The current portion of a controversial overhaul of Santa Fe Drive near San Dieguito High School Academy is nearly done and Encinitas officials hope to start monitoring its effects on high school students in mid-March.
“Depending on how much rain” the city receives within the next week, all construction activity could conclude as soon as March 10, interim City Manager Jennifer Campbell told the City Council last week.
Currently, construction crews are filling in the landscape planters and spreading mulch. Then they’ll start installing a mid-block crosswalk, and that will be a multi-day project, Campbell said.
“The goal is to have (all the work done) with … enough time to see how it operates” while school is still in session, then decide whether to make changes, Mayor Bruce Ehlers said.
Some five years ago, the initial plans called for doing one project that would overhaul all of Santa Fe Drive from McKinnon Avenue eastward to El Camino Real. However, due to soaring construction cost estimates, those plans were later split into two — a “western” project between McKinnon and Evergreen, and an “eastern” project for the remaining portion from Evergreen to El Camino. A proposed roundabout at Crest Drive also was eliminated as a cost-cutting measure.
After rejecting three sets of contractors’ bids, the city ultimately picked Tri-Group Construction Development, Inc. of San Diego and embarked on the western portion of the project in 2023.
Prior to the start of construction, the Santa Fe Drive renovation plans had generally been praised. In 2022, when the city’s Planning Commission approved the required permits, one commissioner declared that he loved the plans and “really hadn’t found anything bad to say about” them. The biggest public outcry at the time came from people who were unhappy that the proposed Crest Drive roundabout wasn’t going to be built.
But, as construction began, feelings soured. Contractors got far behind schedule; costs rose far higher than anticipated; and neighboring homeowners found driving through the construction zone a challenge and increasingly started voicing concerns about what was being built. By late 2024, many neighbors were heavily lobbying for the city to change the project’s design, saying the back-in parking spots would be impossible for teen drivers to manage and the narrowed vehicle roadway widths would slow both freeway commuters and fire responders.
At a meeting in mid-December, the City Council decided to pause all construction activity once the current phase of work concludes — which at that time was estimated to be at the end of January, but now is looking like mid-March. Once this phase concludes, the western project will have many, but not all, of its proposed elements, including back-in parking spots, protected bike lanes, the mid-block crossing point and filled landscape planters.
Two intersections — Nardo Road/MacKinnon Avenue and Bonita Drive/Windsor Road — were proposed to gain new traffic signal equipment and redesigned corners with what are considered pedestrian-friendly “curb bulb-out” areas, but those have been postponed to a possible, later phase of construction.
