TCA Scare Tactics backfire

5/17/07

To: Supe Pat Bates

Honorable Supervisor,

your endorsement of TCA's Trestles toll road plan
is contradictory in substance. The fear you project:
a double-decker 1-5 south-county highway debacle
on a par with Oakland's recent overpass incineration
is inexplicably, exactly what you endorse - with a far
worse potential for highway-holocaust consequences
compounding your ill-timed (OCReg) endorsement
of a doubly-dangerous, double-decked Trestles toll
road north/south I-5 convergence, ramped-up (and
or down) directly in front of - and mere steps from
SONGS(???) nuclear facility gate!, aka spent N-rods
storage facility and known potential terrorist target.

What a concept.

Honorable Supervisor, I suggest, before you infuse
OC with more TCA scare tactic rhetoric purposely
clouding the public debate (toll road / no toll road),
you and your honorable elected cohorts need scout
the very-location / epicenter you're so willing to
sacrifice to a fate worse than Oakland's highway
holocaust - a fate quite frankly unimaginable in
consequence with no regard for life or public-limb.

To end, and or begin your over-the-I-5 toll road exactly
at California's epicenter of potential coastal human
catastrophe - SONGS nuke-plant, is crazy.

Let me remind you of a similar ill fated plan - NYC,
911. Then Mayor Guillioni made a similar catastrophic
decision, placing the Twin Towers emergency response
center - directly below the Towers.

He had been advised not to. Rather, he was advised,
place them miles away in Long Island (where they
are now being reconstructed) out of harms way.

Those of us opposing a Trestles toll road do it
for good reason. Many good reasons. But your new
Oakland-highway holocaust scare tactic opens yet
another critical door to why a double-decked toll
convergence with I-5 at SONGS is egregiously
fool hearty to a degree of national importance.

As to the destruction of the San Mateo Watershed and
San Mateo Creek - you say, a toll road would improve
them from their present Gold Standard status of LAST
healthy mountains-to-ocean coastal tributary in 600-miles
of SoCal coastline. Your claim is frankly laughable.
Another TCA impossibility in anyone's lifetime.
No amount of TCA Director's preaching otherwise
will ever change that reality.

You and the TCA can continue to verbally denigrate
San Onofre State Beach Park's natural beauty - its
environmental necessity and or public-value as a
public place of perfectly natural recreation (5th most
popular in the state), but a toll road through it would
destroy it. That's Reality.

And not help our traffic.
That's South OC's I-5 traffic Reality.

During this long public-campaign to Preseve and Protect
San Onofre State Beach Park from TCA's needless
toll there - we're often asked, "What's your alternative?"

We have them.
Yes "We."
An extended group of South OC concerned citizens.
Concerned enough to have school ourselves on 'our' traffic
Realty's, and what it will take to REALLY fix things.

Doable, buildable, labor intensive, local highway construction
alternatives. If anyone cares to listen - and learn.

In my humble opinion, you of all people need to hear them.

We can ignore the facts, we can distort the facts,
but the facts always remain the facts.

And the big fat fact here is - a toll road to Trestles is superfluous
to our traffic while it paves over paradise in a potentially
very explosive way.

Your pointed-danger-zone: precisely where I-5, the fly-over
Trestles toll road and the nuke plant converge.
I repeat - in a worst case scenario: crazy.

Thank you for reminding us of a Trestles toll road's too dangerous toll,
in so many ways.