It’s taken almost 20 years and more than $150 million to build a parkway between Perris and San Jacinto.
Despite that, most of the Mid-County Parkway remains on the drawing board — unhelpful to drivers whose limited east-west options include an expressway notorious for fatal crashes.
It’s unclear when the 16-mile parkway will ever be finished. Officials with the city of Perris and the Riverside County Transportation Commission are trying to resolve the city’s concerns about the project’s impact on the city, a situation that frustrates commissioners who thought the parkway was a done deal.
“This is pretty much the big punch in the eyeball when you come back at this stage, $150 million into it and decide now is the time to raise a bunch of issues,” Jurupa Valley City Council Member Brian Berkson, a commission member, said at a March 28 meeting.
Perris officials contend the current version of the parkway isn’t what the city agreed to, and the city wasn’t told of the changes until work started on the first phase, an interchange being built at the 215 Freeway and Placentia Avenue in Perris.
“The concerns related to traffic, air quality, and noise impacts on nearby residential areas, city streets, a fire station, and a local park, remain of great concern for us,” Perris City Manager Clara Miramontes wrote in an April 18 letter to the commission, the county’s main transportation-planning body. Earlier, Perris raised concerns about the parkway cutting off access to a nearby high school.
On Monday, April 25, a subcommittee of the 34-member transportation commission, which has elected leaders from every city in Riverside County, agreed to delay work on the parkway’s Perris segment “until such time that the project is financially and technically feasible,” a commission report states. It’s not clear when that might be.
Money and staff time for the parkway would be shifted toward another segment of the project as well as work to improve safety on the Ramona Expressway, one of the east-west linkages between the San Jacinto Valley and the county’s western half and the subject of heightened traffic enforcement after a series of deadly crashes, including at least four in the past three months.
The subcommittee’s vote must be approved by the full commission. That might happen in May.
Home to 2.4 million people, Riverside County is the 10th most populated county in the United States and one of California’s fastest growing counties.
Infrastructure has struggled to keep pace with that rapid growth, leading to gridlock as residents lured by the county’s cheaper housing commute to jobs beyond the county line.
A longtime challenge has been adding another link between the San Jacinto Valley and the county’s western half. Right now, drivers’ main options between Hemet/San Jacinto and the 215 are Highway 74 and the Ramona Expressway.
The parkway concept sprang from a regional planning effort in the late 1990s that developed a long-term blueprint for growth in the county’s unincorporated areas, including a network of reserves to protect endangered species and a vision for new and expanded transportation arteries. At first, the parkway would have one or two lanes in each direction but eventually would have three lanes each way, a commission fact sheet states.
Originally, the parkway would have stretched from the 15 Freeway in Corona to Highway 79 in San Jacinto. But facing rising costs and concerns about building in Lake Mathews and Gavilan Hills, the transportation commission in 2009 cut the parkway from 32 to 16 miles. That meant it would run between the 215 and the 79 and the portion between the 15 and 215 would be scrapped.
The parkway project also required an extensive environment impact report and settled two lawsuits challenging the project on environmental grounds. In all, more than $150 million has been spent so far on the parkway, which includes the cost of getting permits and buying land to offset environmental impacts.
In all, it could cost $1.1 billion to finish the project. The Placentia interchange, which is 70% complete, will cost $42 million.
The commission was set to move forward with the parkway when it received a Feb. 28 letter from Perris.
In it, Perris officials expressed concern the parkway would send traffic through residential streets to connect with the 215. Officials also worried the parkway would sever access to Orange Vista High School, which opened in 2016 after the parkway’s environment study wrapped up.
Commission staff agreed to build a bridge undercrossing so students could get to Orange Vista, preserve a local trail and guide trucks to Perris’ preferred truck routes, commission Executive Director Anne Mayer said at the March 28 meeting of the commission’s subcommittee dealing with road projects in western Riverside County.
But in a March 23 letter to the commission, Perris officials said they would support the parkway — only if trucks weren’t allowed on it.
“That is certainly not something that is within the purview of (the commission),” Mayer said.
At the March subcommittee meeting, officials recommended stopping all work on the parkway, except for the Placentia interchange, and shifting parkway funding to other projects.
“At this point, I don’t see a path forward given the city of Perris’ requirements and issues related to truck traffic,” Mayer said. “So it is a difficult recommendation and not one that we make lightly. But we do not believe that we should continue to expend funds on the project if there’s not going to be support within the community for it.”
Commissioners urged the staff to continue talking with Perris to find a solution.
“To not build what we’ve spent this amount of money on is crazy,” commissioner and Eastvale Mayor Clint Lorimore said. “It is unconscionable to walk away from the investment of $150 million in taxpayer money.”
In letters sent to the commission since March, Perris — as a condition of supporting the parkway — wants either a series of improvements to Placentia Avenue or upgrades around Redlands, Morgan and Indian avenues.
Commission staff said it could cost $25 million to $40 million to make the improvements Perris wants. Twelve homes would have to be bought from willing sellers — they likely couldn’t be acquired through eminent domain — and Perris’ option for diverting truck traffic could require more environmental studies, officials wrote in a report to commissioners.
As a result, the commission should focus on other “(parkway) construction packages along the 16-mile corridor to determine if a less complex, less controversial, and less expensive option is feasible,” the commission report read, noting the Ramona Expressway’s safety problems.
In order for the project to keep its environmental approvals, work must start on a new portion of the parkway every five years, Mayer said Monday.
Berkson, the Jurupa Valley council member, asked last month if the parkway could be built without Perris’ permission. Mayer said that the commission could move forward with the parkway because of the project’s environmental report, but the commission eventually would need Perris permits to connect to city streets.
“With this level of opposition, it would be very difficult to proceed without the city of Perris’ support,” she said.
Miramontes and Perris Mayor Michael Vargas, who sits on the commission, said Perris supports the parkway and that measures the city is seeking, such as walls, traffic barriers and landscape signals, are typical for such projects.
“The bottom line is that this project has changed. It’s not the original,” Vargas said in a telephone interview Friday, adding the city continues to work with the commission.
Last month, Vargas told fellow commissioners: “Times have changed. The high school’s now in place. We were able to mitigate that issue. We’re basically just stumped with the trucks.”
When the parkway was first designed, no one anticipated the Inland Empire would have the truck traffic it has today, Vargas said Monday. He also has noted the project started when most of the current Perris City Council was not in office.
Commissioner and Riverside County Supervisor Karen Spiegel on Monday said she was “very disappointed and frustrated that after 20 years … this project was moving forward and there was never a comment made until recently.”
“You can’t because of city council changes and new people …. take a regional project and change the whole direction of it,” Spiegel said, adding that without the parkway, the Placentia interchange, which was meant to benefit the region, instead will mainly benefit Perris.
If the parkway is scrapped, Berkson and Spiegel last month raised the prospect of whether Perris could be forced to reimburse the commission for money spent on the project. Mayer replied the commission “doesn’t have any mechanisms” to force reimbursement.
The possibility of the parkway not being built “comes as a real shock,” Hemet City Council Member Linda Krupa said in March.
“Moving forward, we do need increased access and safer access (for) traffic into the San Jacinto Valley,” she said. “ … And we’re growing. And we are growing. And we are growing. And everything that’s happening in Winchester, in Hemet, in Menifee, in San Jacinto, all brings more traffic onto two-lane roads.”
Staff Writer David Downey contributed to this report.
