|
||
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Half Moon Bay Review This is the second of a three-part series on the history of Devil's Slide. Periodically throughout its history, the peaceful slumber enfolding
the issue of what to do about Highway 1 at Devil's Slide has been shattered by episodic fits of feverish interest. A flurry of activity in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with the aim of approving a six-lane
inland bypass to replace the existing Highway 1 between Montara and Pacifica, preceded the tranquil holding pattern that characterized the issue throughout the rest of the 1960s. The idea of a bypass was revived
again in 1971, only to be forced back into remission a year later when environmentalists used powerful new environmental protection laws to halt the project. Rather than abandoning the idea, however, the California
Department of Transportation (CalTrans) turned its attention elsewhere, biding its time until, it hoped, frustrated motorists would rise up and brush aside opposition. But the arrival of Gov. Jerry Brown in 1974 and
his pro-environment administration brought a different vision for transportation in California, one that turned away from the notion of paving the way to ever-expanding suburbs with big freeways. In a
deposition taken in 1986 as part of a Sierra Club lawsuit against the bypass, Adriana Gianturco, Brown's transportation director, described what she considered the appropriate road for Devil's Slide. "The
highway that was contemplated ... was a basic two-lane road, which would conform to the existing topography of the land forms," she said. "Its design was to be in keeping with CalTrans' overall policy of
maintaining Highway 1 in rural areas as a two-lane road." Bypass passed over That was not how the Devil's Slide bypass had been envisioned by its originators. As a result, the bypass became a casualty
during the Brown administration. Money that had been reserved for the bypass was spent elsewhere. When Republican Congressman Bill Royer inquired about the bypass, Gianturco put him off, saying that CalTrans
was focusing on "low-cost corrective measures" and that she could not "justify the expenditure of necessary resources to proceed with long-range environmental studies" that had been ordered by
the court in the first round of lawsuits against the bypass in 1972. Abandoned, but not dead, the bypass limped along through the 1970s, awaiting the return of an administration that would again embrace it. The
decision by the Brown administration to spend little time on Devil's Slide was not only political, but also pragmatic. Other projects, such as the Highway 92/101 interchange, were eating up transportation funding in
San Mateo County, and CalTrans knew it could expect organized opposition to the bypass at every step. So the agency decided to focus its efforts in other areas where more could be accomplished. One of the few
notable activities involving Devil's Slide was the purchase of McNee Ranch, located north of Montara and right in the path of the proposed bypass. In 1978 the state approved the purchase of two parcels of McNee
Ranch land. The two parcels were bisected by approximately 150 parcels of land that CalTrans had acquired between 1969 to 1972, comprising 55 percent of what was expected to some day serve as right of way for the
bypass. In winter 1980, after eight years out of the public eye, Devil's Slide leaped back into prominence because of a dramatic closure of Highway 1. Three hours after CalTrans crews found cracks in the highway's
southbound lane, a 30-foot section of pavement and rock broke away and tumbled down the cliff. Highway 1 was shut down completely for one week, followed by five weeks of one-way traffic control during the
daytime and closures at night. CalTrans spent $150,000 on new drains, culverts and rock bolts drilled into the mountain to stabilize the road. When the work was completed five months later, G.L. Russell, CalTrans
deputy director for Project Development, concluded, "It is my position ... that we have a reasonable expectation of maintaining this state highway well into the future." Support reawakens However,
the 1980 closure set in motion a reawakening of support for the bypass that would fully blossom two years later with the election of George Deukmejian as governor. To CalTrans engineer Burch Bachtold a change in
administrations and attitudes was overdue by 1982. Bachtold, employed at CalTrans from 1948 until his retirement in 1990, had dealt with Devil's Slide over the years, primarily with its maintenance. In 1983 under
Deukmejian he was promoted to regional director of CalTrans for its Bay Area office and quickly set about reversing the policies of the Brown administration. Bachtold to this day scorns what he says was an
"anti-vehicle" and "anti-freeway" attitude foisted upon CalTrans and the people of California by Brown and Gianturco. Some roads that were approved were built, but others, Bachtold scoffs,
were derailed by "anti-everything" environmentalists. "If they had been built," he asserted in an interview at his South San Francisco home, "the Bay Area would be a better place." In the
fall of 1981, a group calling itself CRASH (California Residents After Safe Highways) traveled to Sacramento to present petitions with 7,000 signatures to Gianturco and local representatives demanding that
Highways 1 and 92 be widened. "We would like to have you put this on your priority list for funding," a Montara representative told Gianturco, according to a San Mateo Times report. "Everyone seems to
be in accord that Devil's Slide should be bypassed." The San Mateo County Board of Supervisors also attempted to get the ball rolling in October 1981 by offering CalTrans as much as $700,000 to prepare the
environmental study required by court order in 1972, but Gianturco turned down the offer. Finally, in January 1982 with pressure mounting to address the issue, Gianturco ordered Norman Kelley, the Bay Area regional
director of CalTrans at the time, to take a fresh look at the controversy, but with an eye toward finding a new, cheaper, less environmentally controversial alternative to the bypass. MDA emerges In
an address to the Board of Supervisors, Kelley suggested that the existing road might be fixed. The idea ultimately became the equally controversial Marine Disposal Alternative. The idea was to scrape off the
unstable side of San Pedro Mountain, dumping it into the ocean below, and then build a new road on a stable ledge. Although CalTrans reported in January 1983 that fixing the existing road this way was geologically
feasible, it dismissed it as too expensive. That same month gubernatorial administrations changed and Gianturco was replaced by Leo Trombatore, the engineer on the original six-lane bypass proposal. The shift in
approaches and attitudes was dramatic. Bachtold, the new regional director, told a gathering of city and county officials that there was "almost a euphoria" within CalTrans over Gianturco's departure.
But before the new bypass-friendly administration at CalTrans had time to dust off its old files, Devil's Slide roared back into the headlines in its old familiar way. On March 3 sustained, heavy rain caused Highway
1 to be shut down between Montara and Pacifica when a 300-foot section of the road began breaking free. The highway wound up being shut down for 84 days, disrupting travel and business. Residents demanded a
solution, spurring government into action just as CalTrans had hoped. Devil's Slide rocketed out of bureaucratic limbo to the top of the five-year transportation priority lists of both the Metropolitan
Transportation Commission and the county Board of Supervisors. The Deukmejian administration announced that it had "found" $51 million for the bypass from the proceeds of a new gas tax. Congressman Tom
Lantos, D-San Mateo, convinced Congress to make emergency funds available for Devil's Slide. Even with the momentum provided by the closure, it took CalTrans another year and a half to complete the required
environmental impact study. An early version of the report was so inadequate that Attorney General John Van de Kamp protested it in writing. Finally in December 1984 CalTrans recommended the 6.8-mile Adopted
Alignment bypass from Pacifica to the Half Moon Bay Airport rather than a 4.5-mile Martini Creek bypass that rejoined existing Highway 1 north of Montara, and the Marine Disposal Alternative. The hope was to
secure approval for the Adopted Alignment and have final plans ready by Sept. 30, 1986 - the deadline to be eligible for the federal emergency money available from the 1983 storms. But many hurdles awaited. One
was the county's own planning commission, which had been critical of the bypass and came out in support of marine disposal. In an end-around, a majority of the board voted, with Supervisors Jackie Speier and Anna
Eshoo objecting, to remove review of Devil's Slide from the commission's responsibility. That cleared the way for the board, again on a 3-2 vote, with Supervisors William Schumacher, John Ward and Tom Nolan voting
yes, to approve a change to the county's Local Coastal Plan allowing the Adopted Alignment, now planned at four lanes, but expandable to six. Unusual vote An unusual and dubious series of events involving
the California Coastal Commission between June and September 1985 raised and punctured hopes of both supporters and opponents. In an ironic prelude to its June meeting to vote on the fate of an unsafe road, a
tour of Devil's Slide was interrupted when Coastal Commissioner Dorill Wright was struck by a truck and suffered mild injury as a group of commissioners crossed the highway near Pacifica's Shamrock Ranch. At the
meeting that followed, the commission deadlocked 6-6, which meant the bypass was denied. Opponents like Nancy Maule and Olive Mayer, who had fought the bypass for 15 years were jubilant. But the next month the
commission changed its mind. voting 7-5 to allow a rare reconsideration of previous action. At issue was the vote against the bypass by alternate Commissioner Mike Gotch. Commissioner David Malcolm had missed the
June meeting, enabling his alternate, Gotch, to vote. Malcolm said he favored the bypass and would swing the tide back in favor of it when the matter was reconsidered. Given his vote to rehear the issue and his
public pronouncements of support for the bypass, newspapers trumpeted the September hearing as a fait accompli. CalTrans was so confident that it began bulldozing land to make roads in anticipation of geological
testing for the bypass - without getting a permit from the county. So bypass supporters were stunned when Malcolm voted against the bypass, making the commission's vote 6-6 again. "This is
incomprehensible," said a bewildered Jan McClure, of Montara, chairwoman of Coastsiders for the Bypass. The commission's denial threw Devil's Slide back to the Board of Supervisors with the Sept. 30, 1986,
emergency funding deadline still looming. Martini Creek option Less than a month after the Coastal Commission scuttled the Adopted Alignment, CalTrans was back before the county pushing for its other bypass
alternative, the 4.5-mile Martini Creek bypass. And on Feb. 16, 1986, in yet another lengthy and emotional Coastal Commission hearing, the commission voted 7-5, this time in favor of the 4.5-mile bypass.
CalTrans followed two months later with approval of the Final Environmental Impact Statement, the document that had been absent from the project 14 years earlier. The shorter Martini Creek bypass followed the path of
the Adopted Alignment across San Pedro Mountain, but rejoined Highway 1 near the mouth of Martini Creek, just north of the Chart House instead of taking the new road farther south to the Half Moon Bay Airport.
The Martini Creek bypass was designed as two lanes, plus a continual uphill passing lane on each side of San Pedro Mountain extending past the summit in each direction and creating for about a half a mile a
four-lane road. The plans also included "recovery/retention" areas on the downhill sides and across four bridges. Although the width of the road would vary from 79 to as much as 100 feet wide, each
of the four bridges would be just 56 feet wide. Construction of the road would entail seven cuts into the mountains greater than 150 feet deep and from 350 to 2,100 feet long. The largest cut at the saddle between San
Pedro and Montara mountains would measure 250 feet deep. Canyons and depressions in the terrain up to 250 feet deep would be filled in. CalTrans sought to muffle complaints by promising to re-vegetate the
hillsides, but a judge later said that those efforts were not expected to be very successful. A coalition of environmentalists immediately marched into court to halt the project. One pair of plaintiffs in the
suit, Dana Denman and Tyler Ahlgren, stood to be impacted by the bypass more than anyone else. The couple own Shamrock Ranch, a 300-acre ranch that includes pet and horse boarding, animal feed sales, row crops and
cattle. It has been in Denman's family for more than 70 years. Either of CalTrans' bypass proposals would take 70 acres of the ranch and bisect it almost in half, threatening the viability of the ranch. Other
plaintiffs in the suit included the Sierra Club, led by influential activist Olive Mayer; the Committee for the Permanent Repair of Highway 1, a group of Coastsiders that had been fighting the bypass for more than
a decade, led by a doggedly determined Nancy Maule; and the Committee for Green Foothills, led by Lennie Roberts, a powerful environmental advocate throughout San Mateo County. (Although no action has been taken on
the suit in several years, it is still alive and will remain so until final approval for another alternative, presumably the tunnel, is secured.) On Sept. 3, 1986, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Peckham granted
a temporary restraining order against the bypass. Four months later he halted the bypass completely. Peckham ruled that a trial was warranted on environmentalists' assertion that the bypass violated Section
4(f) of the Transportation Act of 1966, prohibiting any transportation project from using public parkland if there is an alternative, and unless all possible planning to minimize harm to the park has been
undertaken. Although environmentalists wound up losing on most of the claims in the lawsuit, legal maneuvering and a seriously flawed noise element in the environmental study bought them time. By the time of the
next milestone in the Devil's Slide saga - almost a decade later - a new cadre of activists brandishing an old idea that had been passed over 25 years earlier were waiting in the wings to lead the story to yet
another chapter. Next week, environmentalists regroup, CalTrans gets belligerent, and the longest road closure yet strains the coast and galvanizes public opinion for a tunnel. Read the first
article in this series, " Read the third article in this series, " |
|
|
|
||||
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|||
