Tollway Foes File Suit Over Foothill Route Consequences : Transportation: Agencies fail to account for growth the road would spur and how resulting population boom would affect environment, opponents say.

Opponents of the proposed Foothill tollway in South County filed suit Friday against the $746-million highway, saying it would spur growth on broad stretches of undeveloped land, cause air pollution and harm wildlife, including an endangered songbird.

The lawsuit marks the second legal battle this year against the Transportation Corridor Agencies, a coalition of county and city officials pushing the Foothill project and two other planned tollways.

Two national environmental organizations joined a group of local residents and a noted wildlife biologist to push the legal battle against the pay-to-use Foothill highway, which would run through the pristine hills of the county’s largely undeveloped southeast quadrant.

“They just haven’t addressed the environmental issues as they should have,” said Phil Feyerabend, chairman of San Clementians Against Tollroads, a citizens group that joined the lawsuit. “This toll road would just be devastating to the last little bit of open space we have down in this area.”

Officials with the Transportation Corridor Agencies refused to comment on the lawsuit filed by SCAT, which was joined by the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and UC Berkeley biologist Paul Beier, who is conducting a study of mountain lions in Orange County.

“We won’t have any comment until we actually are served with this lawsuit and have a chance to examine the allegations,” said Mike Stockstill, a spokesman for the tollway agencies.

The lawsuit seeks to overturn an environmental impact report approved Oct. 10 by the tollway agencies’ directors for the road’s southern segment, which would run for 15 miles from Oso Parkway in the north to Interstate 5 just south of the county line.

Work has already begun on the northern half of the Foothill tollway, which would flank sections of Mission Viejo and other parcels of land already dotted with houses or scheduled for development. The lawsuit does not seek to stop construction of that segment.

Earlier this year, foes of the San Joaquin Hills tollway filed suit against that road, which would run from San Juan Capistrano through the rolling coastal foothills to Newport Beach. In a victory for opponents, a county Superior Court judge last month ordered the tollway agencies to reconsider an environmental review that the coalition had approved for the highway.

The legal battle over the San Joaquin Hills tollway has troubled officials at the agencies, who are eager to start building the key traffic link that would tie the burgeoning communities of South County to industrial centers to the north.

But the litigation filed Friday against the Foothill tollway should not present as pressing a problem. Authorities have long acknowledged that work on the tollway’s southern segment will probably not begin until late in the decade, meaning that even a protracted legal battle might not affect the agencies’ drawn-out time schedule.

The crux of the Foothill tollway lawsuit centers on an argument that tollway planners failed to properly analyze the highway’s effects on the broad stretches of open space it would traverse in the eastern outback of South County.

In particular, the tollway agencies failed to consider how much growth would be sparked by the road, undermining the accuracy of findings on air and water quality, traffic congestion and other factors, said Sharon Hope Lockhart, an Orange attorney representing tollway foes.

“They have not analyzed the project sufficiently, especially the cumulative impacts, and they haven’t adequately documented their findings,” she said.

The agencies also failed to address a range of wildlife issues sufficiently, Lockhart said.

As envisioned, the road would cross terrain inhabited by the least Bell’s vireo, a tiny gray songbird on the federal endangered species list, and would bisect upward of 2,000 acres of coastal sage scrub, a scruffy mix of vegetation that is habitat for the California gnatcatcher--now being considered for federal protection--and dozens of other sensitive plants and animals.

The lawsuit alleges that the agencies failed to adequately identify what species would be affected and assess the road’s impact on wetlands and “wildlife corridors,” the traditional routes animals such as mountain lions and deer follow while hunting or foraging.

It also argues that the effects on endangered species along the route are underestimated because the environmental review analyzed too little terrain along the road. The study focused on a quarter-mile band running along each side.

The environmental impact report was flawed because alternatives such as mass transit were never studied, the lawsuit alleges.

In addition, it contends that many mitigation measures proposed by the tollway agencies hinge on studies not yet performed, calling into question the effectiveness of such remedies.

Finally, the suit notes that the route would cut through San Onofre State Park and several other environmental preserves, violating federal rules against highways encroaching on such sanctuaries.