It's a significant amount of development.

CD: When you drive back there on the Ortega highway, it's spectacular, it looks like some kind of painting of the old west, and it's only a few minutes off the 5 freeway. Then when you see Ladera Ranch off to the left and see the grading and vast destruction they've done there to build the place, is that the kind of development too? Are they just going to go out and remove every piece of vegetation and destroy the hillsides for miles and miles to build their homes?

McKee: Pretty much. They have 1180 homes along a golf course, 1020 along a business park. Then a whole bunch of what we call McMansions -- mansions with their little lots -- and then they have a couple more golf courses, a couple of business parks, a golf resort and then upscale senior housing. They like to say that they're trying to solve the housing crisis in Orange County, but the cheapest houses they're proposing are $300,000.

McKee: Exactly.

McKee: It's a lot of houses.

McKee: It backs right up onto Caspers Wilderness and the Cleveland National Forest, Camp Pendleton, Coto de Caza, Mission Viejo and San Juan Capistrano.

McKee: A vast area.

McKee: It's been really quiet on the Foothill South front because they're going through their environmental review process right now. But meanwhile, the 73 toll road behind Laguna Beach is $400 million in debt. They're facing bankruptcy, so in order to keep from going bankrupt, they're talking about merging the boards of the 241 and the 73. So that the 241 can prop up the 73. The 241, the northern end, is doing OK financially, but it's not doing great. And they were kind of counting on 241 revenue to finance the Foothill South. So now if they use their revenue to finance the 73 it makes the financial outlook for the Foothill South even riskier. There are a lot of complications with the merging of the boards.

McKee: The problem also is that it's a toll road and not a freeway. Because of that, you have to consider that the people living out there are not going to want to take the tollroad to take their kid to soccer practice to get milk at the market. They're going to want to take the free streets because it's going to cost 9 dollars one-way by the time that construction is completed which is just astronomical. So most won't take the tollroad This of course, will just make traffic worse anyway.

(ed's note, it currently costs as much as $5.00 to drive the entire 241 from the beginning until it reaches the Riverside Freeway. If $9.00 seems kind of high, it's because this amount takes into consideration what it would likely take to drive all the way from Trestles to the Riverside Freeway)

McKee: It was explained to me that there are 25 areas on the entire earth that together make up only 1.4 percent of the entire earth's surface -- it's a really tiny amount of space. But that 1.4 percent of space accounts for 66% of all the earth's biodiversity. So on that tiny amount of space, most of the species live. This land just happens to be one of those spots.

It's actually been nicknamed the Headwaters of the South -- like the Headwaters forest in northern California -- because of it's biological importance. But the area actually has more endangered species and is more biologically sensitive than the forest lands up in Northern California.

McKee: There is not a big, majestic tree that you can grasp onto. Someone could go sit in our little oaks to try and protest the destruction but you could reach up and grab them down.

McKee: Right and it is that important.

McKee: A really cool story is that one of our volunteers, Toby Shackelford, was a Friend of the Foothills volunteer and a 19 year old student at Saddleback College. He was out at San Mateo Creek and caught a fish. He said, "I think this is a steelhead trout." And took it to his professor. His professor said "Yeah, I think it is too."

McKee: Yeah, that's been going back and forth as to whether critical habitat designations can be held up, because developers say they cost too much money. That's been batted around the courts this year.

McKee: Yeah, all the top level predators but bears. And you know, one male mountain lion needs an area the size of Camp Pendleton to survive. They need a huge tract of land for hunting. So it's really great we have all this contiguous open space -- the Rancho Mission Viejo land is also connected with the Cleveland National Forest, Caspers Wilderness and the Mission Viejo Land Conservancy -- so cougars have all that area to roam. When you start putting houses and a road back there, it makes it impossible for them to hunt and live. In fact, when they built the northern portion of the 241 toll road in Orange County and Riverside, they had more animals killed on that road than on all roads in the area combined. It was built through the habitat where those animals live.

McKee: Then when you have homes back there then you have the animals coming into people's neighborhoods and that's really unfortunate for everybody. And the tollroad and housing proposals would basically isolate the Rancho Mission Viejo Land Conservancy from the rest of the open space. So that area would become one of those little biological islands where the larger animals can't survive because they're not accessible and those animals need to traverse across these open areas.

CD: Now let's talk a little bit about watersheds. San Mateo Creek is essentially the last undammed, undiverted, unpolluted watershed south of Ventura, right?

McKee: Right. It's really significant. That's also why essentially Trestles is such a clean beach. Because San Mateo Creek is so clean and there's no development upstream, that's what makes Trestles such a great beach. And it's unfortunate that this tollroad and the homes upstream could ruin all that.

McKee: Basically it parallels San Mateo Creek for quite a long way, it's really going to have much, much more significant impacts than the I-5 in terms of water runoff into the creeks and the beach.

McKee: The TCA (Transportation Corridors Authority, or tollroad board) likes to say, "it's not going to ruin the campground, we'll go right by it." Well, they're going to go within 25 yards of the campground. So the State Park has said, "yeah, technically you're not going to cross our campground, but we're going to abandon the campsite because no one wants to camp under a tollroad." The state parks system has said that they will abandon a campground that is within the top ten most visited campgrounds in the state.

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