Contractor Told to Start Building Toll Road : Transportation: Final approval given by San Joaquin tollway agency. Environmentalists still hope to block work.

SANTA ANA —  Tollway officials gave a construction firm the final go-ahead Thursday to begin work on the $1-billion San Joaquin Hills toll road, Orange County’s most environmentally embattled project.

Construction could begin within a few weeks.

The six-lane road will extend California 73 from the John Wayne Airport area to Interstate 5 near San Juan Capistrano. The first segment, between Laguna Canyon Road and Moulton Parkway, is expected to open in three years. Full-length trips on the road are expected to cost drivers $2.

The San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor Agency board gave California Corridor Constructors a final notice to proceed Thursday on the 17.5-mile tollway. The company, a consortium of several firms, received a fixed-price, $793-million design-and-build contract last year but couldn’t begin work until last week’s successful sale of $1.1 billion in corridor construction bonds.

Thursday’s action drew praise from construction-related businesses and trade unions, and criticism from environmentalists.

The environmentalists were still reeling from a recent finding by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that the tollway will not jeopardize the survival of the California gnatcatcher, a rare songbird. That one-two punch, project opponents conceded, means that lawsuits under way challenging the adequacy of various environmental reviews of the toll road can delay but not stop it.

Initial work on the tollway is expected to involve surveyors and design engineers. There has been some preliminary clearing of vegetation and soil testing, and some areas were graded by developers before they turned the rights of way over to the corridor agency.

Project construction manager Greg Henk said large-scale activities such as earth moving are unlikely to begin for several weeks. However, he said, the schedule could change once California Corridor Constructors develops precise building plans in the next few days.

Tollway officials have agreed to give advance warning of any grading to wildlife officials. Environmentalists pledge to respond to that notice with an immediate lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order halting construction.

Business and labor leaders, though, hailed the project Thursday for the jobs it will create. Toll-road construction is expected to yield 1,200 to 1,500 jobs over a four-year period.

Tollway officials estimate that as many as 3,500 other jobs will be created by the project as construction money filters through the county’s troubled economy.

Michael Potts, executive secretary of the Orange County Building and Construction Trades Council, AFL-CIO, told the corridor agency board that the road will go a long way in reducing unemployment among unionized workers in the county.

“This is a good project,” he said. “We’re proud to be going to work on it.”

Unemployment among the 37 craft unions represented by his council ranges from 15% to 35%, Potts said. Unemployment for Orange County workers as a whole is currently 6.4%.

“We were at the meeting because we wanted to say thank you,” Potts said. “ . . . The project and its officials have been getting some flack from protesters and we wanted to offset this.

“Actually, we are thankful for the environmental opposition. Even construction workers want to work on projects that are as environmentally sound as this one. They helped make it so.”

State employment statistics show that about 28,500 people in Orange County worked in heavy construction jobs in January, down 45% from 52,100 workers in January, 1990. Jack Greene, who directs three local chapters of the Southern California District Council of Carpenters, said the toll road is expected to put several hundred carpenters back to work building bridges and wooden forms to hold concrete supports and other structures.

“Jobs are what our members need,” Greene said. “We thank the (tollway) board and other interested parties for this project and their foresight in recognizing that people are part of the environment as well as those environmentalists who would fight for animals and trees.”

Also attending Thursday’s tollway meeting were Richard Lewis and Al Kirkwood, executives with Granite Construction Co. and Kiewit Pacific, two of the firms that formed California Corridor Constructors.

Anthony P. Frate, vice president of Lockheed Information Management Services, also thanked the board. Lockheed has the $600-million contract to build and operate electronic, toll-collection devices on this and two other county toll roads.

Frate said Lockheed will create a new Orange County division as a result of the toll-road project.

Lockheed initially will employ 20 people, about half of whom will be hired in Orange County, Frate said. That number will increase to more than 40 when the first, 3.6-mile segment of the Foothill tollway near Mission Viejo opens later this year, he said.

Eventually Lockheed will employ 400 to 500 people when all three public toll roads are operating--by the year 2000, he said.

Environmentalists opposed to the project say the job boon will be short-lived and will not outweigh anticipated damage to some of the county’s most ecological sensitive areas.

“It always makes me angry when big developers such as the tollway agency use jobs as an emotional hot button to destroy the environment,” said Michael Phillips, executive director of the Laguna Canyon Conservancy. “They’ve done that quite effectively. . . . You can always create jobs that are environmentally destructive.”

Phillips added: “You have to be sympathetic to people who are out of work, and we are. But this is a project that creates mostly temporary jobs. I don’t think that’s a great trade-off.”

Phillips described Thursday’s notice to proceed as “an order of execution” for wildlife.

Potts, though, said environmentalists are sometimes insensitive to county construction workers in the middle of a severe recession.

“Nobody ever talks to us about what we have to do when we can’t get work,” Potts said. “Our families are selling their houses and they’re breaking up. There’s a fine line between environmentally sound projects and the no-growth agenda--those who oppose building anything.”