Who knew a shovel's worth of Montara dirt could mean so much?
On Friday, community representatives will gather at Gray Whale Cove for an event more than a decade in the making - the official groundbreaking ceremony for the long-awaited Devil's Slide tunnel project. The event will be followed by an invitation-only party at the Half Moon Bay Brewing Company.
|
|
It includes political powerhouses such as Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, state Sen. Jackie Speier, Assemblyman Gene Mullin, the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, as well as Caltrans officials and a laundry list of influential players on the local level, from Half Moon Bay City Council members to environmental advocates.
"Really I think this is one of the biggest public works projects ever in San Mateo County," said Zoe Kersteen-Tucker, a Montara resident and representative of Committee for Green Foothills. Kersteen-Tucker helped jumpstart a community campaign 10 years ago that convinced Caltrans to build a tunnel instead of a freeway bypass.
The tunnel - promoted as a "safer, cheaper, faster" alternative to the bypass - was approved by county voters in 1996 as ballot Measure T.
"It's a solution that's tailored to this unique coastal environment," she said. "It's taken a long time to get here but we did it right."
The design calls for two 4,000-foot-long tunnels through San Pedro Mountain, replacing the trouble-prone oceanfront section of Highway 1, known as Devil's Slide. The former route will become a trail overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Congress funded the project in March with the release of more than $150 million, the first of two installments. The money comes from the U.S. Department of Transportation's emergency relief program to repair and reconstruct highways and roads on federal lands that have sustained serious damage over the years.
Ultimately, the entire Devil's Slide project will be funded with federal emergency relief money, meaning the project is not forced to battle with other California transportation projects for matching state funding.
Since the roadway was first built in 1937, it has been closed countless times due to landslides, rockslides and mudslides. As a solution, the government had originally planned to build a freeway through the surrounding state parkland.
That controversial plan didn't go anywhere but court.
Environmentalists who feared building a freeway would ruin the area's natural beauty and lead to a hemorrhage of development in the sleepy coastal towns of Montara, Moss Beach and Half Moon Bay, first filed suit in 1972. Decades of legal delays ensued, followed by widespread support for an alternate plan to build two tunnels through San Pedro Mountain. The tunnel plan was heralded as a more environmentally sound choice.
Ideally, once the tunnel is built, the boundaries of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area will have been expanded to include the current section of Highway 1.
Then the section of roadway will be transferred to GGNRA management and used as part of the Coastal Trail.
The project's largest milestone was surmounted in 2003 when the Federal Highway Administration certified the tunnel's massive environmental impact report, which reworked part of the project to minimize impacts to wetlands and protect endangered red-legged frogs.
The move wrapped up more than four years of environmental study of the tunnels that included discussion - and ultimately rejection - of the "dewatering alternative," which is still seen by some tunnel opponents as the better alternative.
The Sierra Club and Committee for Green Foothills are among those that support the tunnel project.
Current images of the Devil's Slide plans are available online at the Caltrans Web site at www.dot.ca .gov.dist4.
w