Has Steve Rosansky Finally Aborted the Banning Bridge?

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Rosansky, Banning Bridge plan. Abort?

How do you abort a project that was never going to be built anyway?

This might seem like a trick question, but in the world of Orange County planning, there is a lot of money riding on dotted lines drawn on maps.

If you can pretend that you are going to extend the 241 South, you can temporarily rescue the failing 73 toll road by giving them a massive prepayment of revenue they might potentially lose in the future.

And if you can keep a dotted line on the Master Plan of Arterial Highways that goes from 19th Street in Costa Mesa to Banning in Huntington Beach, you can pretend that some day you will have the traffic capacity that will support development you want to do right now.

If you are smart, you do just enough to keep these unbuildable boondoggles on the plans, without ever really calling attention to them.

But Steve Rosansky, termed out and looking for something he could call a legacy, decided to push for construction of a bridge.

Rosansky probably thought this was a good idea, and he enlisted Big John Moorlach in his quest. Moorlach can’t resist a Big Idea where he can imagine that he will play the pivotal role in solving an intractable problem. He has never actually succeeded with any of his big ideas, but when you have an ego as big as the moon anything seems possible.

But Rosansky should have left well enough alone.

Once he started pushing for actual construction of this imaginary project, people took a closer look at it.

OCTA developed a cost estimate for construction, giving this a price tag of $140 million to $150 million. This may seem like a lot of money when you think of this as a bridge, but it makes sense once you look at a real project, which is to build an elevated aqueduct from the sandy bluffs down the hill and then across the wetlands,  with the final leg of construction through the Orange County Sanitation District with its massive pipelines. Forty miles of pipeline crisscross the landscape, one part of an entrenched oil operation that will require a cleanup estimated at $30 million or more, according to the developer.

Then there’s the fairly significant problem that the cities on either end of the bridge, Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach, have actively fought against this idea for decades. They know that it’s really just a ploy for Newport Beach to allow development without having the traffic impact Newport Beach streets or neighborhoods.

Which brings us back to the real need for the bridge – development of the Banning Ranch property – 412 acres including wetlands and bluffs along the Santa Ana River.  The landowners, Shell Oil and Exxon (through their Aera Energy partnership), think they can gain approval for almost 1400 homes, a hotel and commercial development.

There would be  14,000 vehicle trips a day that have to get out of this proposed development. The major entrance was going to be a new road constructed from the bluffs down to Pacific Coast Highway, but Newport Beach was recently bitch-slapped by the Coastal Commission when they tried to gain approval for this road.

Would the developers come up with $150 million to build this bridge? Not a chance. They want taxpayers to foot the bill.

Is there money in Measure M to pay $150 million for this boondoggle. Again, not a chance. Under Measure M, the money for projects like this is awarded competitively and there is no way that a project that benefits one proposed development, opposed by the cities at both ends, would ever qualify for this funding.

Now that there is a $150 million price tag, opponents have a perfect argument to OCTA to either remove the bridge from their long term plan or show some funding source in the foreseeable future.