Fort Ord Reuse Authority brings back Eastside Parkway and litigation ensues.

The proposed Eastside Parkway through the former Fort Ord – a roadway that would bisect oak woodlands to connect General Jim Moore Boulevard and Inter-Garrison Road – remains the top-priority project in the Fort Ord Reuse Authority’s capital improvement program, and the agency will hold a workshop Dec. 6 at its headquarters in Marina to discuss the road’s ongoing environmental review.

Expect long-simmering tensions to resurface: FORA lost a lawsuit related to Eastside Parkway earlier this year, but it’s still continuing down the same road of road planning – contrary to a court order dictating that FORA go back to square one on the project.

FORA is also proceeding under the pretext that the road is a required environmental mitigation on the former Army base, when FORA’s own Base Reuse Plan indicates it is not.

FORA documents repeatedly refer to the road as an obligation – which is not a legally enforceable term – while FORA Executive Officer Michael Houlemard has referred to the Eastside Parkway as a required mitigation, which is legally enforceable. FORA spokesperson Candace Ingram says, “It’s not a mitigation.”

In fact, the only required traffic mitigations under FORA’s Base Reuse Plan are off-site projects – such as widening Highway 156 – and not roads within the former Army base.

Nonetheless, FORA’s board is pushing to complete the road before the agency sunsets in June 2020 – at a projected cost of about $24 million – but in its haste, FORA violated the law. That’s according to a court ruling: In January of this year, Monterey County Superior Court Judge Lydia Villarreal agreed with Keep Fort Ord Wild that FORA had illegally committed significant financial and bureaucratic momentum to the Eastside Parkway’s proposed route before reviewing other, potentially lower-impact, alternatives. (FORA and Monterey County later reached a settlement with KFOW, and each paid KFOW $255,000 in legal fees.)

Villarreal ordered FORA to go back to the drawing board on the project, and consider all potential alignments on equal footing.

Yet in court papers filed Nov. 13, KFOW’s attorney Molly Erickson contends FORA hasn’t done that, but rather continues to use the same proposed alignment that was discredited by the court. (FORA has no comment on the ongoing litigation.)

One example Erickson cites is from May, when FORA solicited a firm to do an environmental impact report detailing the proposed road, and requested it be based on the earlier plan, for which engineering plans are already 90-percent complete. Whitson, the firm that was hired for the environmental impact report, also did the engineering plans.

If FORA does not complete Eastside Parkway before the agency sunsets, it’s not clear it will ever get done. Debbie Hale, executive director of the Transportation Agency for Monterey County, oversees FORA’s required off-site mitigation projects. She’s disappointed that TAMC has not yet been able to rely on FORA to help fund the required off-site mitigations.

“Normally, you mitigate regional traffic impacts all along the way,” Hale says. “There needs to be a comprehensive regional look at the transportation system, so we’re building [roads] in a way that accommodates traffic as it happens.”