. Their goal in life seems to be to delay and disrupt as much as they can.”

Struiksma’s district contains Mira Mesa Boulevard, which, about 10 years ago, became an unofficial east-west shortcut. The congestion has had a crippling effect on Mira Mesa, he said, as drivers from Rancho Penasquitos, Poway, Rancho Bernardo and even Escondido try to avoid the inland I-15 traffic crunch by heading for the coast.

Struiksma’s Friends of 56 Committee has been inactive of late, he said, “but, if this opposition continues, they will have to be re-energized.”

Fast-growing inland communities haven’t joined the debate over Route 56 yet, but their councilwoman, Abbe Wolfsheimer, has. She coined the slogan: “Route 56 by ‘96” and has been beating the drums for the long-delayed project at every level.

But even Wolfsheimer has mixed feelings about the route because of its effect on the environment. The freeway traverses about 3 miles of the city’s “urban reserve,” which is precluded from development other than large estates, without a citywide vote of approval.

She concedes it would be growth-inducing to build the freeway and suggested that it could be built without off-ramps through the urban reserve.

To Peter Navarro who heads the slow-growth group PLAN--Prevent Los Angelization Now--the freeway should not be built, at least not where the engineers have planned it.

“Do they think we are so stupid as not to remember that that valley (Carmel Valley) was to be the open space for North City West?” he asked. The design, through one of few remaining natural areas along the coast “is totally insensitive to the environment,” Navarro said. “We notice things like this.”