Foul Forecast for a 4-Decade-Old Freeway Plan : Foe of Interstate 710 extension will assume key post in U.S. highway agency

To paraphrase Bob Dylan, at times you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. This is one of those times for supporters and opponents of the final extension of the Long Beach Freeway, Interstate 710, through El Sereno and South Pasadena: The wind is blowing, very hard, against the long-delayed project.

The direction of the gale became clear last week when U.S. Transportation Secretary Federico Pena confirmed that he will appoint Evelyn Fierro, a former mayor of South Pasadena and one of the most vociferous opponents of the 710 Freeway extension, to a key post in the Federal Highway Administration. A public relations executive and long-time Democratic Party activist, Fierro will go to work later this month as a top assistant to the federal highway chief, who will decide whether the Clinton Administration provides the federal share of the estimated $1 billion it will cost to complete the final 6.2-mile leg of the freeway.

Fierro claims she will approach the decision on the proposed Long Beach freeway extension with an open mind. “Personally, I don’t want the freeway to go through, but I am a professional,” she told one interviewer. Anyone who really buys that is probably also gullible enough to buy the whole 710 Freeway from Fierro.

For better or worse, one of the leading opponents of the freeway extension will soon be able to delay for at least three more years a project that, even if construction began now, would not be finished until about the year 2010. And without substantial federal aid, it could well be impossible to complete this freeway, which now runs from the port of Long Beach to the Los Angeles-Alhambra border.

The proposed extension, which has been planned--and bitterly opposed--since 1949, would link Interstate 710 with Interstate 210, the Foothill Freeway, in a major interchange just west of downtown Pasadena. There have always been sound reasons for closing this major gap in the region’s freeway network. In fact, The Times supported doing so many years ago, when it was argued that Interstate 710 would provide an alternative route to congested Interstate 5, near downtown Los Angeles, for trucks traveling between the Central Valley and the L.A.-Long Beach Harbor. But there have been enough changes over the last 40 years--fiscally, environmentally and legally--that it would probably be wise for the freeway extension’s backers to use this latest political setback to consider some alternatives.

To their credit, Fierro and some other freeway opponents in the affected communities are not thoughtless obstructionists. They acknowledge the nightmarish traffic congestion in Alhambra caused by the 710 Freeway’s termination on a busy surface street, and they have tried to devise solutions that they claim are both less costly and could be done much more quickly than the freeway extension.

Of course, some of the alternatives are, at least for now, as much products of wishful thinking as completion of the freeway is--like the Alameda Corridor project to speed trains moving goods inland from the harbor, or completion of the Blue Line trolley to carry more commuters from Pasadena to downtown Los Angeles. But others, like a quarter-mile extension of the existing freeway to diffuse some of the traffic that currently backs up on Valley Boulevard, certainly seem both sensible and doable.

However, the challenge to prove that these alternatives are viable now lies with the freeway’s opponents, especially Fierro. She is now in a key position not only to halt a project she detests but to help relieve the very real problems caused by a freeway gap that should never have been left open so long. She and other 710 Freeway haters can prove their good faith by working hard to make their alternatives real.