Menifee 24/7 Editorial: How divisive can a center divider be?

By Doug Spoon, Editor

Only in Menifee does a governing body approve a major commercial project against the wishes of the project applicant.

It happened Oct. 27, when the Menifee Planning Commission voted unanimously to approve the proposed Menifee Crossroads development – moments after the applicants had requested a denial of their own project. A representative of the applicant now says the decision will be appealed to the City Council, asking for the project in essence to be killed.

This appears to be all about politics, with the future of what could be a major office/retail commercial center at stake.

Menifee Crossroads was designed as a 103,274-square-foot center to be built on nine acres of vacant land at the northeast corner of Newport Road and Bradley Road. The center would stretch north all the way to Park Avenue and would include a specialty grocer (tenant not yet announced), a Denny’s restaurant, two retail shop structures and two office space structures.

Original plans for the project went through the City approval process without major issues. Now, however, the City has insisted that a raised median be placed on Bradley Road from the intersection north until past the Newport Plaza on the other side of the road. The explanation is safety issues, with City planners citing concerns about traffic.

The applicant for the project agreed to construct the median and pay its share of the cost. But addition of the median to the plans raised objections from the owner of Newport Plaza, threatening to sue the developer because of it.

Newport Plaza is one of the older commercial centers in town. It includes several popular dining and entertainment venues, including Pitstop Pub, Giovanni’s Pizza Pasta & More, and Carnitas Express, in addition to doctor’s offices, a paint store, and a tire shop. The owner of the center and some of the business owners say the median would hurt their business because it would prevent motorists driving north on Bradley Road from turning left into their center.

This is a particularly sore spot with those owners because they believe the City has already stuck it to them once before. One of the primary entrances to their center was taken away a few years ago when the City agreed to turn part of the Newport Road center divider strip into a left-turn lane for westbound motorists wishing to turn into a McDonald’s being built across the street from Newport Plaza’s entrance driveway.

That eliminated left turns into Newport Plaza for eastbound motorists. According to Giovanni’s owner Tom Powers, he lost 35 percent of his business in the months following that change.

And now they want to take away the left turn into the plaza’s Bradley Road driveway for motorists.

Granted, eastbound motorists can make a U-turn at Bradley Road and enter the plaza driving back the other way. But the big rig trucks that deliver supplies to the center every morning can’t make that turn. So the many delivery trucks that head east to the Newport Plaza from the 15 Freeway would have to turn left at the signal before Bradley (Winter Hawk) and make right turns through a residential neighborhood to come back south down Bradley and turn into the center that way.

Confused? It’s a mess, all right, and one that City officials aren’t making any easier with the contradictory way they’re addressing the issue.

As mentioned previously, City planners didn’t insist on a raised median in the initial plan checks. There is no raised median listed for Bradley Road in the circulation element of the City’s General Plan. And Powers told us that when the Newport Road eastbound left turn-in for his center was removed a few years ago, he was promised by a City official that the Bradley Road left turn would never be eliminated.

We asked the City about this situation. They responded with the copy of a September 2020 memo in which Chet Robinson of the Engineering Department wrote to the developer that “a median may be necessary along Bradley to discourage left turnouts from any existing or proposed driveways.”

The memo also says, however, that Bradley Road is classified in the General Plan as a Secondary Road. In the General Plan section C-2, a Secondary Road calls for only a painted median, not a raised median. Exhibit C-3 of the General Plan also shows that section of Bradley Road as a Secondary Road (undivided). There has been no proposal to change that section of the General Plan to accommodate this project.

Moreover, there is no requirement for a raised median listed in the City’s review of the plans dated Jan. 21, 2021. Asked where the median requirement came from, assistant city manager Rochelle Clayton pointed to City Engineering’s comment in an April 28 memo stating that the City would require adding a raised median to the plan. Clayton said the decision was made by “The Traffic Engineering Section (including on-call consultant) of the Public Works Department.”

Clayton denied a suggestion that city manager Armando Villa ordered city staff to include the median in the project. But it is clear that although the median is not required according to the City’s General Plan, someone at the City wants it to be installed.

This is the case even though city engineer Nick Fidler said during the Oct. 27 meeting that, “At this point, the City does not believe a median is warranted. The small amount of accidents over a three-year period -- two, to be exact -- is normal. But we do believe that as traffic increases ... it will drive the need for a raised median.”

The “we” in this case appears to be Fidler himself. Jonathan Smith, the previous city engineer, did not call for a median at that location. And Smith was aware of the plans for Menifee Crossroads.

Then a year ago,  Smith was forced out.

Kassen Klein, a consultant representing the applicant, told the Planning Commission at its Oct. 27 meeting that his client was not willing to proceed with the project because of the threatened lawsuit by the owner of Newport Plaza. Asked by commissioners whether the median was a deal breaker, Klein consulted with his clients and said they preferred to be denied the project rather than construct the median and be sued for it.

“There’s either no median or no project,” Klein said. “They’re going to litigate, and we’re stuck in the middle. This family can’t take that risk.

“These people aren’t developers. If it was a developer, they would write a check and the issue goes away. That is not the case.”

The applicants are a family who owns and operates Denny’s restaurants, including one in Murrieta.

So now it appears the issue lies with the Menifee City Council, which will have to decide whether to grant the applicant’s request by appeal to in essence kill a project that could be of great benefit to the City and its residents.

Obviously, Planning Commission members didn't want to be the ones to kill such a big project. It’s also possible they were coached by City staff members to approve the request – with the median – and let the City Council sort it out.

Good luck with that. The City doesn’t want to get sued, either. On the other hand, the City really wants this commercial center, which would bring an estimated 340 jobs and $45 million in taxable sales. We’re about to find out if City officials decide that insisting on the installation of a raised median is worth potentially killing the deal.

Is there a way out of this mess? How about giving Newport Plaza its left turn back on eastbound Newport Road? Remove the westbound left turn for the McDonald’s and put one in the other way for the plaza, at its westernmost driveway by Pitstop Pub. Was the staff member who promised McDonald’s the left turn lane as a condition of its construction the same person who promised Newport Plaza owners their Bradley Road left turn would never be taken away? Whatever the case, City officials, you can fix this.

If there’s a contractual obligation with McDonald’s to keep its left turn lane, negotiate. Or pull rank. Do something drastic like that if you want your Bradley Road median (which, again, isn’t required by the general plan). Do this, or find another way to avoid litigation and satisfy all parties.

And please, answer the question: Who ordered the inclusion of the raised median and why is it suddenly so important?

Transparency. Ah, it's a novel concept, isn’t it?