By Aaron Claverie
TEMECULA —- The city has filed two lawsuits against a landowner to acquire about 3 acres of land near Temecula Creek, parcels the city wants to convert into riparian habitat and wetlands.
The city is required to provide the habitat and wetlands to replace the federally protected land that is being paved over to widen Pechanga Parkway, a $26 million project to alleviate traffic congestion in the southern section of the city.
John Heffernan, manager of Borchard-Temecula LP, said that he expects the city and his Newport Beach land-holding company will broker a settlement that has the city paying about $36,000 for the land, about 20 percent more than the land had been appraised for.
“We don’t want to go to trial,” Heffernan said.
The city this year is expected to finish widening the parkway, a heavily trafficked corridor that carries Redhawk and Pechanga Resort & Casino traffic, from four to six lanes, three lanes in each direction from the bridge at Temecula Parkway to Wolf Valley Road.
The widening project, which started last year, is being paid for with about $18 million in fees from the Wolf Creek residential development, which is located on the east side of the parkway —- plus $4.4 million from the Pechanga tribe, a $4 million federal grant and reimbursements from various other agencies.
The city filed two separate lawsuits against Borchard-Temecula in February to condemn two parcels of land through the eminent domain process after an agreement couldn’t be reached on a price.
Heffernan said his company’s position was that the land the city was looking to buy should be the same price as the acreage that was taken by the city when Borchard-Temecula was developing a shopping center near the intersection of the Avenida de Missiones and Temecula Parkway.
“That’s the real number,” he said, dismissing the appraised value of the parcels that was submitted to the courts by a Simi Valley-based real estate appraiser.
City officials declined to comment on the suits.
The sequence of events that led to the city filing multiple lawsuits to create a relatively small patch of open space has its beginning in the sometimes convoluted process of building a road that cuts through a waterway, in this case Temecula Creek.
According to the narrative detailed in the text of the lawsuit, the city built storm drain facilities as it worked to widen Pechanga Parkway.
Building those facilities resulted in “permanent impacts” to one-tenth of an acre and temporary impacts to two-tenths of an acre of wetland waters regulated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Regional Water Quality Control Board.
It also caused permanent impacts to about an acre of riparian habitat, which is river bank vegetation that is regulated by the California Department of Fish and Game.
When a public entity does anything that affects protected wetlands, it is required to compensate for that action.
In the small print of the suit, the city is proposing maintaining the wetlands for 5 1/2 years and then offering the land back to Borchard-Temecula.
Heffernan said it makes more sense for the city to keep the land and he said it could be converted into a linear park or a trail for horses.
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