EL TORO : Residents Can’t Believe Their Ears

When Denver and Elaine Fults moved into their stucco home nestled just below the Saddleback foothills of South County 11 years ago, they could hear the trickle of a nearby stream after a good rain.

Now sometimes they can barely hear each other when they stand at opposite corners of the bedroom. They have to yell over the rumblings of a major six-lane highway--the section of Trabuco Road that abuts their back yard.

“I’m not against progress,” said Fults, a 53-year-old Ford Aerospace engineer. “But they’ve completely destroyed our environment.”

In fact, the noise from several once-rural roads in the Lake Forest-El Toro area is an unhealthful irritant for the families in as many as 750 homes here, according to a report expected to be presented today to the Board of Supervisors.

The report recommends further study of the problem with an eye toward building a $2.24-million sound wall along portions of Trabuco, El Toro and Jeronimo Roads, Bake Parkway, Lake Forest Drive and Toledo Way. Residents would help pay for the proposed sound wall through a special property assessment extended over 10 or 15 years.

Developers who have built 25,000 homes in the foothills in the last decade--and who are in the process of building many hundreds more that will use these roads--would also be asked to chip in 25% to 50% of the cost of the sound wall.

But residents who say their property values have plummeted are furious at the suggestion that they should help pay for the sound wall. They are angry at the county planners who came up with the idea and at Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez, who represents that district on the board.

“They want us to pay for the problem. That’s utterly ridiculous. Why should I pay for what the county did?” Fults asked.

Fults complains that Vasquez, who took office three years ago, has been slow to react to residents’ concerns and “has not responded to the environmental issue at all.”

Adds Steven Stack, a neighbor on Shawnee Drive: “That’s one of the reasons there’s such a strong movement down here to become a city, because we don’t get representation from the supervisor.”

Vasquez bristles at the complaints, noting that it was he who requested the report now before the board.

“I’ve been here just a little over three years,” Vasquez said. “I don’t know what somebody expects in that period of time. It’s not an overnight proposition.”

Vasquez also said that when residents first came to him, “it was made very clear that the county did not have the financial resources” to pay for construction of a sound wall and “it was going to require a joint effort” among county, residents and developers.

According to the report from the county’s Environmental Management Agency, a consultant’s survey last spring found that noise in the affected neighborhoods averaged several notches above the acceptable limit set by the county of 65 decibels. The federal Environmental Protection Agency has recommended 55 decibels as an acceptable average.

“You do hear pretty much constant noise,” said Richard Adler, an EMA analyst who prepared the report.

Roanne and Tom Holliman, who moved into their neighborhood about a year ago, said that when the trucks are especially noisy, their children sometimes duck for cover, thinking it’s an earthquake.

“I didn’t sleep at all the first night, Roanne Holliman said. When I woke up that morning, I cried and said, ‘What have we done?’ ”