Oh god, open space people, open space is another word for fire space. dharma, they have been kicking around the offramp idea for a few years, the trouble has more to do with the giant granite mountains in the way rather than critters. One plan is to have an offramp near the BP checkpoint and go around and through morgan at butterfield straight up through to hemet, the other is just to go straight to the casino and that’s it, keeping gamblers from even needing to enter the city since the casino is the first thing they would come to. My guess is direct offramp will win since both ideas need indian land and they will be more likely to give it up to increase casino access than commuter access to french valley and hemet. Plus all the merchants on Winchester aren’t fired up to let everyone bypass the city and it will ruin Morgan Hill, cutting it half with a major road. Locals win either way, spreads things out. There was an article in the paper today about the widening of pechanga parkway costing 30% less than they had allocated, a benefit from the housing bust is that construction of infrastructure is cheaper, I think it is going to cost them 8.9 mil instead of 12 mil that they budgeted for it, they got 11 bids and all but one was under 10 mil. hopefully a lot more will get done while things are cheap and the open space people cant complain because all the critters are already dead from the fire. What open space people dont get is that firefighters cant defend open space, you need a road and some water pipes to defend it, which is better, a road going through the habitat or having them all burned up every couple of years and that open space does burn every few years, it gets put out as soon at reaches the first road or golf course, every time.
