Debby Swoboda, San Clemente
To All,
It seems like some think The Toll Roads issue only affects where the pavement starts and ends; however, this is untrue. For every new home in the areas around tolls roads and “future” toll roads, the builder has to pay a fee, about $6,000 per home, so everyone who buys a home, whether they agree or not, is giving money to the Transportation Corridor Agencies (TCA).
Hey, homebuilders, start fighting back; homebuyers, start fighting back. This impacts everyone’s bottom line.
Just think: what if we had $1,000 per home put in a fund for homelessness? How quickly could we do something about it? Instead, the TCA says to pay the fee, or you can’t build. Extort much?
So when you think, “Oh, the toll road won’t affect me,” think about it just a smidge more. The TCA has a $10 million payroll (2017 numbers) to pay the salaries of 166 employees. Where is the money coming from for those salaries? Your taxes and tolls from the road. Isn’t that something we should know? And wouldn’t that money be better spent paying off The Toll Roads to make them free for everyone, which is what the TCA is supposed to do?
You know that gas tax everyone is paying? Well, if The Toll Roads didn’t use millions of taxpayer dollars to keep the toll roads up (because they are still losing money), they could be using them on our decaying roads and infrastructure everyone uses.
We need to stand up to greed, which this is, plain and simple. The TCA shouldn’t exist. Let’s stop them for the good of California.
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toll road smoll road ,, if our beach parking fund cant survive why should the troll road fund survive
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With or without the TCA, new housing means new residents and new residents mean more impact on our roadways, including the I5 Fwy. Right now the only option for additional roads is toll roads. And if that is the option, then we need to pay for construction. Who better to pay for that construction than the people coming into the city and expecting all the services that long time residents have paid for with their taxes.
I am not an advocate of TCA but I am an advocate of additional roads for ingress and egress to the City of San Clemente. Despite the widening of I5, that freeway remains a parking lot on weekends and will get much worse once the summer traffic arrives.. WE MUST FIND ALTERNATIVE ROUTES in and out of the city..
If anyone has a right to be mad about all this it is long time residents like myself (44yrs) who have paid the taxes to expand our infrastructure as the City has grown from 14,000 residents to whatever it is today. My little city by the ocean has grown into an overgrown nightmare that is land-locked with few options for remedies.
I have no problems with the concept of developers having to add a tax for roadway development to the cost of a new home. If people want to come here fine, but they need to pay for the impact on our resources and infrastructure. If TCA happens to be the beneficiary, so be it.. Otherwise we pay CalTrans to build another deck on I5.
although i trust cal trans a bit i dont trust the tca at all and a free road is much more preferable compared to a toll road
Bill Robinson— wrong my friend. To assert that since more residents are coming means we therefore need more roads is incorrect. It’s like the fat person saying….”I’m getting fatter, so, I need bigger pants”…….
Bigger pants really isn’t what the person needs, they need a diet, or some lipo or…….etc…….just expanding ignores the root cause of the problem. Existing roads can be widened, new routes on surface streets opened, etc,
No face valid study exists that supports the notion that the goofy toll road will relieve ANY I5 traffic—-WE HAVE BEEN THRU ALL OF THIS SOOOOOOOO MANY TIMES BEFORE… The nonsense continues. The TCA is here to make money. Some cities council members get paid a great wage by the TCA and they are conflicted and the dance continues—- Surfrider, other enviros and locals defeated this last time– we will do it again– the road is a white elephant no one wants it………
Traffic on hwy 5 has been almost static for the past 20 years, based on SCAG data. A further study commissioned by San Clemente showed that a toll road through San Clemente would actually increase traffic. BTW, the firm conducting the study has done studies for the TCA in the past, so it’s not a “tail wag dog” scenario.
Has anyone stopped to consider how our traffic would be affected if the current toll roads were free? If the TCA worked as intended, the toll roads would now be free.