Planners to Recommend Controversial Road Projects

Ventura County planners will recommend Tuesday that supervisors support two controversial road improvement projects along a stretch of California 118 in Las Posas Valley.

County staff has determined that the projects are consistent with the General Plan and the recent voter-approved SOAR growth-control measure.

“The concern that people have is that the projects are being over-designed and it’s really just a plot to increase the highway to four lanes in the future,” said Thomas Berg, Resource Management Agency director. “The two issues have been mushed together and it has complicated the matter.”

Residents fear that the projects, scheduled to break ground in fall 2001, are just the beginning of a larger plan to widen a 16-mile strip of the highway.

But Berg disagrees.

“They’re putting the cart before the horse,” Berg said Friday. “There’s really two issues going on. One issue is whether the intersection and the curve near Mesa School should be improved now. We think they should.”

County planners also want Caltrans officials to study the projects’ impact on the area’s farmland, riparian resources and rural character. The environmental study would also address effects on noise and parking, Berg said.

One road project would widen and straighten the notorious Mesa School S-curve, located midway between Somis and Saticoy, where since 1990 more than 600 accidents have occurred, resulting in 20 deaths. The project is expected to cost $6.7 million.

The other would widen the Somis intersection at the rural, two-lane highway at California 34 and Donlon Road. County staff supports a Caltrans plan to study the possibility of installing a roundabout, or traffic circle, at the busy intersection.

“I’m perfectly comfortable with their recommendations,” said Supervisor Judy Mikels, whose district includes Somis. “The important thing is that there’s no lack of compliance with the county’s General Plan or the agriculture policy. Those issues are moot. . . . The ball is now in the court of Caltrans to go forward with a final design.”

But Supervisor John K. Flynn, who has strongly opposed the road improvement projects, asserting they would lead to more development, said the county staff report was “way off base.”

In December, he and Supervisor Kathy Long proposed that county staff study whether the projects abide by the General Plan and the Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources measure.

“I don’t agree with it,” Flynn said. “The projects are not in compliance with SOAR. We have to be sensitive to community values. You don’t pass a measure like SOAR and at the same time continue with a project that would accommodate millions of people in the future.”

The larger, $11.8-million widening project would not have been allowed under the current General Plan. Members of Save Our Somis are anticipating possible changes in the plan allowing a four-lane highway.

“Then, Somis as we know it is gone,” member John Kerkhoff, an automotive engineer, said Friday. “That would devastate the town.”

In a full-page ad printed last week in a local paper, the group urged supervisors not to support the road improvement projects, “especially since they appear to be a first step to [widening] all of Highway 118 to four lanes.”

Kerkhoff said the group Tuesday will present supervisors with a petition signed by 700 residents seeking a “bypass road” to alleviate commuter traffic in Somis.

The road would reroute California 34, avoiding Somis altogether. In their report, county planners said Caltrans should consider a bypass road in the long-range highway development of the Somis community.

“Caltrans will look at all the viable alternatives,” Berg said. “The one with the lesser impact is the one they should choose.”