A Brief History…

UPDATE: Here is a useful piece on the tollroad issue from a local blog concerned with Mission Viejo.

Last week, the Coastal Commission voted with the enviro community to block a toll road that would provide a parallel route to Interstate 5 in Orange County. This, of course, is celebrated by the 1500 people who use the San Onofre State Beach to surf or sunbathe. The 15 million who would use the route to get to work or home more quickly are ignored. The route in question is called the 241 Toll Road, or State Route 241. It runs east of Interstate 5, the only highway connecting Orange County to San Diego County and the only north-south route to San Diego on the west side of the coastal mountains.

I live in Mission Viejo, a pleasant small city 60 miles south of Los Angeles and 60 miles north of San Diego. When I moved here in 1972, it was a middle class “bedroom” community, most of whose residents commuted to Los Angeles to work. It is situated just east of Interstate 5, which was convenient then and a threat to the community now. The city was a master-planned development and part of one of the great land grant ranches of southern California. After Mission Viejo was pretty well built out in the late 1970s, the remaining vacant land was sold to Phillip Morris, the tobacco company which was diversifying, and the O’Neill family began to plan other development of the remaining ranch lands. All the undeveloped land lay to the east of Mission Viejo and it should have been apparent that access to the land-locked eastern area would be a problem for the residents of Mission Viejo.

We now have the potential of 24,000 homes being built in the area east of Mission Viejo and their access to the freeway will be either the 241 toll road or Interstate 5. To get to Interstate 5, they must go through Mission Viejo. The long term project is called “The Ranch Plan” but notice there are no maps. If you go to all the web sites of the developers in this area there are no maps. Why?

The original master plan for Orange County had additional freeways that were never built once Jerry Brown became governor. He apparently believed that, if he did not build the infrastructure, the people would not come. Sort of the reverse of the baseball movie. He was wrong and the quality of life in southern California has steadily declined as the years went by.

The failure of the political left to secure the cities is at the root of much of the suburban sprawl they now decry. I grew up in Chicago in a pleasant middle class neighborhood. By the time I left for college in 1956, many of the older families, especially the more prosperous ones, were leaving for the suburbs. In 1962, when I came home to visit, the neighborhood was already showing visible tension. Much of this showed as racial tension as blacks moved into white neighborhoods and the whites began to flee when crime, not always the doing of the black residents, quickly climbed. The mythology of suburbia rarely mentions this aspect of the shift.

When I moved to Mission Viejo in 1972, one of my reasons was to escape the traffic. It followed me but it took 30 years. Another reason was to find a more comfortable place to practice surgery, away from the pressures involved in joining an older surgeon in practice. I began by joining a group in the San Fernando Valley and would probably have remained there except for some inter-personal issues and the problems of traffic in a vocation that does not lend itself to commuting.

In recent years, as local traffic increased to uncomfortable levels, I joined the city Planning Commission. Here I had an opportunity to see what could be done about the situation. The result was not encouraging. The original course of the 241 route would have joined the Interstate 5 near the intersection with the 55 freeway, providing a reasonable parallel route for the residents of the eastern developments. That was changed years ago at the instigation of residents of affluent suburbs further north, such as Lemon Heights and several other small but powerful cities. I don’t blame them for using influence to avoid a freeway in their midst but too much of the planning of Orange County has been done this way. Now, the 241 is less useful for commuters than it might have been. The decision not to extend it to meet the I-5 south of San Clemente is another short-sighted decision that will reverberate for decades unless it is reversed.

Small cities are often at the mercy of real estate developers and real estate interests. One reason is because the city councils of these small cities are susceptible to pressure as these are often thankless jobs with small salaries, if any. It takes a dedicated and selfless city official to look out for the future (Or one with ambition for higher office, which is worse). Often, the residents care too little about their local politics and the result is not seen for many years. When it finally comes, it may not be pretty.

One such rare citizen was Norm Murray, the first mayor of Mission Viejo and a man who was involved in city government for over 50 years . Norm was the mayor of a small southern California city when John Kennedy was nominated for the presidency at Los Angeles Sports Arena, the site of the Democratic convention that year. Norm was one of the mayors introduced to the future president in 1960. In 2006, he was still serving, this time on the Planning Commission with me. I learned a lot from Norm but unfortunately, he was only one man and there were not enough Norm Murrays in Orange County. Things are bad but they will get worse.