California Coast & Ocean

"This Is the Last One"
The TCA has said that it will work to offset the toll road's impacts on the environment and on park users both during and after construction. Its plan includes installing detention basins with state-of-the-art filters to capture and treat stormwater runoff, building a soundwall to shield the campground from traffic noise, and building bridges and culverts to serve as wildlife crossings. It disputes claims that the road could affect the surf break at Trestles, citing studies it commissioned as part of its environmental impact study (see attachment 11 to the TCA's final SEIR at www.thetollroads.com/home/finalseir.htm).

"There has never been a road builtthat didn't pollute," counteredSurfrider's Mark Rauscher.

San Onofre State Beach and Camp Pendleton, together with surrounding parks and open space, harbor a tremendous diversity of habitat types, animals, and plants, many of which are rapidly disappearing elsewhere. Federally protected or threatened species that live in the region include the arroyo toad, least Bell's vireo, California gnatcatcher, Pacific pocket mouse, tidewater goby, and probably steelhead trout, which were last documented in San Mateo Creek in 2003. "It has everything that was there, except the grizzly bear," said Dan Silver, executive director of the Endangered Habitats League. "Biologically, this is the best that's left in southern California."

For people, the park will become ever more valuable as the area's population grows. "The reason there are so many visitors to San Onofre State Beach every year is because eight million people live within an hour's drive," said Brittany McKee of Friends of the Foothills, a local task force of the Sierra Club that has been very active in opposing the road.

Allen Greenwood, a cofounder of San Diego Trout, pointed out that mitigating the proposed road's damage by setting aside comparable land elsewhere in the region isn't possible because nothing else like San Mateo Creek remains elsewhere along the southern coast. "You can't say you have 30 more streams like San Mateo Creek," he said. "This is the last one."

One more irony in this story is this: both San Mateo Campground and the Donna O'Neill Land Conservancy were created as mitigation for other development projects in the region--O'Neill for the community of Talega, built on what was Rancho Mission Viejo land, and the campground for a parking lot built on part of the state park's land by the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, just down the coast. "This park has been nibbled at before," said Elizabeth Goldstein. "At some point you have to ask, where does it end?"

The problem is that California doesn't have strong enough legal tools to protect its state parks, said Goldstein, who worked for parks departments in New York City and State before coming to California. "The charter obligations to protect state land are much stronger in other states. People have to say ‘We won't tolerate this,' if this is going to be turned around."