MTA Votes to Expand the 710 Freeway

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority board on Thursday approved an ambitious $5.5-billion plan to rebuild the truck-choked Long Beach Freeway, despite protests from residents that the agency is turning its back on their concerns about air pollution from diesel-burning trucks.

MTA board members voted to move ahead with plans to reconstruct an 18-mile stretch of the freeway from the harbors to rail yards in Commerce and East Los Angeles, transforming it from a 1950s-style road with six to 10 lanes to a modern 14-lane highway, with four lanes designed exclusively for trucks. Some portions of the truck lanes could be elevated.

The project is widely supported among transportation agencies and industry because it would allow more trucks to carry goods inland from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, where cargo volume is expected to double by 2020.

Although Thursday’s vote culminated five years of planning, construction would not begin until 2015 or later, and no one can say where funding would be found.

A spate of truck-related collisions and deaths in recent years have drawn attention to the 710 Freeway’s shortcomings. But although most residents near the corridor agree the road needs to be rebuilt, many say they fear the project would create a massive truck artery without doing enough to reduce air pollution.

Community and health activists pleaded with the board to pay more attention to health concerns, and they criticized the fact that most MTA directors apparently never saw the lengthy report that a 35-member community advisory group from 18 cities along the freeway route spent a year compiling. Transportation officials created the panel in May 2003 in response to residents’ outcry that they were being ignored in favor of the ports and shipping interests.

Now, some members of the community advisory panel say they have been shunted aside again.

“It’s outrageous they’re making a decision on a huge public project like this and they didn’t review the complete report,” said panel member Angelo Logan of East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, which represents areas of East Los Angeles and Commerce heavily affected by truck and rail traffic.

Logan unsuccessfully called for the vote to be delayed until MTA directors could read the full report. An MTA spokesman said later that directors did receive an abridged version.

Ed Avol, professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at USC, said the group felt strongly that the 710 Freeway expansion should be conditioned on improvements to air quality and health issues in the freeway corridor, where many residents complain of asthma and other lung ailments.

“If that was just given short shrift, I expect the MTA has not heard the last from the community,” said Avol, who said that as part of the community advisors group, he attended 14 to 16 meetings, each lasting three to four hours.

Other speakers, including Long Beach Mayor Beverly O’Neill, applauded the plan and urged the board to move forward. The growth of the two ports has “created the crisis that we’re in,” O’Neill said. The 710, she said, “is falling apart.”

Eight miles of the 18-mile corridor is within Long Beach, she said. “I encourage you to keep the process moving on.”

Representatives of Caltrans and the California Highway Patrol also spoke in favor of the project.

Richard Powers, executive director of the Gateway Cities Council of Governments, made up of cities along the 710 corridor, said in an interview that he was pleased with the MTA vote.

The Gateway council made its first request to transportation officials to expand the 710 Freeway in 1999, and formal planning began a year later. But the process stalled in the spring of 2003, when residents learned that up to 800 homes could be demolished, and they accused officials of ignoring health concerns. The council then launched an elaborate process for community input.

New design plans, meanwhile, call for the demolition of only five residential buildings and 61 industrial or commercial structures.

Transportation officials say community health concerns will be addressed as part of the environmental review process, which could begin next year and take three to four years, at a cost of $35 million to $40 million.

County Supervisors Gloria Molina and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, both MTA directors, drafted a motion accepting the community panel’s report and stating it would be used as part of the environmental process.