Residents Fear the Effects of Tollway : Transit: Nellie Gail Ranch homeowners want road’s builder to safeguard enclave.

Residents of the affluent Nellie Gail Ranch neighborhood have a vision of what life will be like when the San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor opens at their back door in 1997.

They see confused motorists exiting at Greenfield Drive to avoid the first tollbooth, then racing through their quiet streets trying to find their way back to Interstate 5. Further, residents fear, the off-ramp might make Nellie Gail an easy target for burglars and vandals.

So the Nellie Gail Ranch Owners Assn. has asked the road’s builder, the Transportation Corridor Agencies, to pony up $197,000 for unlocked gates, an unmanned guard pavilion, patterned pavement, a monument sign and more trees at Greenfield to make Nellie Gail look like a gated community.

Residents hope that will keep out the lost, the speeders and the criminals.

The TCA hasn’t evaluated the plan yet, but with $324 million of its funds frozen in the county’s failed investment pool, the proposal is likely to run into some opposition.

“We’ll have to see what their proposal is,” said TCA spokeswoman Lisa Telles. “But the time to have things included in the project is usually part of the environmental studies, and that’s long past.”

The 15-mile, $800-million San Joaquin Hills tollway will extend the Corona del Mar Freeway through Irvine, Laguna Canyon, Aliso Viejo and Laguna Hills, ending at Interstate 5 south of Avery Parkway. A one-way trip will cost $2. The TCA, a consortium of the county and 12 cities, is paying for the San Joaquin Hills, Foothill and Eastern toll roads mostly through bond sales that will be repaid with future toll revenue.

Northbound drivers who mistakenly get on the San Joaquin Hills toll road at Interstate 5 can exit at Greenfield, the first off-ramp, without being charged.

Nellie Gail residents say the best way to steer such drivers toward Crown Valley Parkway, where they can get back on Interstate 5, is to make the Nellie Gail Ranch entrance narrower and more imposing by putting in a three-rail fence, empty guard shack and turnaround area so cars don’t make U-turns using residents’ driveways.

“We have a fairly unique situation . . . that needs a fairly unique response,” said Andrew Ulich, president of the Ranch Owners Assn. He urged the Laguna Hills City Council to ask the TCA for as much money as possible to divert traffic toward a Laguna Niguel shopping center just south of the toll road.

“If we could mitigate the problem for only $5,000, it would make us just as happy,” he said. “To make somebody pay for landscaping and gating is not our goal. But it may be the only effective means” to divert traffic.

The Greenfield exit is the only one along the toll road that empties directly into a residential area. Most off-ramps are at major streets, including Moulton Parkway, La Paz Road and Sand Canyon Avenue.

The original tollway plans called for one on-ramp and one off-ramp at Greenfield. But then another pair of ramps was added, angering Nellie Gail residents who were worried about extra traffic. By the year 2010, 25,000 cars are expected to use the Greenfield ramps each day.

At his last council meeting Nov. 22, Nellie Gail resident and former Laguna Hills Councilman L. Allan Songstad Jr. said the TCA must accept responsibility for the potential traffic problems and solve them, even if that means paying for unused gates and an unused guard pavilion.

“I feel no compunction whatsoever about throwing in everything and the kitchen sink and asking (the TCA) to do what’s right,” Songstad had urged his fellow council members. “They need to mitigate a bad, bad situation they’ve created.”

With strong encouragement from Songstad and Councilwoman Melody Carruth, who also lives in Nellie Gail, the council voted unanimously to request the full $197,000 from the TCA.

Although he voted for the request, Councilman Randal J. Bressette, one of two council members who do not live in Nellie Gail, said the city’s request may be too elaborate to receive the go-ahead from the TCA.

“My concern is that you don’t go overboard,” Bressette said last week. “If someone threw a baseball through your window, you would want him to replace the glass but not the whole window frame. And you wouldn’t ask him to come in and pick up the glass off the floor. When you ask for changes that are aesthetic in nature and that don’t divert traffic, it may delay” funding.

Although a majority of the council members live in Nellie Gail, they said they would have asked for money to divert traffic from any other residential neighborhood.

In May, the TCA gave Laguna Hills $5,000 to draw up its Greenfield traffic diversion plan. At the time, William C. Woollett Jr., the TCA’s chief executive, said the TCA understood the plan might include community gating.

But by September, San Joaquin Hills corridor manager Gene W. Foster told Woollett in a memorandum he felt Nellie Gail was asking for too much and that their plan didn’t fit in the corridor’s budget.

Mayor Joel T. Lautenschleger, the city’s representative to the TCA who does not live in Nellie Gail, said he now thinks the city may have to scale back its request.

“With the county financial crisis, this is probably not the top priority of the TCA, but at least some money should be set aside,” he said. “I think the guard pavilion or shack is just an option that was thrown in. I don’t know if it will continue to be there when we get into discussions with the TCA. As long as we stick to traffic mitigation, the TCA should be happy to help us.”