Oceanside city staffers have looked at 10 options for improving access to the Capistrano neighborhood near the main entrance to Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, where residents have trouble getting in and out when traffic is heavy entering or leaving the military base.
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“This restricted access condition has raised questions of how traffic would be managed during an emergency evacuation,” states a city report to be presented at Wednesday’s Oceanside City Council meeting.
Staffers will outline the options and ask the council to select up to three for further study.
The only way for drivers to exit the Capistrano neighborhood is onto Harbor Drive, just before the main entrance into the Marine Corps base. There they can either go into Oceanside, onto the base or onto a ramp entering northbound Interstate 5. Harbor Drive becomes Vandegrift Boulevard once it enters the base.
Drivers also can enter the residential neighborhood by taking an offramp from northbound Interstate 5 to Capistrano Drive. After Capistrano Drive, the offramp continues and becomes part of Harbor Drive, and the last chance to enter the neighborhood is a right turn from Harbor Drive onto San Rafael Drive just before the Pendleton gate.
Four of the ideas proposed for improved access are variations on creating a connection from the eastern side of the Capistrano neighborhood to state Route 76.
Each of those options includes building a bridge across the San Luis Rey River and would take seven to 10 years to complete at an estimated cost ranging from $60 million to $90 million, according to the city’s report.
The most expensive option on the list, estimated at $175 million and rated a 10 on a difficulty scale of 1 to 10, is to build a road to the Prince of Peace Abbey.
The abbey is on private property east of the Capistrano neighborhood and its only outlet is Airport Road to state Route 76. Extensive environmental and regulatory permits would be needed, and the city would have to acquire one or two pieces of private residential property. The abbey connection would take 10 to 15 years to implement, the report states.
Also on the list, and rated 9 out of 10 on the difficulty scale, is a suggestion to build as many as four bridges across Interstate 5 connecting streets in the Capistrano neighborhood to North Coast Highway. The rough estimate for that project is $150 million, and the time frame is seven to 12 years.
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One of the possibilities is relatively quick and free, which would be to open the Camp Pendleton gate for Capistrano residents to drive through in an emergency. However, this would require the cooperation of Marine Corps officials and would be difficult to obtain, city staffers said in their report.
Another option involving Pendleton is a proposal to build a short street with a locked gate connecting Capistrano Drive with Carnation Street in a nearby military housing area just inside the base. That would cost about $400,000, but also would require an agreement that the Marine Corps is unlikely to support.
“Base staff indicated that, should the City wish to pursue (options other than the Pendleton connections), the Defense Community Infrastructure Program (DCIP) could be a potential source of up to $20 million in federal funding, and base representatives would be willing to consider supporting a funding application,” states the city’s staff report.
The City Council at a meeting in April asked staffers to work on the access problem after hearing from neighborhood residents.
“We need help,” said resident Darren Jenson, in a letter to the City Council. “Our neighborhood is consistently blocked with traffic and emergencies. We (residents) need another exit or entrance to our neighborhood.”
Access to the neighborhood has become more difficult in recent years, City Manager Jonathan Borrego said in April. Staffers have discussed the problem in the past, but this will be the first time they have presented the City Council with a range of possible solutions and a rough estimate of the costs.
Most of the several hundred small, single-family homes in the Capistrano community were built in the 1950s, when the region’s population and traffic were far less. The 14-acre Capistrano Park, developed in 1964, has two baseball fields and two tennis courts.
The neighborhood also has a kindergarten through eighth-grade school, North Terrace, operated by the Oceanside Unified School District, built on federal property at the edge of the base. The school serves both military and civilian families, with entrances from both the Oceanside and Camp Pendleton sides of the campus.
