Santa Clarita girds for a future without gridlock; taxation for road improvement proves a contentious issue.

Santa Clarita girds for a future without gridlock 

Taxation for road improvement proves a contentious issue

Six years ago, Brian O'Leary got tired of driving into the smog of the San Fernando Valley to his job at Lockheed Corp. so he got a real estate license and began selling houses close to where he lived in the Santa Clarita Valley. Until three years ago, the seven-mile drive from his home in Saugus to his office in Canyon Country took about 10 minutes.

That was then. Now it takes O'Leary 25 minutes to get to work. That may not seem like much to someone with a two-hour commute, and it's not much to Brian O'Leary. What bothers him is the rate at which his road is approaching Los Angeles-style gridlock. The 150 percent increase in his travel time over a three-year period is typical and it is a trend that seems set to continue.

O'Leary must compete for road space with the 73,000 people who have moved into Santa Clarita since 1980 and the new residents of Palmdale and Lancaster who use the county roads as an alternative to the increasingly congested Antelope Valley Freeway. As a result, he crawls along a semi-rural road at an average speed of 16.8 miles an hour.

The roads in Santa Clarita are too few and too heavily traveled, and smog is an increasingly frequent byproduct as the valley chokes in traffic. Every day 118,000 vehicles squeeze through the northern connector of the Golden State and the Antelope freeways. Traffic on that interchange has been growing at an annual rate of 14 percent for the past six years.

Santa Clarita, not even a city three years ago, is a boomtown. Homebuyers squeezed out of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley have been flocking over the Newhall pass to buy their piece of the California dream in a less polluted and lower priced Santa Clarita Valley. Incorporated in December 1987, the city is now the second fastest-growing municipality in the nation, after Palmdale.

All those new residents are taxing the road system. But taxing themselves is something they're not prepared to do. A measure to assess property owners between $100 and $200 per unit to pay for roads was defeated last November, garnering less than 25 percent of the vote.

"We have a deficit situation in roads," said George Caravalho, Santa Clarita city manager. "The backbone system of roads we have are the same roads that have been here for about 30 years."

A growing feeling among residents for the need for more control over development led to cityhood. But there were problems already in the pipeline that incorporation could not stem.

"Part of the challenge we inherited when we became a city is the lack of roads and grid system in respect to the number of development projects that were approved by the county," said city Director of Public Works John Medina. "We have some 19,000 [housing] units that have already been approved by the county Board of Supervisors prior to cityhood. If we didn't build one more unit, we still have a problem here."

O'Leary, an agent with Century 21 in Santa Clarita, said residents he talks with think the county should pay for roads. "What the board has allowed is very visible. So the taxpayers are saying, `You created this problem. Now you want us to bail you out. No!'"

O'Leary, who spends much of his workday in his car, feels the bite most sharply on the city's main roads. "There are just too many people using the same access roads," he said. "It's fine and dandy that [developers] put roads to their tracts, but they all empty onto the same access roads. There are not enough access roads going to the major highways."

Some canyon intersections are handling 67,000 cars each day and Caravalho reported that it can take upwards of 45 minutes just to get out of one neighborhood. There is but one east-west road -- Soledad Canyon Road -- through the middle of the valley and one north-south road -- San Fernando Road.

The city has been trying to fund road construction through developer fees, but some homebuilders are beginning to balk.

Brentwood-based G.H. Palmer & Associates proposed four developments in Santa Clarita which would have netted the city $55 million worth of roads. Of that, $35 million was to go toward building roads to directly serve the new developments, the remainder was to be spread throughout the city.

But under pressure from residents, the city council is considering reducing the size of Palmer's central project, the Santa Katarina development. If faced with the higher unit cost of a smaller tract, the developer says he could not afford to build anywhere near $55 million worth of roads, and in fact may pull out of the deal altogether.

That kind of scaling back is bad news for commuters. The city needs to build close to $100 million worth of roads just to get caught up. And $100 million doesn't go far: the proposed four-lane roadway called Rio Vista which would run from Bouquet Canyon to the Antelope Valley Freeway, a distance of just under six miles, would cost $45 million. So Palmer's original $55 million would have brought the city only a step closer to serving current needs.

"The voters' expressed concern was that developers should pay for roads," said Medina. "They think, `they got us into this mess and they should pay to get us out. So let's increase the fees for developers, but let's not have any more development.' Both of those together mean no money for roads."

An oft-mentioned alternative is gas tax money. Medina squelches that notion. "We received about $1.8 million in gas tax money and this year we expended over $4 million on maintenance alone. We didn't even do all the maintenance we should have done and we're actually falling behind on our maintenance program."

Complicating the money crunch for Santa Clarita is the city's topography. Rivers and tributaries, railroad crossings, mountainous terrain and significant development high up in the canyons rack up additional dollars in road-building costs.

Then there's the added pressure from developments outside the city. Those developments are centered in the cities of Palmdale and Lancaster, more than 40 miles to the north.

Ritter Park Associates, a Los Angeles-based development firm that lists Merv Adelson as a principal partner, has proposed an 11,500-acre development west of Palmdale. The planned 8,500 homes on Ritter Ranch would increase Palmdale's population by an estimated 22,865 over the next 20 years.

In Lancaster, a partnership including Santa Monica-based Watt Industries has advanced a proposal for a 20,000- to 21,000-unit development just west of town. Known as California Springs, that development would increase Lancaster's population by about 70,000.

Santa Clarita is bracing for the onslaught of all these new commuters draining down the Antelope Valley freeway and the city's two main arteries -- Sierra Highway and Bouquet Canyon Road -- like so many backed-up grains of sand trying to get through the neck of an egg-timer.

Instead, the city is working with Lancaster, Palmdale and Los Angeles County to work out a regional solution to its transportation problem.

The Los Angeles County Transportation Commission is a possible source of funding for a commuter rail line, which could hook up with the proposed Anaheim-Las Vegas high-speed train.

State money is another possibility and the federal government could also provide mass transit funding. The city is experimenting with Park & Ride programs, expanding its bus fleet and is considering offering drivers a month's free public transportation to coax them out of their cars.

Caravalho supports the imposition of impact fees on homeowners to help finance a rail system into the San Fernando Valley or downtown Los Angeles. Those impact fees would be assessed on new residents only, according to Medina.

"It would assist in moving forward more rapidly with a program if existing residents were involved in the funding program. But people don't want to tax themselves," Medina said. "If you place the fees before people move out there you have a better chance because it's part of their buying costs."

A unified committee representing Santa Clarita, Palmdale and Lancaster is the key to any significant solution, he noted.

PHOTO : Bottlenecks: Growth brings cars flowing through the valley