U.S. Agency Pulls Back on 710 Plan
The Federal Highway Administration has suspended its support of the beleaguered plan to extend the Long Beach Freeway through South Pasadena and has ordered state officials to conduct a new environmental impact study on the project.
The decision was the latest setback for the state, which has been fighting local residents over the proposal for more than 50 years and is prohibited by a federal injunction from working on the freeway extension.
Preservationists and local activists, who say the freeway extension would destroy South Pasadena as a community, cheered the suspension and predicted hopefully that the state would decide not to spend the time and money needed to study the proposal again.
But Doug Failing, regional director for the California Department of Transportation, said he planned to do the study, which would take three to five years and cost several million dollars.
"The fact is, the transportation need in that corridor still exists," Failing said.
The $1-billion project would connect the heavily congested San Bernardino and Foothill freeways and close what state transportation officials say is one of the most critical gaps in the Los Angeles freeway system.
The project would extend the 710 from its current terminus near the San Bernardino Freeway in Alhambra to the Foothill Freeway, passing through Alhambra, South Pasadena and parts of Los Angeles and Pasadena. It would bisect South Pasadena, require the destruction of about 1,000 homes and other buildings and pass through or near at least 41 historical sites.
The route was proposed in 1949 by then-Gov. Earl Warren. Local opposition coalesced in the mid-'60s, when Caltrans held its first public hearings on the route. By the '70s, with the project still unbuilt, new federal and state laws required that an environmental impact report be prepared.
Several reports were done, and one was finally accepted in 1992. The Federal Highway Administration approved the project in 1998 on the basis of that report. But work was stalled soon afterward, under an injunction from a federal judge.
So much time has passed since then that, on Dec. 17, FHA Division Administrator Gary Hamby wrote to Caltrans Director Jeff Morales, stating that the 1992 report was too old.
"This is a huge victory," said South Pasadena Mayor Michael Cacciotti, holding up a wrapped gift box, which he said symbolized "the federal government's Christmas present."
