Canyon Road Widening Returns for Discussion

Widening Laguna Canyon Road, a project stalled by the Orange County bankruptcy, is back on tonight’s City Council agenda.

City Manager Kenneth C. Frank will update the council on the project’s funding and timetable.

The county’s road program manager, Roger Hohnbaum, said Monday that the county does not have the money to continue with the $20-million project.

“We are considering ways to implement this project, and it doesn’t go any further than that,” he said. “The funding for this is critical. . . . There needs to be a game plan put together . . . and that’s what we’re attempting to do.”

County and state officials have studied their options to widen and realign curvy Laguna Canyon Road, partly for safety reasons, for more than a decade.

Two months before the county filed for bankruptcy in December 1994, the Board of Supervisors endorsed a plan to widen the road to four lanes from El Toro Road to the San Diego Freeway and shift it to the west.

While some residents opposed the plan, many environmentalists backed it because it would reroute the road around a lake that it now divides and would restore wetlands.

So far, the county has completed only environmental and preliminary project studies. Taking the next step--developing a project report--would not be wise until funding can be determined, Hohnbaum said.

Planners had expected the project to be underway this year and completed by 1997. Hohnbaum said that those dates are no longer realistic.

“We’re trying to figure out what it is we want to reactivate,” he said, and “how we can pay for it.”