The hills beside Interstate 15 are blooming gloriously with the colors of spring and summer, the bright green grass contrasting with vivid orange poppies and hazy purple lupines. These flowers sprouted from a hydraulically sprayed fertilizer-and-seed combination distributed last fall. It’s one of many California highways blossoming from expensive man-made landscaping. Each year, California is spending too much money landscaping its freeways.
California allocates $10 million per year to the Environmental Enhancement and Mitigation Program, which is overseen by the California Department of Transportation Division of Local Assistance. EEMP projects undertaken each year include reforestation, trail building and habitat restoration. That’s a heck of a lot of taxpayer money spent planting trees–something I remember doing for free in third grade.
The entities working on roadside environmental projects are local, state or federally funded agencies or nonprofit organizations. TransNet, a local half-cent sales tax program started in 1988 and overseen by the San Diego Association of Governments, is the organization responsible for making I-15 look prettier. The project for the I-15 corridor included four express lanes to reduce traffic, costing $572 million. Of that, approximately$10.6 million was spent on environmental enhancement and mitigation. Almost four-fifths of the total cost of the project was funded by the state while about one-fifth was by TransNet. While local funding represents only a small sliver of the project’s total, this still means San Diegans are paying in part for highway enhancement and its corresponding environmental enhancements.
Why we are dishing out so much money to reinvent a naturally beautiful and lushly vegetated landscape is beyond me.
The EEMP’s website states the “Highway Landscape and Urban Forestry. Projects are designed to offset vehicular emissions of carbon dioxide through the planting of trees and other suitable plants.” Oxygen is good, yet the fact that San Diegans are annually spending tens of millions of dollars through Caltrans and local taxes to spray wildflower seeds on already pretty hillsides is something that needs to come under public scrutiny. I would rather enjoy a landscape made by the natural elements than one carved by a bulldozer and a posthole digger.
San Diego’s roads have seen $85.8 million poured into them in the last year, according to TransNet. That’s not including the outlying communities and cities, bikeways and walking paths that were also worked on. If the extra $10 million spent on I-15’s flowers and trees was spent refilling potholes and sealing cracks in those streets, many San Diegans would be complaining less about poor road conditions. Until there is a change in funding from painting hillsides with trees and flowers to actually fixing the roads San Diegans drive on every day, California will hear the complaints of San Diego drivers.
