By Jeremy Ogul | Editor

Neighbors say traffic, parking issues must be resolved

Nearly seven years after the City Council voted to approve it, the Verge Apartments are finally a reality.

Much of the 444-unit luxury apartment complex is still under construction on Mission Gorge Road at Greenbrier Avenue, but the first tenants began moving into the finished units in July. Approximately 10 percent of the units are occupied now, but the complex should be fully occupied by the end of the year, said Justin Wald, the community manager for Verge.

The apartment project — originally known as Archstone Mission Gorge — is the largest addition to the neighborhood since the late 1970s, when several neighboring apartment and condominium complexes were built.

Many nearby homeowners remain unhappy with the development. Residents on Greenbrier Avenue, in particular, are upset that the new traffic signal at Mission Gorge and Greenbrier was designed in a way that makes it too easy for Verge residents and their guests to park in the single-family residential neighborhood.

“What’s going to happen is everybody who can’t get a parking space or won’t pay for one is going to park over here and walk [back across Mission Gorge],” said Rick Fahmie, who has lived on Greenbrier for 36 years.

That will make it impossible for the homeowners or their guests to find street parking, he said.

“This is a neighborhood; it’s not Downtown where they’re used to parking aggravation,” he said.

Fahmie and others said it wasn’t supposed to be this way. The City Council specifically discussed the design of the intersection at the Nov. 18, 2008 meeting in which the project was approved.

“I want to make sure that there’s no new traffic that goes into Allied Gardens via Greenbrier,” Councilmember Jim Madaffer said then, according to a video recording of the meeting.

Madaffer asked a city traffic engineer whether the traffic signal at the intersection of Mission Gorge and Greenbrier could be designed so that cars exiting the new apartment complex would not be allowed to drive straight across Mission Gorge Road onto Greenbrier.

“We’re trying to protect the residents, the single-family residents, from having another freeway off-ramp into the community, basically,” Madaffer said.

Jim Lundquist, a city traffic engineer, said an intersection like that could be designed but had not been analyzed in the project’s environmental impact report.

“I don’t believe that you would get the benefits from it that you may think there are,” Lundquist said.

Madaffer disagreed, pointing out that an existing median on Mission Gorge Road blocked access to Greenbrier (except for right turns onto Greenbrier from the northbound lanes of Mission Gorge). Madaffer then reiterated that he wanted approval of the project to be conditional on no new traffic into Allied Gardens via Greenbrier.

Anthony Wagner, who lives on Greenbrier and serves as president of the Allied Gardens-Grantville Community Council, remembered that City Council discussion when the new traffic signal was turned on earlier this summer. He wrote to city staff asking them to investigate.

In an email to Wagner, city traffic engineer Crystal Cliame acknowledged that Madaffer in 2008 had requested no new traffic onto Greenbrier, but she said there was no way for the city to distinguish between new or old traffic, nor could such an intersection be designed.

Wagner said the design of the Costco shopping center in La Mesa shows that such an intersection is possible. Drivers exiting that shopping center have only two options: turn left or right onto Fletcher Parkway. Driving straight across Fletcher Parkway onto Marengo Avenue is prohibited by a sign that says “NO THRU MOVES.”

The city’s senior traffic engineer, Ann Gonsalves, wrote in an email to Wagner that traffic should be minimal onto Greenbrier — less than 20 trips in either direction at the busiest hour of the day, according to the environmental impact report.

With so few residents moved into the apartments at this point, the real traffic and parking impacts on Greenbrier and other nearby streets remain to be seen. For now, most of the street parking in the area seems to be taken up by construction workers.

—Write to Jeremy Ogul at [email protected].