San Diego Union-Tribune
The proposal will be discussed at Monday's Del Mar City Council meeting. The task force would include five voting members who are Del Mar residents and two non-voting members from the nearby Torrey Pines area of San Diego .
The task force will meet approximately weekly, according to a charter prepared for the group. It would advise the City Council and recommend, presumably with a vote, official responses to documents such as the environmental impact report prepared for the tunnel project.
It also would address community concerns and, as directed by the City Council , it could be assigned to review issues or topics related to the project and provide recommendations to the council.
All comments and concerns raised, whether by individuals, the City Council or some other group, must be addressed in the project's final environmental documents, which will examine its potential effects such as noise, traffic, air and water pollution and more.
Members of the task force could be appointed by the council as soon as April 1 and would serve until environmental documents and a final design are approved for the tunnel, which is anticipated in 2026. Then the panel would be disbanded.
Del Mar has closely monitored the San Diego Association of Governments' rail realignment project since the regional planning agency began public outreach efforts in 2020. SANDAG intends to move about 1.7 miles of the tracks off the eroding bluffs to ensure the long-term viability of the 351-mile-long Los Angeles - San Diego - San Luis Obispo (LOSSAN) rail corridor.
The agency has looked at more than a dozen possible routes for the tunnel.
Most of the possible routes, including the shortest and fastest, would take trains beneath residential properties. Many Del Mar residents have expressed concerns about noise, vibrations, hazardous materials and other hazards.
Some residents are pushing for a route that would take the tracks across the San Dieguito Lagoon , under the state-owned Del Mar Fairgrounds and along Interstate 5 , away from the most densely populated areas. Fairgrounds officials have opposed that idea.
Council members proposed the task force after hearing an update on the project from SANDAG officials Feb. 5 .
"I'd like to see ... a group of citizens ... so that when questions come up you are not just relying on the staff and on the council members ... some sort of task force," Councilmember Terry Gaasterland said at the meeting.
Mayor David Druker agreed and said the ad hoc group could provide important information to SANDAG and update the City Council as the realignment plan proceeds.
"We have a bunch of times where we are going to be able to comment," Druker said. "The next period is the notice of preparation. That is going to be extremely important, that we comment on that."
The notice of preparation will be issued by SANDAG later this year to indicate the agency is about to begin work on environmental documents for the project. State and federal regulations require all relevant public comments on the notice to be considered when preparing the documents.
SANDAG received a $300 million state grant in 2022 to advance planning for the tunnel. Construction is expected to start in 2028 and be completed in 2035. The cost has been estimated at more than $4 billion .
Erosion eats away the Del Mar bluffs at the average rate of 6 inches annually, bringing the railroad tracks ever closer to the cliff's edge.
SANDAG and the North County Transit District , which owns the railroad right-of-way, have completed a series of projects over more than 20 years to protect the tracks on the 70-foot-high bluffs by installing concrete-and-steel pilings, drainage structures, retaining walls, seawalls and other devices.
Despite that work, periodic bluff failures occur. One on Feb. 28, 2021 , briefly halted all rail traffic and periodically delayed trains for months while emergency repairs costing more than $10 million were made.
Construction of a new set of stabilization measures, intended to safeguard the route in place until 2035, begins this year. Details of that work will be presented by SANDAG at Monday's Del Mar City Council meeting.
Meanwhile, another stretch of the coastal rail corridor has become a growing problem. The railroad right-of-way runs along the beach at near sea level below steep bluffs for several miles through San Clemente in southern Orange County , just north of Camp Pendleton .
Winter storms have caused landslides that sent soil and debris down onto the tracks in three different places there in the last few years.
Most recent of these is a slide near Mariposa Point , where parts of a pedestrian bridge on the San Clemente Beach Trail were pushed onto the railroad right-of-way. No passenger trains have been allowed past the spot since Jan. 24 .
Freight traffic has been allowed periodically, only at slow speeds and at night. The trains were suspended again last week after the slide accelerated, then resumed Thursday night after the hillside's movement slowed.
Work began last week on a 200-foot-long barrier wall anchored by steel beams sunk 30 feet into the ground. When the wall is completed, probably in less than a month, passenger train service is expected to resume.
OCTA officials said in February 2023 they would need about $7 million to study possible long-term solutions to protect the San Clemente segment of track. One possibility is the realignment of about seven miles of coastal tracks from Dana Point to the border of San Diego and Orange counties.
A first phase of the study, now underway with $2 million in funding, will consider ways to protect the tracks in place with measures such as sand replenishment and retention.
A second phase would require an additional $5 million to consider the possibility of relocating the tracks inland, probably along or underneath Interstate 5 . That idea would require the cooperation of local, regional, state and federal agencies, and construction would cost unknown billions of dollars.
This story originally appeared in San Diego Union-Tribune .
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