There continue to be two topics that continue to be of major concern to the Four Corners Consortium regarding traffic issues on Quail Gardens Drive as well as the potential for development of the L-7 city owned parcel of land on Quail Gardens Drive. This consortium made up of all of the neighborhoods and HOA’s along Quail Gardens Drive and was formed to advocate for traffic measures. The following is a short summary of the current status.
1. Traffic Mitigation
a. The consortium leadership has met with city council members and discussed how the consortium was formed in the spring of 2022 to address concerns of safety for all users over ever increasing traffic volumes and speeding along Quail Gardens Drive. The underlying issue is safety; that is the safety of pedestrians, bicyclists as well as vehicles. The other related concern is one of access. Virtually every resident who lives along this road has only one means of access and that is through and on Quail Gardens Drive. This impact also affects the residents who live along this road but also the San Diego Botanical Gardens that sees over 100,000 visitors annually. the Heritage Museum, the Encinitas Union School District Farm Lab and the Encinitas Community Garden. Furthermore, with an additional 1000 housing units underway along this road, the situation will just continue to become much worse. Our consortium represents every HOA and neighborhood along Quail Gardens Drive as well as the Saxony HOA and homeowners in the Clark Avenue neighborhood.
b. The consortium was able to advocate and convince the city council in the summer of 2022 to agendize and direct city staff to develop recommendations for safety and traffic mitigation. Currently, the city engineer has developed a set of short term quick build recommendations.
c. We are concerned over the glacial pace of work and are looking for a stronger sense of urgency and some short term solutions. Those solutions could be inexpensive and serve to determine if they help to alleviate some of the problems.
d. We discussed the 2015 Leichtag Foundation study which developed a number of traffic measures for both Quail Gardens Drive and Saxony Road. That study died with the Traffic Commission that year although we would submit that their recommendations still make good sense.
e. Quail Gardens Drive is different from Saxony or Vulcan in that this road is going to absorb 1000 housing units in the next few years and all of these developments will have one access road: Quail Gardens Drive
L-7
a. We firmly believe that placing additional housing on Quail Gardens Drive is very inequitable with residents already going to grapple with an additional 1000 housing units which represents over 40% of the housing units in the most recent housing element on a one mile stretch of road.
b. The use of that parcel of plan for housing appears to fly in the face of several HCD selection criteria used for selecting affordable housing sites:
– It is not close to any transit stops or commercial services
– It would not easily blend with the surrounding housing
– It will create a silo of 100% low income housing that will not be integrated into the community.
– It would not address the criteria of distributing affordable housing across the entire city
c. We urge the council and city staff to explore the use of other city owned properties as well as privately owned land.
d. If L-7 is determined to be the best and only solution to address the No Net Loss requirements then the design of any housing needs to be a top focus area and there should be a mix of housing.
e. We are looking for open and transparent dialogue about site selection for housing element sites that would include an advisory council and/or town hall style meetings to solicit input and feedback.