Last Chance!

Today, October 2, is your last chance to submit comments regarding the southerly extension of the Foothill Tollway (Route 241). Comments by snail mail must be postmarked as of today and addressed to:

Thomas Street, Attorney-Advisor
NOAA Office of General Counsel for Ocean Services
1305 East-West Highway, Room 6111
Silver Spring, MD 20910 .

Comments may also be e-mailed to gcos.comments@noaa.gov.

Let’s hope the Secretary of Commerce has a better sense of geography than the numerous members of the Foothill/Eastern Transportation Corridor Agency board who testified at the public hearing. For some reason, numerous elected officials from cities like Dana Point, San Juan Capistrano, and Laguna Niguel seemed to believe that they had no means of evacuation in case of emergencies except the Highway 5. Did Coast Highway/El Camino disappear? Do folks in San Juan Capistrano not have access to the Ortega Highway of the San Joaquin Hill Transportation Corridor—built by the very people who now seem to have forgotten its existence?

Also failing Geography 101 were elected officials from cities like Anaheim who said the corridor extension was necessary to provide access to Riverside County if the 91 became inaccessible. Pretty strange, since the 241 would connect to the 91 within Orange County, where parallel routes are provided by La Palma and Santa Ana Canyon Road, doing nothing to eliminate the bottleneck through Santa Ana Canyon west of the 71 and, further east, Highway 15, which are also conveniently forgotten.

Even more strange was a member of the Orange County Board of Supervisors who maintained that San Diego would be cutoff from goods and services from the rest of the United States, if something happened along the 5.

WOW! Somebody buy these folks an atlas.

And get your letters in. NOW.