Three Cheers for Hayden Parks Bill

* Thank you for your great article about state Sen. Tom Hayden’s bill designed to protect our state parks (March 25). I need a place where I can escape from traffic and road noise.

I’d like to say to Susan Withrow of the Transportation Corridor Agencies board that I am a “real person” who lives in Mission Viejo and works in San Juan Capistrano.

These roads through parks are harmful to people like me, who need quiet and beautiful locations for recreation. I’m grateful to our state senators who are helping to protect our public land.

Withrow might be interested in knowing that a recent analysis of the Texas Transportation Institute’s annual report on metropolitan congestion shows that adding roads does not relieve congestion.

Let’s take the hundreds of millions of dollars from the Foothill toll road and invest it in transit that will truly improve our quality of life: safer air for our children, cleaner water and peaceful parks.

LAURA COHEN

Mission Viejo

* In the article regarding the bill to protect state parklands from public highways, Lisa Telles, the Transportation Corridor Agencies spokeswoman, states that “many laws on the books [deal] with the impact of building in parks, and we’re following all of those rules.”

I wonder if she had a straight face when she said that.

When TCA couldn’t get approval to cut through Laguna Canyon lands for the San Joaquin corridor, it simply got the rule waived.

When it looked like the Environmental Protection Agency might not give approval for the latest toll road because it didn’t see a “purpose and need” as required by law, again TCA intervened to subvert that law.

It got a rider, courtesy of Rep. Ron Packard (R-Oceanside), disallowing EPA input and thereby denying Orange County residents the full protection of the information-gathering process that is afforded every other part of the nation.

Indeed, the TCA has specifically viewed and targeted protected open space areas as easy pickings, laws or no laws. No wonder it is worried about this bill.

BILL HOLMES

Dana Point

* The proposed Foothill South toll road is a gun pointed at the head of south Orange County. Not only would it attack the integrity of the state park system by paving over much of San Onofre State Beach, it will create urban sprawl and increase traffic in the communities of south Orange County.

Despite the claims of the Transportation Corridor Agencies, the Foothill South will not reduce local traffic congestion.

TCA wants the public to think that the Foothill South toll road is a “done deal.” It is not. The road is financially risky, environmentally disastrous, harmful to local communities and unneeded except by developers with big plans for Orange County’s rapidly dwindling open space.

BILL CORCORAN

Public lands conservation assistant

Sierra Club

Angeles chapter