Years of foot-dragging by San Juan Capistrano officials over widening a 0.9-mile stretch of the Ortega Highway has cost Orange County taxpayers millions of dollars, according to a report by the Orange County Grand Jury.
The bottleneck and congestion caused by the two-lane stretch of highway has long been in need of relief. Growing populations in surrounding areas, including thousands of homes built as part of the Rancho Mission Viejo development, have only aggravated the problem. Despite the obvious case for widening the 0.9 mile stretch — the only portion of the highway with just two lanes after the county widened a 1.1-mile length of the highway to four lanes in 2012 — the reluctance of San Juan Capistrano to get moving on it has only made the project all the more expensive.
According to the grand jury report, after years of legal battles over plans by Caltrans to widen the highway to four lanes, in 2011 an agreement was reached between Caltrans, the city and the Hunt Club Community Association detailing “the aesthetics, the need for proper traffic control and the physical scope of the road widening.” Caltrans also allowed the city to take on the role of the lead agency for the project, which resulted in the city applying for and receiving millions of dollars in grants for the project, as well as securing funding commitments from developers.
Despite the agreement and the early progress, little else has actually been accomplished since 2011. Worse, in January 2016, the city inexplicably decided to reverse an earlier decision to execute a design engineering contract and ultimately ceased to be the lead agency for the project. As a result, not only did the city hold up millions in government grants, but delays added tens of millions of dollars in costs to address the design, right-of-way and construction.
Reasons for the city’s embarrassing behavior essentially boil down to council and community members thinking the best way to preserve the rural character of the area is to create a frustrating bottleneck to discourage people from passing through the area.
In reality, all they accomplished was delaying the inevitable, wasting time and money in the process. The grand jury report underscores the need for widening the Ortega Highway, but also the long-term costs of short-term thinking.