Making Noise: Petition Drive Seeks to Preserve Freeway Sound Wall Above Future Housing Project

Vern McAtee is a retired auto-body repairman at University Ford who turns 90 in June. He lives quietly in a tree-shrouded neighborhood west of state Route 125 and south of Johnson Drive—a part of La Mesa once home to a chicken ranch and later Moening’s Nursery.

But one recent Wednesday, McAtee was ticked. Two visitors had stopped by to chat about revised plans for a 31-home development going in just south of his home.

The project had been approved. The change has not.

The builder, Reynolds Communities, informed the neighborhood in mid-March that it didn’t want to build an 11-foot sound wall along the freeway—above an 11-acre housing tract to be called La Mesa Meadows.

“If people think it’s noisy now,” McAtee told neighbor Mary Putnam and a reporter, not completing the sentence. “I’m going to talk like a trooper” to keep the sound wall.

A Kansas native who moved to San Diego in 1940, McAtee has lived in the Garfield  neighborhood for 25 years—letting the trees on his half-acre property grow thick to block the freeway noise.

Yet concerns about freeway widening and more traffic along the busy north-south corridor are prompting him—and neighbors who launched a petition drive—to preserve the sound-wall requirement imposed when the planned residential development was approved by the La Mesa City Council in August 2006.

Reynolds wants to drop the requirement, however. It has asked for a hearing before the city Planning Commission. 

Company officials declined to comment on their request—or on the petition drive to keep the wall.

But the Internet home of the petition drive contends that developer Neil Reynolds told residents March 12 that “Caltrans has asked the wall be moved west in order to someday add lanes to the freeway.”

The new wall location, he reportedly said, would require more grading and expense than the original sound wall location. Thus the company is asking the city to remove the requirement to build a sound wall.

However, Jacob Armstrong, a state Department of Transportation official based in San Diego, told La Mesa Patch this week that “we’re not requiring or asking them to do anything,” referring to Reynolds Communities.

“The issue of building the wall is between them and the city,” said Armstrong, branch chief for Caltrans development review. “I’m not sure why we’re being included in the conversation as much as we are.”

Armstrong said Caltrans has communicated with Reynolds over the years—letting the East County developer know about long-term plans for the freeway, including a  widening project possibly decades away. But, he said, “Caltrans has never had the authority to tell them where to build [the wall].”

Further, Armstrong said, the “actual sound abatement has nothing to do with Caltrans’ future plans. … If they were to put in the wall [as currently specified], it doesn’t matter to us.”

In fact, if Reynolds erected the sound wall—and the state needed to widen Route 125 down the line—Reynolds wouldn’t have to pay for a new wall.

“If  we have to relocate that [wall] sometime in the future, that’s what we’ll do,” he said, and at no cost to Reynolds.

The website home of the petition drive—led by residents Putnam, Gary King and Kristin Kjaero—says the developer’s request to drop the sound wall would be heard by the Planning Commission on April 20.

But on Thursday, senior planner Chris Jacobs of the city of La Mesa said documents required for the hearing had not yet arrived from Reynolds.

“If the materials do not arrive by Monday [April 4], the item will NOT be scheduled for Planning Commission consideration on April 20th due to noticing requirements,” Jacobs said via email.  “If the April 20th hearing date slips, then we are looking at May 4th as the next potential hearing date.”

John O’Donnell, an assistant planner with the city, said Reynolds needs to file a revised environmental document called a “mitigated negative declaration.”

Other plan revisions also would be needed by April 4—which would give city staff time to study the changes for possible recommendations to the Planning Commission and to place a legal ad in the East County Californian newspaper to comply with public-notice laws.

“The sound wall is an approved feature of the project,” O’Donnell said.

Said Jacobs: “The city’s position is: If you want to make a change, you have to go through the hearing process.”

Asked why Reynolds might want to drop the sound-wall requirement,  O’Donnell said: “I think it’s a sign of the times,” suggesting that the tight economy is leading developers to seek cost savings where they can.

Vicki Eiler, a spokeswoman for El Cajon-based Reynolds Communities, would only say: “We are working with all of the agencies for a resolution, and do not have an answer, or any comments, at this time.”

Putnam, the co-petitioner, is an environmental planner with the County Water Authority and has lived in her Garfield Street home for 20 years. She said she’s making the rounds of nearby homes on Highfield Avenue and Garfield Lane seeking support for the sound wall.

She said some neighbors of the Reynolds property support the builder, apparently for certain financial benefits.

But McAtee, the 89-year-old resident on Johnson Drive, said: “They haven’t tried to buy me out.”

The portion of the housing development nearest McAtee’s property would actually be a small park, with picnic tables, according to plans made public. That doesn’t appease him, though.

“I want them to put a wall out there,” he said.