Residents not to blame for road problems

I read the Thursday Daily Pilot article regarding the escalation of

the cost of the new loop road at Newport Coast Elementary with great

concern (“Price tag for new loop road balloons”).

As a former resident of the Tesoro neighborhood, I feel the story

focused far too much of the blame on the Tesoro residents instead of

on the elected officials, where blame truly lies.

To begin with, the residents of Tesoro only heard about this

project for the first time in the form of a flier stuffed into their

mailboxes on June 18 to notify them of an informational presentation

at the school on June 21. This was to be followed immediately the

next night with a vote on the matter by the City Council and

groundbreaking within a week or two. Obviously, the council had more

than four days notice to prepare to vote on the matter since it made

the agenda and construction contracts were already underway. Either

someone was sitting on this ball to run out the clock or they just

frankly dropped the ball because of incompetence.

The city and school district owed this neighborhood more notice

than the four days they gave it, and they now owe them a thank you

for working with the involved parties in a spirit of cooperation and

compromise rather than halting things indefinitely though litigation,

as many other groups in this town would have done.

To blame Tesoro for the escalated cost is simply inaccurate and

unfair.

I think perhaps it would be better to step back and look at this

school for what it is, a pure design failure. This is a school that

in its first three years of operation has had two major construction

projects on its grounds. Newport Coast is a very well planned family

community that was laid out many, many years ago; however, it seems

somewhere along the way the Newport-Mesa Unified School District

missed the memo.

To add insult to injury, the Newport Beach City Council rushed

into this construction project for the loop road on the grounds that

it was a safety hazard to the children crossing Ridge Park. What

happened in June that created this emergency need that hadn’t

happened in the first three years the school was opened? The loop

road has not solved any safety concerns on Ridge Park as evidenced by

the additional crossing guards now on-site every afternoon. The

street is littered with unsightly “No Parking” and “No Turn Lane”

signs and markers forcing children to cross Newport Coast Drive -- an

even busier street where parents are forced to park in the Pavilions

parking lot because the street parking was eliminated on Ridge Park

as part of this “solution.” I fear it is only a matter of time before

some child walking home to Newport Ridge is hurt or worse because

they chose to walk down the loop road rather than Ridge Park to cross

Newport Coast Drive, an intersection where there is no crosswalk or

crossing guard.

I think the real blame here should go to the school district and

the people who planned this debacle of a school, and, rather than

continually adding bandage after bandage, they should come up with a

master plan for the school focused on the real logistical needs for

the future to fix these design flaws once and for all.

With the addition of the community center at the corner of Newport

Coast and San Joaquin and the popularity of the new restaurants and

shops in the Newport Coast Shopping Center, this immediate area is

only going to get busier with more traffic as time goes by. When you

add these factors to the opening of the Pacific Ridge communities at

the top of Ridge Park, the school and area will only become more

populated with children every year. Our politicians on the council

and school board need to stop shooting from the hip conducting these

back-room planning meetings and start engaging more with the Newport

Coast community to develop comprehensive strategies that actually

solve problems and not just move them around.

For any council member to now blame the Tesoro residents for the

failure or cost escalation of the loop road is an attempt to hide

their own poor decision-making through scapegoating. I can only

imagine how my former Tesoro neighbors will feel when the school

district parks double-wide trailers beneath their homes to

accommodate more children once the school reaches its capacity. While

I have not heard of any such plans to date, it is an inevitable event

as public schools, including nearby Lincoln Elementary and other

Newport-Mesa schools, use this temporary solution for fast, cheap,

extra classroom space.

How little notice will they be given then?

J.P. HANNAN

Crystal Cove