The tunnel is just around the corner!
by Lennie Roberts

May 26 had the appearance of a typical Wednesday afternoon in Redwood City. The County Planning Commission was holding a public hearing, as they do twice a month, year in and year out. Yet this particular public hearing was no ordinary event. It was the final action (barring any appeals) to approve the Coastal Development Permit for the Devil's Slide Tunnel.

The public parking near the south portal of the Devil's Slide Tunnels will allow bike and pedestrian access to the adjacent trail.

The audience and the staff seemed relaxed and mellow; there was a sense of familiar camaraderie among most of the people in the room. This group had, after all, met numerous times under the aegis of Supervisors Ruben Barrales and Rich Gordon since the passage of Measure T, the Tunnel Initiative, in 1996.

As I listened intently to the staff presentation, my attention kept wandering. Like a flashback in a Western melodrama, my mind jumped back in time to 1972, when Committee for Green Foothills took a bold step and went to court to fight the devastating Devil's Slide Bypass project. At the time, I was tremendously impressed by activist Ollie Mayer's eloquent description of the destruction that the bypass would cause to Shamrock Ranch, Montara Mountain, Green Valley, Martini Creek, McNee Ranch, and the coastal communities of Pacifica, Montara and Moss Beach. Ollie had obtained Caltrans engineering drawings that detailed the enormous destruction associated with the Bypass. Caltrans had quietly prepared the Bypass plans and then waited for an emergency so they could get federal funds to build this first segment of a six-lane freeway from San Francisco down the coast to San Luis Obispo.

Committee for Green Foothills, along with Sierra Club, Save Our Shores, Shamrock Ranch and a number of coastal residents sued Caltrans because the agency had not prepared an Environmental Impact Statement for this massive project. Caltrans argued that the project was a state highway, and they didn't have to comply with federal law regarding disclosure of environmental impacts.

Because the project has federal funding, citizens and environmentalists won that first early legal skirmish, but in our jubilation at the time, we had no idea that it would take another 30 years to achieve an environmentally superior solution to the geologic challenge posed by the dangerous Devil's Slide -- the Tunnel. As is often the case in Western melodramas, this battle had to be won over and over again.

Bypass opponents had to file four more court challenges, attend hundreds of meetings, raise hundreds of thousands of dollars, and collect over 30,000 signatures to qualify an initiative for the ballot that mandated Caltrans fix the slide or build a tunnel instead of the Bypass. In November of 1996, the voters of San Mateo County settled this melodrama once and for all with a landslide 74% majority approval for the Tunnel.

But this decisive vote was only the beginning of a new phase of the drama. Unlike the frontier, where folks could just go out and dig a new road, the process of approving a complex project today involves numerous agencies and harmonizing potentially conflicting mandates.

As soon as Measure T passed, the County Board of Supervisors established the Devil's Slide Coordination Meetings. All interested parties attended these monthly meetings, where "the good guys and the bad guys" sat down together to address every possible issue, from engineering questions to aesthetics. This process not only resolved possible problems, but forged new alliances between former adversaries. Even Caltrans, which had originally circled the wagons when confronted with citizens questioning the highfalutin Bypass plans, underwent an attitudinal sea change.

By the time the Planning Commission convened in May to consider the Tunnel's Coastal Development Permit, this project had been scrutinized to the nth degree. In less than two hours, the Tunnel Permit was approved.

The calm demeanor of this hearing was amazing. After it was over, a reporter asked me how I felt. I could only reflect that the quiet of the moment belied the monumentality of the struggle, but it surely felt good.

This is an accomplishment that has given me a great deal of satisfaction. The time, energy and sheer perseverance invested in this effort makes the result even more sweet. Through this long journey, I have honed many skills. Creativity, persuasion, outreach to people not naturally one's allies, not burning bridges with adversaries, all have been invaluable and essential skills for this battle.

It looks as though we might break ground on the Tunnel as early as fall 2004. The ultimate result - a safe, reliable and beautiful tunnel and the preservation of the Montara Mountain area -- will be a reality by the year 2010!