Costs of Toll Road Are Weighed Against Essential County Services

I’m so mad, I am almost ready to go down to Laguna Canyon and get arrested again. It is absurd that the people protesting in the canyon are being accused of wasting county money!

I went there to point out, and hopefully encourage others to speak out, about what should be the priorities at this time of financial crisis in Orange County. The toll road is the waste of money! It is unconscionable that one dime is being used to continue with a project that will benefit so few. That road is merely an on-off ramp through one of the wealthiest areas in the county to save a few people a few minutes of driving time. Oh, and it will allow the developers to build more expensive homes in our county’s last coastal wilderness area.

How about it, all the rest of you people in Orange County who never drive near that area? The county is supposed to be spending money for essential services only. Is that road an essential service to you? We need money for schools, police protection and our fire departments, not toll roads.

MARION PACK

Executive Director, Alliance for Survival

Santa Ana

* I’m writing because of the story (“Candlelight Vigil Planned to Protest Laguna Tollway,” Dec. 15) about the San Joaquin Hills corridor. I’ve just about had it with the protesters against the corridor. The corridor needs to be finished, and they keep throwing monkey wrenches into the works with no good reason at all.

If these people haven’t noticed, the population of Orange County keeps growing, and if the areas need to be used to spread the population, then let it be! If the protesters are afraid of progress, let them move to Baker or Barstow. There they would not have to worry about new freeways, condos or office buildings.

The new corridor would make a big difference to the flow of traffic on Pacific Coast Highway and the San Diego Freeway. The ones against the tollway do not have to use it. In fact, I bet they use Interstate 5, which, at one time, had to be built for the growing population. I would understand their plight if they didn’t use any streets or freeways to drive on, but I know they do and that makes them hypocrites.

STEVE CLARK

Dana Point

* The tired litany about the toll road providing jobs and relieving traffic congestion, which Transportation Corridor Agencies (Executive Director) William C. Woollett Jr. stated in The Times, should be countered with two facts:

The jobs are only temporary while the construction goes on; and it has long since been proven that what such roads do is encourage more development, the result of which is worse traffic conditions, and pollution as well.

Meanwhile the loss of natural mitigating habitat is permanent.

ANDY WING

Laguna Beach

* Well, fellow Orange County residents, our government has given us a wake-up call. The message is that no one is minding the county’s fiscal store. A loss of a billion dollars here, another billion there, pretty soon we will be talking about some real money.

Conservative Orange County has been given a lesson in liberal fiscal accountability.

There is another arm where our county government is equally unaccountable. The environment and quality of life in the county is being continually sacrificed to provide huge profits to large developers just as Wall Street brokerage houses raked in fat commissions on our wild risk-taking.

A prime example is the county’s nonstop efforts to push toll roads through our beautiful back country so developers can bulldoze oaks to build pink and green condos. The Board of Supervisors should take the money for those roads and spend it on something we really need, like salaries for firemen, teachers and police--public servants whose future they have risked.

STEVE G. CHRISTMAN

San Clemente