Tollway Debate Spills Into Ocean

Inflaming a feud over south Orange County’s shoreline, volunteers for the Sierra Club stormed San Clemente beaches Saturday to decry a planned toll road they say will pollute the nearby ocean with turbid runoff.

They asked sunbathers at three beaches to sign postcards to send to a county supervisor and the chairman of a water quality control board.

Officials at the Transportation Corridor Agencies, who proposed the new road, scoffed at the charges, saying the activists were using “extreme rhetoric” to scare people already rattled by a series of sewage spills into Orange County beaches.

The $644-million, 16-mile toll road would connect Oso Parkway to Interstate 5, south of San Clemente, crossing San Onofre State Park and San Mateo Creek. Construction would begin in 2004, officials said.

Mike Stockstill, TCA director of external affairs, said 200,000 cars on Interstate 5 pass over San Mateo Creek every day. Yet the beach where the creek ends--Trestles--is one of the cleanest in Southern California, he said.

“The No. 1 cause of beach pollution is human sewage,” Stockstill said. “End of debate.”

Not so fast, Sierra officials said. “That’s very entertaining: How do you compare a road that crosses on top of a creek with one that travels on the side?” asked Elizabeth Lambe, an organizer for the Sierra Club.

Besides, Lambe predicted the toll road will go the way of other toll passages: doomed to economic failure. She said the real purpose of the thoroughfare is to open the way for commercial development along one of Orange County’s last pristine areas.

Water experts say only time will tell who is correct in the environmental debate, at least when it comes to potential ocean pollution.

But the debate itself, set against a backdrop of a record number of sewage spills into the ocean, goes beyond the issue of water pollution and into the realm of preservation of local communities’ way of life.

Roads--from tollways to freeways--by their nature are never good for the environment, but they don’t rank high among the causes of local beach closures, said Deborah Jane, an environmental specialist for the Regional Water Quality Control Board in San Diego.

The effect of roads, like much urban development, tends to be cumulative, she said.

Roads create added water runoff because they are impervious, not allowing most rainwater to seep naturally into the ground. As water is deflected by the concrete, it gains volume and the ability to carry pollutants at a rapid clip, Jane said.

Vegetation, which in pristine environments serves as a kind of filter for the noxious runoff, is lacking in developed areas, so the runoff is more harmful, she said.

The question is whether TCA would indeed use best management practices to ensure that water quality is protected, as all developers must promise before they get construction permits, Jane said.

If TCA does this, environmentalists who claim the toll road will damage nearby oceans should be proved wrong, she said.

Often, however, many developers don’t follow through, Jane said.

“Historically, developers haven’t followed regulations, and regulators haven’t been enforcing them the way they should,” Jane said. “But developers are beginning to use the best management practices to protect water quality more and more. Slowly, they’re beginning to.”

Still, activists at the Sierra Club said the issue in San Clemente has as much to do with the toll road’s impact on a cloistered, rustic community as it does with ocean pollution.

“The road will bring urban sprawl and other sorts of pollution,” Lambe said. “If the real purpose of the toll road is to commercially develop open land--to bring Pizza Huts, Home Depots and video stores--then how much they protect the water will be cheapened because they will just bring another form of pollution to one of Southern California’s last untouched areas.”

But TCA’s Stockstill said the agency polled about 600 people in affected areas in South County, as well as Orange, Newport Beach and Yorba Linda, and 75% supported the toll road, he said. He called opponents of the toll road “anti-development.”

“Southern California is expected in the next 20 years to grow in population to the equivalent of another city of Chicago,” Stockstill said. “This road will help relieve some of the traffic congestion.”

The toll road controversy aside, water quality regulators said urban runoff is a huge problem. People tend to forget that mushrooming urban development has a total effect on the environment that can’t be easily isolated to one closed beach, Jane said.

“If you’re going to build a road,” she said, “you better do it in an environmentally reasonable way.”