Activists gather signatures to block 17th Street widening

Andrew Glazer

EAST SIDE -- Banners are flying, petitions circulating and momentum

building in opposition to city plans to widen East 17th Street.

“This is a strip shopping center street, not a highway. This is not

the place to just blow traffic through,” said Brett Hemphill, owner of

Hemphill’s Rugs and Carpets on East 17th Street and member of the 17th

Street Merchants and Community Assn.

The recently formed association, made up of residents and business

owners, has in about a week gathered more than 1,500 signatures of people

who oppose the expansion plans. They hope to deliver 5,000 names to the

City Council by the end of the month.

The city plans to widen 17th Street from four to six lanes because of

surging traffic levels.

Peter Naghavi, Costa Mesa’s director of transportation, has said the

city could lose $4.5 million in federal grants if it does not widen at

least part of East 17th to six lanes.

The city formed a committee of East Side merchants and homeowners in

January to help engineers plan the project. The citizens committee and

engineers have remained at an impasse even after seven sometimes very

heated monthly meetings.

“We’ve been talking about the same issues over and over,” Naghavi

said. “We agreed that we may disagree, but we both understand each

other’s concerns. We’re hoping to get closer to something workable.”

But merchants and homeowners in the area overwhelmingly oppose any

street widening; they formed the association to have a voice in the

issue.

The merchants, who met with Naghavi on Tuesday, say a wider East 17th

Street would threaten the streets “mom-and-pop” feel. They advocate

planting new trees and adding bus turnouts along the street.

Members of the city-formed committee -- who in the spring, feeling as

though discussions with the city were going nowhere, spun off into a

grass-roots neighborhood organization -- are hanging bold-lettered

banners from their shops and gathering signatures from other project

opponents.

“We’ll get thousands more signatures if we need to,” said

environmentalist Doug Bader, who has helped organize the

signature-gathering effort. “We’ll march the streets. We’re just not

going to go for it. We won’t concede this thing.”

The neighborhood association also commissioned a volunteer to develop

an alternative plan for the street.

“I’d be happy to see any plan,” Naghavi said. “But we have spent

hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants and had our own staff --

all degreed engineers, architects and planners -- putting our heads

together. I’d be interested to see any plan that satisfies the level of

[traffic] service we need to provide and the businesses equally.”