Brea Fights Road Buildup Called Benefit to Animals

Smack in the middle of various busy suburbs is an exit of the Orange Freeway that is frozen in time.

The offramp to Tonner Canyon Road in Brea doesn’t lead to a busy thoroughfare with stoplights, gridlocked commuters and crowded gas stations. The road has remained a quiet driveway into the wilderness and oil fields of north Orange County, just as it was when it was built three decades ago.

There is so little traffic that wildlife displaced by the surrounding suburban sprawl has moved in. Mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes and other critters move under the freeway at the intersection every day as they travel a 31-mile wildlife corridor that stretches from the Cleveland National Forest to the Whittier Narrows area.

Local officials and environmentalists fear that would all change under the county’s highway plan, which calls for turning Tonner Canyon Road into a busy arterial highway that would cut through untouched wilderness. They say it will flood the area with through-traffic and invite too much development. Pressure to at least enlarge and modernize the exit is increasing as oil companies move forward with plans to build more than 3,500 houses bordering it.

Nuevo Energy Co., which wants to build 914 of those houses, comes armed with studies showing that building out the interchange would enhance wildlife movement.

It’s an argument many in Brea don’t accept.

“This is one of the few areas that is virtually pristine,” said Glenn Parker, a former city councilman and member of the Wildlife Corridor Conservation Authority, a regional agency of local and state officials. “They are under the delusion that this could help facilitate wildlife movement.... You don’t have to be a biologist to understand the absurdity of that.”

Nuevo, however, is not the city’s biggest obstacle.

The problem for Brea is a collection of cities to the east desperately looking for solutions to the traffic created by commuters trying to make their way to and from the Inland Empire.

The proposed road would be part of a plan to ease congestion in Four Corners, where the borders of four counties converge. A recent regional transportation study predicted that traffic would double in the area by 2020.

Brea’s petition to remove Tonner Canyon from the traffic plan is now in the hands of the Orange County Transportation Authority. County officials say they are withholding comment until the studies have been analyzed.

But objections are surfacing. Diamond Bar officials sent a letter to Brea and county planners reminding the city that it is part of a coalition working to reach consensus on Four Corners traffic issues.