Court Orders Blocked Road Opened : Commuting: City told to remove barricades from Pomerado Road, key route from North County to San Diego.

Pomerado Road should be open for traffic next week if San Diego officials bow to Friday’s ruling by the 4th District Court of Appeal that the city has no right to close a “regionally important road.”

Pomerado, which runs from Escondido through Rancho Bernardo and Poway into San Diego, was closed in November, 1987, when San Diego annexed part of the unincorporated through which the road runs.

Last November, Poway filed suit demanding that San Diego reopen the road, and Friday the appeals court upheld a lower court order that the road be reopened immediately.

Poway City Manager Jim Bowersox immediately called San Diego City Manager Jack McGrory to find out when the court order would be implemented and barricades along the popular North County shortcut would be removed. He was unable to reach McGrory.

“I imagine that the issue will be resolved, and the road will be reopened early next week,” Poway City Atty. Stephen Eckis said. However, Les Girard, San Diego deputy city attorney, said he will meet with the San Diego City Council early next week in closed session “to seek further guidance.”

The appeal court’s ruling could be appealed to the state Supreme Court.

In its Friday ruling, the appeal court said that “one local authority’s actions within its own jurisdiction may not infringe upon the rights of other citizens of the greater metropolitan area to travel from community to community on publicly owned and controlled streets and highways.”

The three-justice panel also commented that “we do not believe that the Legislature anticipated that its enactment of (a section of the state motor vehicle code) would serve to empower any local authority to promote the health and safety of its own citizens by interfering with the rights of other members of the public to safely travel on the public streets.”

Eckis had argued, in seeking to have the road reopened, that San Diego had no authority to keep Pomerado Road closed to through traffic after the road had been improved and realigned to meet safety standards.

Girard had argued that San Diego had the right to blockade the road until another access road--South Poway Parkway linking Poway to Interstate 15--was completed. The second road is needed to prevent excessive traffic on Pomerado and through the exclusive San Diego suburb of Scripps Ranch, city officials said.

Eckis said Friday that “the court obviously took this issue very seriously” and noted that the 31-page decision addressed and rejected San Diego’s arguments that it had closed the road legally through amendment of the city’s general plan and that the state motor vehicle code gave it the right to take that step.

If the appeal court had recognized San Diego’s right to blockade a regional road, Eckis explained, “it would have granted broad new powers to local governments and impacted the entire state.”

Pomerado Road, once the route of U.S. 395, was returned to city street status after Interstate 15 was built to the west but still serves much of the northeast part of the county as a commuter shortcut to I-15 and the city of San Diego.

Before San Diego annexed a county island lying between San Diego and Poway, Pomerado was a narrow, winding two-lane road connecting Poway with I-15 at Miramar Road. Even so, about 5,000 motorists used it daily to avoid peak-hour traffic congestion on I-15.

When the 1 1/2-mile substandard section of Pomerado was upgraded to a straight, four-lane arterial at a cost of nearly $3 million, traffic was expected to increase to about 15,000 cars a day, which concerned Scripps Ranch residents whose community lies along Pomerado. Daily traffic is expected to reach 34,000 cars a day by the year 2010.