Santee officials attack SANDAG’s transit-centered plan: ‘It’s a frickin slap in the face’

Santee is not interested in spending millions of dollars to put bike lanes along state Route 52, city officials said last week.

What residents want, they said, is relief from grueling morning and evening commutes. And they are growing impatient with transportation plans being crafted by outside agencies that don’t jibe with the needs of the East County community.

Those sentiments were aired during a workshop hosted by the City Council and the Highway 52 Coalition that included presentations from the San Diego Association of Governments, (SANDAG) a regional planning agency, and the California Department of Transportation.

Several members of the City Council criticized SANDAG for not using a half-cent sales tax known as TransNet as was intended when approved by San Diego County voters in 1988, then extended in 2004 for another 40 years.

“Put it into some damn freeways for us,” said City Councilman Rob McNelis.

That’s not going to happen, SANDAG leader Hasan Ikhrata said when contacted after the meeting. “There really is no way,” he said. “Adding capacity is part of the past.”

The workshop examined the agency’s Comprehensive Multimodal Corridor Plan, which encompasses an area that stretches from Lakeside and El Cajon through Kearny Mesa, Sorrento Valley and across toward University City, inclusive of state Routes 52, 67,125 and 163 plus Interstates 5, 8, 15 and 805.

The CMCP is part of SANDAG’s “5 Big Moves” to switch the focus from freeway expansions to mobility hubs.

A presentation of the plan, which will be finalized later this year, was shared jointly by Rachel Kennedy of SANDAG and Karen Jewel from Caltrans.

All five members of the City Council were quick to point out that the plan did not say how it would be funded.

Santee City Councilman Rob McNelis (left) tells SANDAG and Caltrans representatives that the city wants freeway improvements. Also pictured is Santee Councilman Dustin Trotter.

(Karen Pearlman / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

“Talking about spending money on more high-speed rail, more trolley systems, on more buses, and god, doggone bicycle lanes on the freeway?” McNelis said. “It’s absolutely maddening for anybody that lives (here) and actually drives on a freeway. Frankly, it’s a frickin’ slap in the face that you want to take our tax dollars that we were promised were going to go into transit, meaning roads, our freeways, and you’re going to put them into bicycle lanes on the damn freeway “

McNelis was referencing the November 2004 voter approval of Proposition A, an extension of TransNet. The money in that measure specifically identified several important freeway projects in East County, including Interstate 8 and state Routes 52, 67, 94 and 125.

Any future tax measures for transportation needs that SANDAG might put on an election ballot will not have the Santee City Council’s blessing, “unless they significantly modify the ‘Five Big Moves’ to incorporate the needs of East County,” said City Council member Laura Koval.

SANDAG and Caltrans are studying ways to improve transportation safety, increase travel choices and improve mobility with the deployment of technology to better manage traffic. The groups asked to meet with the Highway 52 Coalition as part of their community outreach as they work with stakeholders to gather feedback and develop integrated transportation solutions within the corridor.

Only a few members of the Highway 52 Coalition were present at the meeting, include founding member Dan Bickford, who said he has represented the coalition at certain MTS meetings for three years.

Mayor John Minto gave Bickford permission to turn his attention away from the City Council in front of him to the Caltrans and SANDAG presenters behind him. He then described how Highway 52 has not been taken seriously, and mentioned that state Route 67 also needs “a lot of work.”

“We don’t need mass transit going across the 52... what we need is additional traffic lanes on both sides,” Bickford said to Kennedy and Jewel. “Get the traffic moving now.”

The Coalition, a task force led by Mayor John Minto and City Manager Marlene Best, was created in 2018 to address growing traffic congestion along the east-west freeway. The group has been successful in bringing together strategic partners to push for regional and local interests to focus on state Route 52.

One of the maps presented by SANDAG showing plans for East County transportation moving forward.

(Photo of SANDAG slide by Karen Pearlman / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

McNelis was the most vocal of the City Council members when speaking out about the SANDAG and Caltrans vision for East County. He said that while the vision for a pedestrian- and bike-friendly downtown San Diego is great, those same plans don’t work in Santee.

“We’ve got a bike lane now,” McNelis said. “You can go up the 52 you maybe see two, three at most people riding a bicycle on a lane, yet you’re going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for a bicycle lane all on the freeways instead of spending that money where it’s shown, it’s proven, we can see, today, it’s needed on the actual freeway for cars and trucks?”

“No matter what, we are not going to get rid of vehicles in the next 20 years — they’re not going to disappear, especially commercial vehicles, they’re not going away... they’re needed to haul products from point A to point B and get them to our stores... There may be some changing of the guard with online buying, but guess what? it’s still got to get to a distribution center and still get to your house someway — probably a truck.”

Ikhrata, the SANDAG leader, said the plans for Santee would look very different from other parts of the region.

“We knew from Day 1 that East County is not downtown San Diego, and planning for East County is not what were planning for downtown San Diego,” Ikhrata said. “But it would be misleading to tell them that we are going to expand freeways. To be truthful, there will not be any expansion of the freeways.”

Ikhrata pointed to the new state law, Senate Bill 743, that encourages transportation projects focused on biking, walking and public transit.

“(SB) 743 is the law of the land and to add freeway capacity, you need to mitigate for it and it’s very prohibitive,” Ikhrata said.

Ikhrata said Santee was using fear to push its agenda, and that “fear mongering doesn’t work.”

He said that he understood that people won’t leave their cars altogether, that “90 percent of us will continue driving,” but that it will be more about “how we do this drive.”