(An open letter to the L.A. County Planning Commission, Santa Clarita City Council and L.A. County Supervisors):
I just read an Opinion piece by Bryan Caforio in The Signal newspaper (“Dump expansion not just about Val Verde,” Tuesday’s Signal).
It was very disturbing to hear that Los Angeles County supervisors may be planning to greatly increase the volume of trash to the Chiquita Canyon dump site.
Not only is this planned to be one of the largest dump sites in the world, if approved for the tonnage of trash that is planned, but it will possibly become an environmental disaster, and will result in intolerable increased traffic by trucks passing through the Santa Clarita Valley on I-5, Highway 126 and Highway 14.
If you have had a chance to drive up to our community on the I-5 through the Newhall Pass, you will undoubtedly have experienced clogged traffic at almost all hours of the day.
Particularly bothersome is the bottleneck caused by our incompetent Caltrans building a new HOV lane into the SCV that suddenly ends, abruptly merging lanes just below the Highway 14 interchange.
This “improvement” has actually caused more traffic congestion after millions of dollars were spent for the freeway changes.
Now, if we add thousands of trucks coming north on the I-5 and entering the freeway from the truck lane, traffic will grind to a stop, affecting the commute of tens of thousands of SCV residents.
You need to support our community and stop this idiocy from happening. And a call to Caltrans on our behalf to open up all of the available lanes at this critical bottleneck might also help.
I will be anxiously awaiting your action on our behalf. If you let this happen, there will be a heavy price to pay for not only the residents, but for any politician who fails us in this important issue.
