It's the freeway controversy that just won't quit.
The fight over whether to finish the 710 Freeway -- which stops just short of South Pasadena -- has been going on for more than half a century, with the records in a 1998 federal court case so voluminous that they filled some 500 cardboard file boxes.
Now transit officials are opening another chapter in the controversy: They have begun exploratory drilling to determine the feasibility of building a tunnel to link the unfinished 710 to the 210 or possibly another freeway.
The California Department of Transportation and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority are conducting boring and seismic reflection activities at 33 sites throughout the study area, which includes Alhambra, Glendale, La Canada Flintridge, northeast Los Angeles, Monterey Park, Pasadena, San Marino and South Pasadena.
Douglas Failing, Caltrans director for Los Angeles and Ventura counties, called the study "a key piece" in determining whether the freeway project can move forward.
Already, combatants in the freeway fight have drawn battle lines.
Alhambra Mayor Barbara Messina, who has spent 27 years fighting to complete the freeway, said building a tunnel "is the only way it's ever going to happen." Putting the freeway 250 or more feet underground is supporters' best chance at overcoming the opposition to building it through residential neighborhoods.
"It's not taking homes. It's not taking trees," Messina said. "There is no real reason anymore for people to be opposed to it."
But longtime South Pasadena resident and 710 extension opponent Joanne Nuckols called the tunnel proposal "a really bad idea" and the exploratory study "a waste of taxpayers' money."
The 710 extension has been in limbo for years: In 2003, the Federal Highway Administration rescinded its 1998 approval of a court-stalled surface route linking the northern terminus of the 710, at the boundary of Los Angeles and Alhambra, to the 210 Freeway.
South Pasadena and other opponents had kept the project tied up in courts for years, while Alhambra and its allies have long battled for the freeway extension as a solution to traffic and air pollution problems where the freeway ends at Valley Boulevard and dumps about 100,000 vehicles a day onto surface streets.
Officials hope to finish the 710 tunnel technical study by May and to have some answers regarding a tunnel's feasibility by the end of the year.
