The Bridge to Somewhere...

A couple of miles down the road from my home, on Lawson Valley Road, there's a little two-lane bridge over the Lawson Valley Creek. It's been inspected, and it's falling apart. So San Diego County is going to replace it.

Sounds perfectly ok, right? It's such an ordinary sort of thing for a Department of Public Works to do. You'd think they'd have pre-packaged plans for such a thing on the shelf, and all that would be required would be a little adjustment for the local circumstances. Get funding, take the tweaked plans, assign the right people and equipment, and then go build the bridge. Simple.

Ah, but you forget. There's a government involved. Simple, it seems, is just unacceptable.

On the San Diego County web site, there's a page for this project. There's nothing on it except for six links to PDF documents, which you can download (and if you live in Lawson Valley, I encourage you to do so). The documents include:

• Notice of Intent (NOI)
• CEQA Initial Study (IS)
• Mitigated Negative Declaration (MND)
• Natural Environmental Study (NES)
• Visual Impact Assessment (VIA)
• Water Quality Report (WQR)

Some of this government-speak must be translated for us normal humans. The CEQA is the California Environmental Quality Act. A Mitigated Negative Declaration is a document saying that a project has potential environmental impact, but they're going to be addressed by actions (the “mitigations”) that are part of the plan – so in the end there will be no environmental impact.

A question that immediately occurs to Lawson Valley inhabitants who live east of the bridge (that includes me!) is this: how the heck are we going to get in and out of the valley while this new bridge is being built? And how long will that take?

Well, the plan says that building the new bridge will take 18 months (really?), and that one lane will remain open while they build it.

The image at right is from the 36 page Visual Impact Assessment. It's the same as the photo above, but the new bridge is shown. I'm not sure how they made this – it could be an artist, or it could be some kind of computer-generated thing. In any case, someone went to a great deal of trouble to produce it. Then they never showed it to any of the people to whom it might actually matter, like the inhabitants of Lawson Valley. I only found this by accident, and the review period was up weeks ago. You'd think if they were going to go to all this trouble, they might have done something obvious like mail it to us denizens. Sheesh!

In any case, you can see that they're going to straighten the road just a bit. There are more modern-looking rails and the crash-absorbing “bumpers”. It's just a silly little bridge.

I'm still having trouble absorbing the notion that we taxpayers had to pay for a Visual Impact Assessment. This one was made by Vicki Estrada, of Estrada Land Planning. I'm afraid to ask what it cost – and even more afraid of what this cost is multiplied by the hundreds of projects across the county...

But the Visual Impact Assessment is dwarfed by the 154 page Natural Environmental Study. The diagram at right is one of many in the study. I learned a lot just by glancing through this study. For instance, I learned that in 2002 the county paid Nelson Olivas to visit the bridge site and determine that there was no nearby breeding habitat for the Arroyo Toad. Then in 2003, the county paid Nelson Olivas to visit the bridge site and determine that there was no breeding habitat for the Southwestern Willow Flycatcher. I read the 17 page “Wetland Determination Data Form” included in an appendix (fascinating stuff). Then there's the two page plant species list, listing about 60 species observed near the bridge – I'm sure we paid someone to take that inventory. Oh, and let's not forget the six page restoration planting plan.

By comparison to the preceding, the 17 page Water Quality Report is a model of brevity and conciseness. Even so, its actual content could easily be distilled to just a few sentences. Basically, it says that the new bridge will not have any significant impact.

Doesn't this seem like an awful lot of time and trouble (and money!) considering that we're talking about a teeny little country two lane bridge? In the end, all these studies and reports accomplished nothing whatsoever that I can see – the county is going to build a new bridge just as it would have done without the studies. A few “best practices” guidelines – like businesses use every day – would have covered things like erosion mitigation and recovery planting. This just seems horribly excessive, and a case of bureaucracy trumping common sense. These sorts of studies are the kind of thing I'd expect if you were going to build another Coronado Bay Bridge – and then I'd be lauding them for taking proper precautions. But for a little country bridge? Come on, folks...