Carlsbad Village Drive Now in Sight at End of Costly, 4 1/2-Year Road

It was hardly the most colossal decision the Carlsbad City Council ever made when it voted to rename Elm Avenue, in an unabashed attempt to snag more passing tourists from Interstate 5.

However, the city is learning that little in life--not even changing Elm to fancier Carlsbad Village Drive--is simple. The effort has evolved into a 4 1/2-year, $143,000 process to get new freeway signs.

Looking back on the surprise costs and complications, Patty Cratty, the city’s acting redevelopment director, said with a slight mixture of rue and amusement that there “was probably innocence on our part.”

The city is expected to sign an agreement any day with the state Department of Transportation to design and post nine long-awaited signs on I-5 that city officials and shop owners hope will inform the outside world that a downtown “village” exists in the seaside community of Carlsbad.

True, a street renaming may be a mundane municipal matter, but, to Carlsbad, the new moniker is seen as a critical enticement for tourists to exit the freeway and explore the city’s quaintly redeveloped business district.

“The downtown merchants say this is the cheapest billboard they can get,” said Steve Link, manager of the Carlsbad Convention and Visitors Bureau. It was the Village Merchants Assn. that prodded the council in early 1987 to alter Elm, so named in 1886, in favor of a name invoking the village--even though the community has a growing population of about 60,000.

“It does express the ambience of the place,” Link said.

Ambience aside, he said Carlsbad is “second only to San Diego in tourism” in the county, and the city gets $3 million a year from its bed tax.

It helps to think about beds in understanding the importance of signs indicating the proximity of a visitor-oriented village. Link noted that Carlsbad has “2,000 motel rooms we have to keep full every night. That’s quite a number for a city our size.”

Cratty spoke of a broader need for the new signs, noting that “we have people in the community who don’t know the downtown exists.”

Considering such imperatives, officials and merchants have found it rather frustrating that freeway signs converting Elm to Carlsbad Village Drive are taking so long.

After the council voted on the new name, the actual switch was expected in mid-1988. But that was before the dawn of awareness, namely word from Caltrans that freeway signs aren’t changed for free. In fact, the city learned that the nine new signs will cost $143,000.

“We didn’t know cities pay for freeway signs,” Cratty said. The council agreed to the expenditure early last year, and it’s taken until now for Caltrans and the city to approach an agreement.

Caltrans spokesman Steve Saville acknowledged that “it has been kind of a long, drawn-out process.” Nor does it end with an agreement.

Caltrans is now expected to take at least 18 months to design the new signs. “You can’t take an old sign and just repaint it green,” Saville said. Because Carlsbad Village Drive is a much longer name than Elm Avenue, larger and heavier signs are required, as well as stronger bracing.

By the time the signs go up, it will have been 4 1/2 years since the council approved the name change. Despite his fondness for the new name, even Link had to acknowledge, “Elm didn’t sound too bad to me in the first place.”