Tollway Extension At Ortega Highway Gets Green Light

The first four miles of the 241 Tollway extension are set to move ahead after Thursday’s vote by the board overseeing the Foothill/Eastern Transportation Corridor.

Local commuters who use the Ortega Highway or the 241 Tollway will be affected.

If all goes according to TCA staffers’ plans, the construction could be finished by March 2014. Thursday's vote approved the first steps, including obtaining approvals from government agencies and performing initial studies.

The first four-mile segment would end somewhere in the vicinity of Ortega Highway, though further studies and engineering would have to determine what street north of the highway the segment would feed onto.

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Board member and San Juan Capistrano Mayor said he and his colleagues on the San Juan City Council were in favor of the new, segmented approach with some caveats.

Because the proposed segment would dump traffic onto San Juan arterials, Allevato said he wanted three planned traffic mitigation projects finished around the same time as the 241 segment. These include the that would link up San Clemente and San Juan, a fully-funded I-5/Ortega interchange improvement and a widening of a one-mile, two-lane choke point on Ortega at the San Juan border.

The vote in favor of moving forward with the plan had one dissenter, Beth Krom of Irvine City Council. She worried traffic studies weren’t accurately predicting potential toll revenue, the final alignment wasn’t set and that floating more bonds would put the agency in a precarious financial position.

A representative from the Southern California Association of Governments, Philip Law, spoke in favor of the project, citing economic benefits and cleaner air because vehicles would have to spend less time on the road.

Reed Royalty, president of the Orange County Taxpayers Association, also said his organization was in favor of the project, as it had been since the late 1980s.

“Toll roads are a prodigious gift to taxpayers,” he said. “They are at the top in terms of utility to taxpayers; if we don’t use them, we don’t pay for them. They enable free-flowing traffic which keeps the air clean and creates wealth.”

John Whitman from the South Orange County Regional Chamber of Commerce also spoke in support of the project.

Perennial opponents of the 241, the Surfrider Foundation and the Natural Resources Defense Council, had representatives speak who were opposed to the project, saying it was illegal. Their argument was that the segmented approach was to push the project forward, creating momentum to cut through San Onofre State Beach park, an alignment shot down by the California Coastal Commission in 2008.

“In fact, the only purpose of this entire exercise is to push the project so far down the road that all other options are closed,” said Damon Nagami, a staff attorney with the NRDC.

Surfrider’s Mark Raucher echoed Nagami’s comments.

“Clearly this agency is trying to ram this project through at any cost,” he said.