While a pair of community meetings drew hundreds of Bouquet Canyon residents upset over the planned closure of their main arterial for 11 months, fewer than 10 showed up Tuesday to a protest outside Santa Clarita City Hall after an online effort to drum up support.
The closure is being planned for a realignment of Bouquet Canyon Road, necessitated by the construction of 375 for-sale single-family homes by Lennar, next to David Way and Bouquet Canyon Road.
Commuters in the area will be asked to detour around Bouquet Canyon Road, which will be closed from Benz Road to David Way, with Hobbs Court and Sue Court also being closed off to all traffic except emergency vehicles. Residents who live off Benz Road will be given gate access, according to city officials.
The latest announcement about the plan is that the closure is expected to happen Feb. 13, according to a website created by the developer, BouquetCanyonRoad.com.
The city has said that the closure won’t happen until all the impacted residents have been given a gate key for Benz Road.
However, when Natalia Rodriguez, a resident who lives near the project, reached out to the city to ask questions about the gate key, she said Tuesday she was told to talk to Lennar.
John Musella, local spokesman for Lennar, confirmed the announcement but declined to make a statement.
The developer’s outreach was one of the residents’ most repeated concerns Tuesday prior to the Santa Clarita City Council meeting.
Joyce Stein, who said she lives near Haskell Canyon Road and Copper Hill Drive, was doing this to raise awareness about what was going on for residents in the area.
She said she’d been involved in working with the Santa Clarita City Council in the past regarding projects in her area when her neighborhood was an unincorporated area, in a fight with her neighbors against the county’s Department of Regional Planning. She could remember a city official telling her, “Your problem will be our problem,” regarding a 500-home project that was stopped north of her.
This time around, she didn’t feel like the city was being as good of a neighbor.
City Manager Ken Striplin has joined the chorus that has criticized the outreach from the national Miami-based homebuilder on more than one occasion, but residents say the city hasn’t addressed their main issue: They want the realignment built first so their main access road is not closed down for 11 months.
“Do it right,” said Janet Carnevali, who attended the developer’s previous community meeting and also showed up to the protest. “Build the road before you do the building,” she said, adding the developer has had five years to figure it out.
She said the turnout was probably due to the timing, the fact that it was cold outside, a lot of people work and some of the residents are part of an “aging community,” she said.
“It’s hard,” she added. “I’m able to come out, so I figure at least a few of us are out here … getting attention, people are noticing,” she said, as the occasional driver would honk, a few even slowing down to read protesters’ signs on Valencia Boulevard.
Joy Ory, a 36-year resident of Bouquet Canyon Estates, said one of her biggest concerns was the impact of residents who likely haven’t been informed of the work at all, which is Antelope Valley commuters who come to town through Bouquet Canyon Road.
She said the city’s detour signs have already negatively impacted her daily commute, and once more drivers are funneled on to Copper Hill Drive, she said it will create major circulation concerns in a fire.
The developer has said such an accommodation would be infeasible, due to the need to widen the floodplain, raise the bridge and balance more than 1 million square feet of soil at the project site.
