Costa Mesa officials bemoan stalled bridge study

Alex Coolman

NEWPORT-MESA -- Newport Beach development politics and inadequate

county-level leadership are leaving a report on proposed Santa Ana River

bridges mired in delays, a Costa Mesa councilwoman said this week.

The report, being prepared by the consultant firm of Kimley-Horn &

Associates, is intended to clarify the potential effects to traffic of

creating bridges across the Santa Ana River at 19th Street and at Gisler

Avenue in Costa Mesa.

But the report on bridges, which have sparked heated emotions among

local residents for years, is taking longer to prepare than was initially

anticipated.

At its Aug. 7 meeting, the Costa Mesa City Council approved a year’s

extension to the consultant’s contract for the $200,000 study. The

original deadline for project completion was August 1999.

Costa Mesa isn’t happy about the delay.

Mayor Gary Monahan wrote last week to the Orange County Transportation

Agency and the other cities involved with the study -- Newport Beach,

Fountain Valley and Huntington Beach -- expressing concern about “the

lack of adequate progress and timely completion of the project.”

And Councilwoman Heather Somers was even more outspoken on the subject

of the delay.

The holdup, she argued, is not merely a consequence of the project’s

complexity; she said she believes it’s a product of poor leadership from

the county and what she called “stonewalling” on the part of Newport

Beach city officials.

“Part of it is what’s going on right now [in Newport Beach] with their

TPO and Greenlight,” Somers said, referring to competing initiatives on

the November ballot that have the potential to dramatically affect the

nature of development in Newport.

“Newport Beach is in a position where they really have to see what the

vote is going to be in November, and they really can’t do much of

anything until that time” because of the way the bridges might interact

with larger traffic patterns in the city, she said.

But the outspoken rhetoric of the recent letter, said Rich Edmonston,

transportation and development services manager for Newport Beach, was

surprising.

“I don’t believe that anybody at the city is dragging their feet,”

Edmonston said. “It’s an extremely complex project. I’ve not heard any

word from any of our elected officials to do anything different from what

we’ve historically done.”

Edmonston pointed out that Costa Mesa officials, who oppose the

bridges, have their own agenda for wanting the study to be completed:

they hope, he said, to get the possibility of construction wiped off the

political radar as soon as possible.

Additionally, Glen Campbell, a senior analyst with the Orange County

Transportation Authority, said the delays sprang from the difficulty of

trying to address the concerns of the four cities involved in the

project.

“We had to get all four cities and the community groups essentially

all on the same thought process with this when they basically have

opposite interests,” he said.

Campbell said he did not believe Newport Beach was stalling in its

contributions to the report.

“We’re aware that those [growth-related] issues exist in Newport

Beach, but I don’t think it’s affecting things here,” he said.

The vice president of Kimley-Horn, Herman Basmaciyan, said that delays

were the result of “unanticipated issues with what the future land uses

and trip-making characteristics” in the cities involved.

Asked whether Newport Beach was trying to delay the study, Basmaciyan

replied “I couldn’t comment on that. I don’t know what the city’s

thinking is. I couldn’t even speculate.”

This is hardly the first disagreement on the subject of bridge

construction on 19th Street.

Costa Mesa residents were organizing as early as 1987 to oppose

development of bridges at 19th Street and Gisler Avenue, claiming they

would increase traffic in what are residential neighborhoods.

Newport Beach officials, however, have argued in years past that the

bridges are simply the part of the county traffic burden that Costa Mesa

needs to bear.

Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach officials have said they hope to see

the bridges eliminated from the county’s transportation plan, while

Newport Beach and Fountain Valley support their construction.