Las Urbanistas

New traffic studies contradict optimistic predictions that a proposed tollway through San Onofre State Beach would eliminate much of the congestion on Interstate 5 in South County.

The forecasts assume construction of the tollway, a carpool lane each way on the I-5 and some interchange improvements. If only the tollway is built, the study suggests, the situation will be even worse, with motorists on the interstate seeing “severely congested” conditions.

Environmentalists and other tollway opponents have seized on the long-range plan as a sign that the benefits of the proposed six-lane tollway do not justify sacrificing one of the state’s most popular parks.

The Irvine-based Transportation Corridor Agencies, which operates a 51-mile network of tollways in Orange County, plans to build the Foothill South through the northern half of San Onofre. The park’s campgrounds, wildlife areas, panoramic views and world-renowned surf spots attract about 2.7 million visitors a year.

The controversy has raged for more a decade and is unlikely to end soon. Environmentalists and the state attorney general are pursuing lawsuits to halt construction of the tollway, and it still requires state and federal approval.

“Why are we building a project with a stated purpose that won’t be achieved, at the expense of our parkland?” said James Birkelund, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group.

Opponents say the toll agency’s forecasts have been unreliable in the past, leading to financial problems for the San Joaquin Hills tollway and a downsizing of the Foothill South project from eight lanes to six.

The toll agency, which is planning to build the Foothill South by 2011, has predicted that the road would help create congestion-free driving conditions on much of southern Interstate 5 by 2025. Traffic relief has been one of the project’s main selling points.

Without the Foothill South, tollway officials say, travel times on I-5 from the San Diego County line to Oso Parkway — roughly 16 miles — would be an hour during peak periods in 2025 instead of 25 minutes.

“We know there’s going to be more traffic on the 5 Freeway in the future,” said Lisa Telles, a tollway spokeswoman. “If you don’t build the toll road, there will just be more congestion.”

TCA officials say that although most of their assumptions are the same, the two agencies’ studies are different and thus can’t be compared directly.

Now estimated to cost $875 million, the tollway extension would run from Interstate 5 at Basilone Road south of San Clemente to Oso Parkway in Rancho Santa Margarita. It would connect with the Foothill toll road after coursing through San Onofre State Beach and the Donna O’Neill Land Conservancy, a 1,200-acre open-space preserve set aside as mitigation for housing development.

Tollway officials have concluded that the route — one of eight options studied — would do the least harm to the environment and avoid the cost of condemning hundreds of homes and businesses in South County.

Dubbed the “green alignment” by the agency, the Foothill South would handle 24,000 to 52,000 daily trips by motorists in 2025 depending on the section of highway, the toll agency predicts.

“Green means Go!” the agency’s promotional materials state. “Foothill-South: Your road map to traffic relief.”

Like OCTA’s, the corridor agency’s own forecasts assume the tollway will be built as well as other improvements made to Interstate 5, including a carpool lane each way.

Tollway officials estimate that vehicle trips on I-5 would be reduced from 290,000 a day to 267,000 in the Dana Point-San Clemente area. The least benefit would occur in the Lake Forest area, where traffic would be reduced from 413,000 trips to 406,000.

The agency’s studies predict that the number of congested I-5 segments would be reduced 70% during the evening rush hour, usually the busiest time of day.

The agency’s environmental impact statement shows that if the Foothill South is not built, much of Interstate 5 in South County will be heavily congested by 2025.

With the tollway, the agency’s environmental documents show that I-5 from Alicia Parkway to the San Diego County line would be uncongested at rush hour except for two short sections between Avenida Pico and El Camino Real in San Clemente and between Ortega Highway and Camino Capistrano in San Juan Capistrano. Those would be lightly to moderately congested at peak times.

“Will the south extension alleviate traffic in Orange County? Absolutely,” said Lake Forest City Councilman Peter Herzog, an agency board member. “By way of analysis, we have congestion on the I-5 now and we have 51 miles of toll roads. The point is that we are taking many daily trips off the freeway.”

But OCTA’s long-range transportation plan, which was completed in July, predicts a far more congested future for I-5 than the toll agency envisions.

OCTA studies indicate that daily vehicle trips on south I-5 between Avenida Pico and the San Joaquin Hills interchange will increase from about 250,000 to 364,000 by 2030.

Between the tollway and the El Toro Y, vehicle trips are expected to increase from 342,000 to 460,000, a level that easily exceeds the daily flow on the 405 Freeway around Los Angeles International Airport.

Assuming the tollway and I-5 improvements are completed, OCTA’s study indicates that the interstate will go from “moderately” to “consistently” congested during rush hour along much of its path through southern Orange County.

“Even with a fully functional Foothill South, I-5 will still be bad. The tollway is not as advertised,” said Laguna Niguel Mayor Cathryn DeYoung, a former OCTA board member who unsuccessfully challenged Patricia Bates for county supervisor in last week’s election.

DeYoung questioned the Foothill South proposal during her election campaign. While at OCTA, she requested a major study of south I-5, now underway, to find ways to reduce future congestion.

“Both agencies should sit down, look at the data and determine what they are going to do,” DeYoung said.

OCTA spokesman Michael Litschi said he did not want to comment on which study might be more valid.

Tollway foes say that before any tollway extension is built, I-5 should be widened and improved to see if it alone can accommodate future traffic growth.

The OCTA study “really proves that the way to fix congestion on I-5 is to fix I-5,” said Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the California State Parks Foundation.

“It’s become imperative that the TCA reconsider their choice here.”

Tollway opponents note that traffic forecasts by the tollway agency indicate that widening I-5, instead of building the Foothill South, produced some of the best results for reducing congestion on the interstate.

During the environmental review process, however, the tollway agency ruled out that option as too costly and difficult to fund.

Toll road officials say that widening I-5 by one and two lanes each way could cost more than $1 billion and $2.4 billion, respectively, because hundreds of homes and business would have to be purchased for right of way.

But two studies by Smart Mobility Inc., a Vermont-based transportation consultant hired by opponents of toll road extension, state that traffic growth in South County could be accommodated by improving I-5 and major streets.

Condemnations of private property could be greatly reduced, researchers said, using innovative interchange designs — “measures never considered by TCA.”

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david.reyes@latimes.com

By Dave McKibben, Times Staff Writer
November 5, 2006

For decades, Anaheim and Disneyland have enjoyed a snug relationship as the city and the entertainment giant have jointly polished the neighborhood where Disney’s amusement parks have grown and flourished.

More than $6 billon in private and public money has been poured into the resort district, bringing a Disney-esque sheen to an area once overrun with cheap motels, tacky retail shops and bubbling neon signs.

The clutter on the edge of neatly groomed Disneyland was such an irritant to Walt Disney that when he went to Florida to expand his kingdom four decades ago, he bought 30,000 acres of swampland, in part to shield the future resort and its visitors from such an eyesore.

Now a proposed housing project in the midst of Anaheim’s resort quarters has unearthed those ancient concerns, leaving city officials to debate which is more important: pleasing Anaheim’s largest employer and biggest tourist draw or creating needed housing.

The project, planned as 1,300 condominiums and 200 low-cost apartments, has been embraced by the City Council, which sees it as a partial solution to Anaheim’s housing shortage.

But Disney officials are pushing back, fearful it could degrade the area they believe has finally become a Disney-worthy gateway to their amusement parks.

“It’s like owning a wonderful house in a wonderful neighborhood,” said Ed Chuchla, Disneyland’s vice president of corporate real estate.

“You care about the house and what could impact it.”

Cynthia King, director of Cal State Fullerton’s Center for Entertainment and Tourism, said the Walt Disney Co.’s reluctance to support the housing plan is just the latest example of the entertainment giant’s obsession with controlling its surroundings.

“They’re all for that housing if you put it behind a wall a few miles away,” King said. “But they feel this low-cost housing is a threat to their central function, to create this unrealistic, magical kind of place.”

City Councilwoman Lorri Galloway said the debate over a housing complex in Disneyland’s backyard has highlighted her concerns over the direction of the resort district.

“This is a city and community that has changed a lot in 12 years,” she said. “Disney is looking at a time when you didn’t have to make 25 bucks an hour to live in a two-bedroom apartment. Time and society have altered that plan naturally. Disney is just going to have to change with the times.”

Disney officials agree housing is a pressing issue in Anaheim but say it doesn’t belong outside the gates to Disneyland and California Adventure. That area, which has increasingly given way to hotels, restaurants and the tourist-friendly retail district Downtown Disney, has long been a source of frustration to the company.

In 1965, when Walt Disney was buying land in central Florida, he complained about how little control he had in shaping the area around Disneyland. “We don’t like it, but we get blamed for it,” he said, according to a Disney historian.

“The ‘it’ was the ticky-tacky stuff that grew up around Anaheim: the fast-food restaurants, the cheap hotels and the neon jungle,” said Richard E. Foglesong, a professor at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., who wrote a book about how Disney World shaped central Florida, “Married to the Mouse.”

“He had learned his lesson there and didn’t want to make the same mistakes again.”

Given a second chance in Florida, Disney’s solution was the Ready Creek Improvement District, created by the Florida Legislature at Disney’s request nearly 40 years ago.

It allowed Disney to finance, build and oversee development around Orlando without interference. The district, which includes four Disney parks and the towns of Lake Buena Vista and Bay Lake, also controls utilities, transportation and police and fire services.

“They have every protection they want for their attractions,” said Linda Chapin, a former mayor of Orange County, Fla.

Disney has not achieved that level of power in Anaheim, but the company’s relationship with city officials has been cozy, enough so that critics called the town “Disneyheim” in the early 1990s.

During one three-decade stretch, Anaheim council members and department heads were showered with tickets, meals and an annual fishing-and-golf trip to the Hotel del Coronado in Coronado.

The trips were discontinued in the early 1990s when then-City Manager James D. Ruth decided they might be viewed as a conflict.

Disney’s favored status with the city was illustrated in 1998, when Anaheim police and firefighters were kept waiting for more than an hour while Disney officials cleaned up the scene of a fatal accident involving a park visitor.

“Right or wrongly, everyone who has been on the City Council believes what’s good for Disney is good for Anaheim,” said Steve White, president of an Anaheim citizens group that once sold T-shirts reading “Anaheim: owned and operated by Disney.”

For all the criticism Anaheim gets for being too close to Disney, city officials said, it’s just good business to address the company’s concerns. Disney is the city’s largest business with 20,000 employees, and 40% of Anaheim’s general fund comes from tourism, much of it driven by the Disney resort.

Before Walt Disney came to town and built Disneyland amid some bean fields, Anaheim was known for its pioneer German settlers and bountiful orange groves. Now it is the state’s 10th-largest city with 350,000 residents and is one of the country’s top tourist destinations. Anaheim is also home to professional baseball and hockey teams and one of country’s largest convention centers.

When the city sold $510 million in bonds for a variety of improvements to the 2.2-square-mile resort district, it paid quick dividends. Since the revitalization of the resort district in 1994 — which was created to help extend visitors’ trips by erecting world-class hotels, entertainment venues and restaurants — annual hotel bed tax revenue has climbed from $33 million to $70 million.

“It would certainly be wrong to avoid the largest employer and economic engine to our city,” said Mayor Curt Pringle. “But I don’t believe in any fashion Disney has any undue or aggressive influence in Anaheim.”

Last year, the city and the company joined forces to oppose preliminary plans for a Las Vegas-style hotel-casino in neighboring Garden Grove.

Rarely has Disney failed to get its way on setting the tone for the area outside the gates to Disneyland and California Adventure. The housing dispute is one of those occasions.

When Disneyland’s 50th anniversary celebration recently closed, park officials turned their attention to their neighborhood, specifically to a 25-acre parcel between California Adventure and the area where a third park may someday be erected.

When Disney officials learned that a developer was planning to put in housing — including low-cost homes that park and hotel workers might use — they lobbied hard against the project. They called City Council members an hour before the meeting, spoke out against the plan at the meeting and later met privately with council members.

Councilman Richard Chavez said he was “disturbed” that Disney thought a last-minute phone call could influence his decision.

Disney officials said their attempts to derail the project were caused by the developer, SunCal Cos., “circumventing” the city’s planning process, which includes environmental and traffic studies. The SunCal project, which would replace about 300 mobile homes, still has hurdles to clear before ground is broken.

Regardless, the issue has caused friction between Disney and Anaheim’s elected officials.

“If you get a municipality and business on the same page, it works out beautifully,” Councilman Bob Hernandez said. “But I don’t think it’s a good thing if they’re on the same page all the time. I think anyone would be suspicious of that.”

Disney officials downplayed the flap. “We have a great relationship with the city,” said Kristin Nolt Wingard, Disneyland’s senior vice president of public affairs. “Are we going to agree all the time? Of course not. We’re proud of what our partnership has accomplished over the years and how it has benefited Anaheim. One issue should not define an overall relationship.”

But as Disney struggles to control the environment outside the gates to the “Happiest Place on Earth,” its theme parks, there is evidence that the clash over putting housing in the resort district won’t be the last.

Chavez, for one, said he would like to see more low-cost housing units there: “As the resort has been expanded, we’ve created thousands of low-paying jobs but not enough housing to go along with. If we want to sit down and master-plan that whole area again based on today’s needs, it’s something I’d consider.”

King, the Cal State Fullerton professor, said she thinks the two sides — as they have before — will find middle ground: “There’s going to be squabbles between Anaheim and Disney. But they really have no choice but to get along. They can’t get divorced.”