Irvine Pedestrian Overpass Flap Still Growing : Expansion: The city is spending nearly $700,000 on landscaping that will be torn right up if June 5 ballot measure passes.

Even as voters prepare to decide whether two pedestrian overpasses on Yale Avenue should be expanded to accommodate traffic, landscapers are planting trees and otherwise sprucing up the embankments along one of the overcrossings.

Residents have long complained about the area surrounding the bridge that crosses the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad tracks. But should voters on June 5 approve the expansion of that bridge and the one that crosses the San Diego Freeway, much of the landscaping work will have to be excavated.

The landscaping project, which the City Council approved last November for $694,101, symbolizes the longstanding political battle in Irvine regarding the Yale Avenue bridges. Councilwoman Sally Anne Sheridan, who voted against the landscaping, said the council majority approved the project even though it realized there was growing support to expand the bridges.

“Obviously, I think it’s very inappropriate,” Sheridan said of the landscaping. “I honestly believe you can’t be spending taxpayer money . . . for something that can be removed.”

She added, “We’ve been known to do dumber things.”

Sheridan, who is challenging incumbent Mayor Larry Agran in the June 5 mayoral election, supports the expansion of the bridges.

Agran, however, stands by the decision to landscape the bridge, saying there is no reason why the neighborhoods surrounding it should be denied the same aesthetic advantages other parts of the city enjoy.

“If the council were to withhold landscaping or other improvements simply because it were a matter of controversy, we would be paralyzed as a council to do almost anything,” Agran said.

He said that even if voters should approve the measure to expand the bridges, it may take some time to find funding to do the work.

“People have been demanding the landscaping for years and years,” Agran said. “There’s no reason those neighborhoods should be deprived.”

Those who want the bridges expanded say the city should have waited until after the results of the election before going ahead with the landscaping work.

Those who want to keep the overpasses limited to pedestrian traffic say the landscaping is merely the final step in a long-awaited improvement plan aimed at making the span over the railroad tracks more pleasing to pedestrians.

The landscaping was approved by the City Council on Nov. 28, nearly two months before the measure to expand the bridges was put on the June 5 ballot, according to City Manager Paul O. Brady Jr. It was the final touch in an improvement process in which an old wooden and steel footbridge was replaced with the current concrete span.

Brady said questions were raised about landscaping once the measure to expand the bridges was put on the ballot in late January. But delaying the work would have cost the city money. By then, it had already entered into a contract with the landscaping company, Artistic Landscape & Engineering Inc. of South Gate.

“It was talked about,” Brady said of delaying the work. “But the council had already made its decision. It never came back up.”

The two proposed vehicular overpasses on Yale Avenue are included in the city’s general plan. However, the council voted in 1988 to study amending the general plan so that the bridges would remain limited to pedestrians, bicycles and emergency vehicles only.

Angered by that action, supporters of the overpass expansions circulated petitions during the Christmas holiday that called for vehicular overpasses to remain in the general plan. Supporters gathered 7,002 signatures by January, enough to put Measure B on the June 5 ballot.

In response, the council in February voted 4 to 1, with Sheridan dissenting, to put a second bridge proposal--Measure C--on the ballot that would allow the bridges to remain as they are.

Members of a group called Yale Action Committee, which circulated the bridge expansion petitions, argue that widening the overpasses would ease traffic on the city’s main roadways by giving residents alternative routes for short trips.

Members of the group Friends of Caution for Neighborhood Preservation, however, claim that the expanded bridges would dump more traffic on side streets and come at the expense of the safety of children, who use the pedestrian overpasses to get to school.

Opponents of the expansion estimate it will cost about $9 million to expand the bridges; supporters put the figure at about half that.

Meanwhile, both sides are campaigning hard in the final days before the election. Members of the anti-expansion group are handing out leaflets in neighborhoods. Members of the Yale Action Committee have taken out a full-page advertisement in the local newspaper, the Irvine World News, and have launched a fund-raising effort.