'Sliver of land' purchase price is latest Holland Overpass delay

By Doug Spoon, Editor

The Holland Road Overpass project has most of the funding necessary to begin construction later this year, but one significant obstacle remains, a city official said.

Although the City has purchased 95 percent of the adjacent right of way property necessary to accommodate the bridge on both sides of the 215 Freeway, negotiations with the final property owner have hit a snag, City Manager Armando Villa said.

Villa didn’t identify the lone parcel yet to be purchased, but he said the owner of the “sliver” of land the City needs in order to complete the bridge right of way “disagrees with the appraised value” of the property. Unlike the previous land purchases, which Villa said were “very amicable”, negotiations on the final parcel have been difficult.

“We’re still negotiating,” Villa said. “We have offered fair market value, but the owner believes it is worth more than that.

“If we can’t come to an agreement, we’ll look at more alternatives. We could go through the eminent domain process.”

Villa said that if it becomes necessary, he could seek authorization from the City Council to increase the offer or pursue the eminent domain process, which he said could add an estimated 12-18 months to the timeline.

The latest estimated start date for construction in the $27 million project was this summer.

The Holland Road Overpass has been a topic of public discussion at least since 2012, when mayoral candidate Scott Mann used “Build Holland First” as a campaign pledge. But as was reported in this news article in Menifee 24/7 a year ago, the expansion of the Newport Road and Scott Road interchanges were always given higher priority because of those streets’ value as regional east-west thoroughfares, thus receiving funding for those projects by county and Caltrans officials.

Now that those projects are complete, the focus is on the Holland Road Overpass as an additional traffic route over the 215 Freeway. The bridge will have no freeway access but will have two traffic lanes each way to improve east-west traffic in the city.