Panel OKs Study of Road Across Park

It is a proposed road that environmentalists thought they had erased from planning maps a year ago. But the possibility of extending the Eastern toll road north through Chino Hills State Park reappeared Monday when a regional road commission approved studying the idea.

The Four Corners Transportation Policy committee, made up of representatives from Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, also approved a request to study the widening of Ortega Highway, which runs through Ronald W. Caspers Regional Park and Cleveland National Forest.

Both studies were opposed by Orange County representatives.

Environmentalists currently pushing a bill in the state Legislature that would ban new roads and road widening in state parks say the two proposals are proof that the law needs to be changed.

“They’re going to make our case for us,” said Claire Schlotterbeck, president of the group that helped create Chino Hills State Park. “It just goes to show you that once something like this is suggested, it might never entirely go away.”

But Terrence Belanger, the city manager for Diamond Bar, said it is too soon to rule out anything given the area’s increasing traffic congestion.

“We’re looking at alternatives to try to find relief to what is inevitably going to occur,” he said. “The job locations continue to be in Orange County, and we already have traffic coming off the highways into our city trying to get out of gridlock.”

Belanger said a road connecting Euclid Avenue and the Eastern toll road wouldn’t necessarily go through the state park, although the park clearly lies in the middle.

Mark Pisano, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Governments, said any addition to long-term regional planning maps would require a lengthy technical and environmental review. Pisano said the association last year removed a road that cut through Chino Hills State Park and another that went through Cleveland National Forest because of concerns about the harm they would do to the environment.

But with open space in Southern California quickly vanishing, Pisano said the question of where to build new roads is difficult.

“This is one of the major dilemmas facing this region,” he said. “But I think our regional council has a clear position: We will not undertake transportation policies that will adversely affect our parks and other habitat areas.”

Extending the 241

A possible extension to the Eastern toll road would cut through a state park to connect with the Chino Valley Freeway.

Source: City of Chino Hills