Half Moon Bay Review
March 16, 2005

Feds release first chunk of the Devil's Slide tunnel funding

By Jeanine Gore

Stalled for nearly three decades by lawsuits and legislative hurdles, a permanent fix for problematic Devil's Slide now officially has the funding to move forward.

The Department of Transportation released $150.3 million last week for construction of two tunnels through Montara Mountain. The federal money serves as the first installment on the $270 million project, which will enable commuters to bypass the troublesome Devil's Slide portion of Highway 1.

"These funds have been held up for more than 20 years, and I am thrilled that they finally will be released," said U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo, who began pushing for emergency road repair legislation for Devil's Slide 22 years ago, after an El Nino storm closed the road for months.

The project was funded through legislation co-written by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and approved in 2004.

The funds come from the Department of Transportation's emergency relief program to repair and reconstruct highways and roads on federal lands that have sustained serious damage as from natural disasters. Ultimately, the entire Devil's Slide project will be funded with federal emergency relief money, meaning the project is not forced to battle with other California transportation projects for matching state funding.

Since the roadway was first built in 1937, it has been closed countless times due to landslides, rockslides, and mudslides. As a solution, the government had originally planned to build a freeway through the surrounding state parkland.

That controversial plan didn't go anywhere but court.

Environmentalists who feared building a freeway would ruin the area's natural beauty and lead to a hemorrhage of development in the sleepy coastal towns of Montara, Moss Beach and Half Moon Bay, first filed suit in 1972. Decades of legal delays ensued, followed by widespread support for an alternate plan to build two tunnels through San Pedro Mountain. The tunnel plan was heralded as a more environmentally sound choice.

The tunnel project was approved by county voters in 1996 as ballot Measure T. Groundbreaking has been scheduled for April 5, with a ceremony and after-party at the Half Moon Bay Brewing Company.

The design proposes to build two 4,000-foot-long tunnels through San Pedro Mountain, replacing the trouble-prone oceanfront section of Highway 1, known as Devil's Slide. The former route will become a trail overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Ideally, once the tunnel is built, the boundaries of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area will have been expanded to include the current section of Highway 1.

Then the section of roadway will be transferred to GGNRA management and used as part of the Coastal Trail.

The project's largest milestone was surmounted in 2003 when the Federal Highway Administration certified the tunnel's massive environmental impact report, which reworked part of the project to minimize impacts to wetlands and protect endangered red-legged frogs.

The move wrapped up more than four years of environmental study of the tunnels that included study and rejection of the "dewatering alternative," which is still seen by some tunnel opponents as the better, less costly alternative.

The Sierra Club and Committee for Green Foothills are among those that support the tunnel project.

Current images of the Devil's Slide tunnel are available online at the Caltrans Web site at www.dot.ca .gov.dist4.

Page last updated September 13, 2010 .