LAGUNA BEACH : Meeting to Focus on Plans for Major Road

County officials will hold a workshop soon on plans to widen and realign Laguna Canyon Road.

The meeting, to be scheduled later this summer, will allow residents to comment on at least two proposals for the road, including one that calls for widening the road to four lanes and moving it several hundred yards west, away from three lakes.

That plan was endorsed in January by 14 of 17 members of the Laguna Canyon Road Consensus Committee, which held closed sessions last year to consider options for the 4.6-mile stretch of road between El Toro Road and the San Diego Freeway.

Mayor Lida Lenney and Councilman Robert F. Gentry rejected that plan and will present an alternative at the workshop, Gentry said.

While any attempt to tamper with the bucolic roadway stirs controversy in this coastal town, county officials say the alteration is necessary, in part to make it safer.

“There’s been an inordinate amount of two-car collisions, head-on-type collisions, for this type of road,” said Kenneth R. Smith, director of transportation for the county’s Environmental Management Agency.

The road is listed on the county’s Master Plan of Arterial Highways, which means it has the potential to be widened to six lanes. Some officials see the four-lane option as a compromise that both sides can live with.

The project “is one that we are committed to seeing through,” Smith said. “Our goal would be to get it done in 1996.”

Proponents of the $18-million project say that shifting the road westward would allow three natural lakes in the area to be restored.

But Gentry said the second option would be less expensive and less intrusive, calling for the road to be lifted above the lakes. A median would be installed along sections of the road where head-on collisions have typically occurred.

That plan would address some of the road’s problems without widening the entire strip. “That’s what we object to--a whole new road that looks like Newport Coast Drive,” Gentry said.

In the meantime, state transportation officials said that they will spruce up the heavily traveled road in the fall by applying a new surface coat, sealing cracks and repairing potholes.

Alberto Angelini, California Department of Transportation project manager, said the surface coating is generally applied at night or during low-traffic hours and the road is quickly back in use.

The other main road into the city, Coast Highway, is not scheduled for significant repair work until 1997 or 1998.