Plan for Weigh Station Near Landmark School Delayed

SANTA PAULA — Bowing to pressure from local officials and state legislators, Caltrans on Friday postponed plans to make a truck weigh station the next-door neighbor to the century-old Little Red Schoolhouse.

The agency’s plan to build an inspection station to weigh trucks about 1,600 feet from Santa Clara Elementary School along California 126 has alarmed school officials, who fear the station could create noise and safety hazards.

The proposal came as the one-room schoolhouse--that welcomes 28 students in less than two weeks--continues to battle an expansion of the nearby Toland Road Landfill, which could result in as many as 25 more trucks a day rumbling past the crimson-colored landmark.

Local and state officials applauded Caltrans’ decision to delay plans to build the station until the agency has time to further review how the facility would affect the clapboard school with the three-story bell tower.

“It gives us some breathing space so that we all can determine what is the best way to go for our kids,” said Tamera McCracken, superintendent of the Santa Clara Elementary School District, which runs the tiny school. “Our playground is really directly across from where the station is going to be. I am really concerned about the students’ health. When you have constant noise, you really can’t function.”

State Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo) said the California Department of Transportation may end up finding another place to put the weigh station.

“I am not convinced that within half a mile of a school is the best site for these types of inspections,” said O’Connell, who had voiced concerns to Caltrans along with Assemblyman Brooks Firestone (R-Los Olivos). “You don’t want a high volume of trucks with some risk factor within a relative proximity to a school. It is just not good public policy.”

Although enrollment has been halved since the school opened in 1896, 28 students will attend classes taught by two teachers when school starts Sept. 3.

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Citing a need to improve traffic safety along California 126, Caltrans has said that the proposed inspection station would fill a gap in the California Highway Patrol’s truck scales network because the county only has two such stations located on the Conejo Grade and on Los Angeles Avenue near Ventura.

Caltrans owns the land where it has proposed building the two-lane station for the CHP on a shoulder just east of the school. Though Caltrans had not awarded a building contract, the agency had already closed the bidding period on the estimated $700,000 construction project.

Caltrans officials would not specify why the agency decided to postpone the project, but Caltrans spokeswoman Patricia Reed said the agency wanted time to study the concerns that residents had raised at a Thursday meeting in Ventura.

“The one that was talked about the most was the proximity to the historical schoolhouse,” she said.

Steve DeGeorge of the Ventura County Transportation Commission said Friday that the site makes sense in some ways because it lies along a lengthy stretch of roadway, allowing truck drivers to see the station in time to stop.

But the transportation planner added that with the landfill expansion and other proposed projects, the traffic situation has changed since Caltrans first proposed the inspection station in the early 1990s.

After the Thursday meeting--that included officials from Caltrans, the CHP and the school-- DeGeorge said the commission wrote a letter to Caltrans asking the agency to conduct a study of how the station would affect noise and air quality.

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“We are very concerned about the impacts on the school,” DeGeorge said.

County officials are also considering a gravel-mining project and a golf course in the area. Train tracks already run behind the historic schoolhouse with a local train operator planning to increase rail tours through the Santa Clara Valley, McCracken said.

“It is the combining of all the projects that is so bad,” McCracken said. “I don’t know what all of this could do to the school.”

Built for about $2,500 a century ago, the kindergarten-through-sixth-grade school is one of 27 remaining single-room schoolhouses in California and the state’s second oldest. The school district, which has an annual budget of $169,000, has spent more than $10,000 since it joined the ongoing legal battle to stop expansion of Toland landfill.

The turn-off for Toland Road leading to the dump is across the street and about 1,000 feet east of the school but west of the proposed station site.

“When you are in the building, the trucks right now make a horrendous racket,” McCracken said.

Don Hopkins, 57, a Toland Road resident whose 10-year-old son died in 1972 after he was hit by a car while trying to cross California 126 on his way to the schoolhouse, said he is not opposed to the weigh station.

But Hopkins, a critic of the dump’s expansion, said the proposed truck inspection station should be moved west of the school so that trucks coming from western Ventura County can be weighed before heading north on Toland Road.

“What I am concerned about is these trash trucks that are coming up the hill and that they could be unsafe,” Hopkins said.

County Supervisor Maggie Kildee, whose district includes the schoolhouse site, said she was heartened by Caltrans’ latest decision.

“It means that they are responding to the concerns that have been raised,” Kildee said.