Highway Proposal Hits Mono Lake Roadblock

Conflict is as endemic to primordial Mono Lake as the surreal spires of calcium carbonate tufa that protrude from its briny surface. The latest chapter involves a crooked highway.

The genesis of the project was innocent enough: Residents around the high desert lake wanted a safer highway shoulder for bicyclists, an alternative to the hair-raising turnoff to the Old Marina and wider pullouts where passing tourists could take in the sights.

But here--where a bitter battle was successfully waged to stop Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power from sucking the lake dry--a well-oiled army of environmental protectors stands at the ready. When the project ballooned into a $13-million overhaul that could threaten precious wetlands and create an eyesore in the heart of a protected scenic zone, they waged war.

“There are two things to remember here: Just about anything is a controversy in Mono Lake ... and don’t leave anybody out,” said Brad Sturdivant, the California State Parks supervising ranger who oversees the Mono Lake Tufa State Reserve.

The California Department of Transportation widening project is now being more closely evaluated and may be scaled down from its original blueprint. And all sides say they are cooperating to come up with a plan that improves road safety while protecting the precious resource.

The compromise came after a typically spirited campaign that taught Caltrans a thing or two about doing business here.

The Mono Lake Committee--which won the fight against the DWP after 16 painstaking years--called out its troops, flooding Gov. Gray Davis’ office last month with more than 2,000 pleas to scale back the venture. Local officials with the U.S. Forest Service, California State Parks and the Regional Water Quality Control Board piled on too, favoring no development at all if a more sensitive alternative weren’t forthcoming.

Concerns ran so high that Caltrans director Jeffrey Morales and State Water Resources Control Board Chairman Art Baggett paid a rare visit to the little lakeside town of Lee Vining near the Sierra’s eastern slope last month to calm nerves.

And all this before the project even entered its design phase. The brouhaha offers a glimpse at just how touchy development can be at Mono Lake--championed nationwide as an environmental success story.

Since the State Water Resources Control Board ordered the DWP to halt its water diversions and restore the lake’s feeder streams and waterfowl habitat, the comeback has exceeded expectations. The lake level has risen by 8 feet, creek-side growths of cottonwoods and willows have sprouted, and one species of bird that had disappeared for decades has returned. But those delicate gains came after 16 years of court battles, and the lake’s varied band of advocates isn’t about to see them reversed.

“Caltrans is coming to see ... how much higher the bar is to do a project here,” said Mono Lake Committee Co-Executive Director Geoffrey McQuilkin. “The number of citizens of California, and the number of agencies that have an investment in protecting the lake and seeing it restored, is not something they initially realized.”

The current flap began a decade ago, when residents asked the Mono County Local Transportation Commission for modest changes to the stretch of U.S. 395 that curls around the lake’s western shore.

But as the proposal lumbered its way through the state’s transportation bureaucracy, it ballooned into a substantial project to significantly widen nearly three miles of highway, pushing it toward the rising water’s edge and adding bulky retaining walls or fill slopes that would affect wetlands and scar the pristine view.

Caltrans officials said that they have worked closely with local constituents and just want to make the roadway safer. The document that has caused such alarm is only a rough outline of the proposal, said Caltrans project manager Tim Shultz, based in nearby Bishop.

Emotions have run so high that the agency in 2000 chose to complete an environmental impact report--somewhat rare for highway projects, Shultz said.

Public Comments

He expects to submit the draft to the Federal Highway Administration in October. It probably will be released to the public early next year, opening the door to formal public comments. Ultimately, local officials could decide on no construction at all.

All the opposition “caught us off guard,” said Shultz, who moved to the area 14 years ago because he loves the lake. “People are coming out and saying, ‘We don’t like your draft EIR’ before they’ve even seen it. Usually people wait, see it and then say it’s garbage,” he joked.

Shultz chalks up the tensions in part to confusion over the Caltrans process.

“We don’t do design until we’ve been authorized to go forward and design something, which doesn’t happen until you evaluate the impacts. You can see the Catch-22: How can you evaluate something when you don’t even know what you’re going to do? They started to not trust us.”

The scars of previous environmental battles are still healing at the lake, a rest stop for 300 species of birds that feast on its brine shrimp and alkali flies. (Though progress has been good, the lake must still rise another 10 feet to meet the state-mandated goal.)

The story starts in 1941, when the DWP began diverting water from four of the lake’s five tributary streams to feed the booming Los Angeles metropolis. The Mono Lake Committee was formed in 1978 by students and scientists determined to save the dying lake.

Years of painstaking legislative hearings and lawsuits led to the 1994 victory and a habitat restoration plan four years later. But the Water Board decision “is a political one that can be changed,” the committee has warned, vowing to “make sure that does not happen.”

It is not alone. The area--including the entire highway widening project area--is part of the Mono Basin National Forest Scenic Area, and that means the Forest Service oversees all development to ensure that it preserves scenic beauty.

The Mono Lake Tufa State Reserve abuts the highway, covering the entire underwater portion of the 60-square-mile lake, as well as a shoreline ring--including wetlands--that would be disturbed by the highway project.

Some of that park land “may literally be buried under the project by fill slope material using the construction methods discussed,” a California State Parks district ecologist, Ken Anderson, wrote to Caltrans late last year. “Constructing a wall to limit the amount of fill slope will leave the reserve with a huge unnatural feature visible from almost everywhere around the lake.”

The Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board has weighed in with wetlands concerns. Altogether, the various agencies and activists were so worried about the lack of project specifics--and the seemingly damaging scope of the rough blueprint--that the Mono Lake Committee decided earlier this summer to take its concerns to the top.

The group sent a letter to Morales, outlining the issues and challenging him to apply his department’s own nascent “Context Sensitive Solutions” policy to the lake project. Within five weeks, the 2,000 letters had been fired off to Davis, urging him to step in too.

Making a Difference

The public complaints made a difference. By mid-July, Morales and Baggett--who heads the agency that ordered the lake’s restoration--were on a plane to Lee Vining, a highly unusual move meant to “to make sure we’re not running amok out here and lend some support,” Shultz said.

For now, the Mono Lake Committee has called off its letter-writing “action alert,” deeming it a success, McQuilkin said. “We’ve been able to get everyone talking about the project at the level of detail where we can ... consider different options,” he said. “It feels like a partnership.”

Caltrans officials will walk the site Friday with McQuilkin’s group and the other agencies to devise a milder option that would be included in the draft environmental impact report--delayed in part by the outcry--Shultz said.

“We may put forward an alternative that doesn’t 100% meet our need and purpose but may substantially meet it,” he said. “It may say, ‘OK, a lot of people don’t want this. It could be ugly; we don’t know if we can mitigate it, so let’s not even try.’ ”