The city of Santa Barbara presented its concerns Tuesday about the revised draft of an environmental impact report for a portion of the Highway 101 widening project that will run through the city.
As part of the EIR’s public comment period, the city will send a letter to Caltrans outlining city-identified traffic impacts to intersections that were not identified in the revised EIR’s own intersection-impact findings.
In late 2015, a judge ordered Caltrans to revise and recirculate the intersections portion of the EIR, saying that the original document was inadequate in the way it analyzed impacts to local intersections and cumulative traffic impacts from the project, which will add a third lane in each direction of Highway 101 between Santa Barbara and Carpinteria.
The revised draft EIR is available on Caltrans’ website, and the final EIR is expected to be ready in late spring, with construction anticipated to begin in 2019.
Caltrans looked at 108 intersections that it concluded would see the worst traffic impacts from project construction, and 47 of those are in Santa Barbara.
The impacts were measured by the length, in seconds, of the added delays at intersections.
Three of the seven intersections identified as needing improvements to mitigate severe impacts are in the city.
Caltrans’ Jason Wilkinson, the project’s environmental manager, said at Tuesday’s City Council meeting that improvements to Milpas Street/Highway 101 southbound offramp and State Street/Highway 154 onramp will be done by the state, which has jurisdiction over them, while those at Cabrillo Boulevard/Los Patos Way would be the city’s responsibility.
For that intersection, the city would pay for the improvements with contributions from the state.
Public speakers on Tuesday criticized the thresholds Caltrans used to determine when there would be traffic impacts to an intersection.
City principal transportation planner Rob Dayton said that using the city’s own thresholds to identify impacts indicated that there would be more than three intersections affected by project construction.
City staff had turned up nine impacted intersections half way through their own analysis, he said.
Mitigation work needed for city intersections would require considerable capital expenditures, he added.
The city wrote in a 13-page draft of the letter to Caltrans that the agency “has chosen to use ad hoc thresholds of significance that minimize the actual impacts of the project on city intersections and streets.
“These thresholds were selected in a vacuum, without consideration of the city’s transportation planning standards,” it said.
The council voted 6-0 to send Caltrans the letter once city staff completes its impact analysis.
Councilman Gregg Hart, an SBCAG spokesman, sat out the discussion and vote, telling Noozhawk that he wanted to avoid the perception of a conflict of interest.
The city’s General Plan, on which the Planning Commission bases its project approvals, uses the thresholds Dayton used, Commissioner Mike Jordan said in a recap of the panel’s own review of the EIR.
That makes granting the approvals that the project needs from the city a tricky task, he said.
Jordan added that it was important to include in the EIR the extra mitigations identified by city staff because, should those associated impacts surface, there would be confusion over their cause and who would be on the hook for them.
“We do take accuracy seriously,” said Scott Eades, Caltrans’ Highway 101 corridor manager. “We will be evaluating all the city comments that come in and looking at those in detail.”
He added that the possibility of recirculating the EIR because of the city’s findings would be something Caltrans would determine after that evaluation.
Marjie Kirn, the executive director of the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments, which is sponsoring the project, said that “we all agree that the 101 widening is needed.”
She told the council that the EIR process should be moved along so that the project can receive funding, avoid what she said would be $1.4 million a month in costs due to delays, and begin providing congestion relief.
Council members Randy Rowse and Cathy Murillo encouraged city staff and Caltrans to work swiftly and collaboratively to hammer out their differences so that a project they said residents have long been waiting for can begin.
Comments on the draft EIR can be sent no later than Jan. 31 to Wilkinson at jason.wilkinson@dot.ca.gov.
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.