A Doug's Life: School busing must be brought back

Menifee 24/7 Editor Doug Spoon's commentary on all things Menifee:

Nobody asked me, but…

Parents who were upset when Menifee Union School District stopped busing service seven years ago should be livid by now. With an ever-increasing population and an insufficient road system, schools are simply asking too much for parents to get their children to and from local campuses.

That goes for the high schools, too, which means Perris Union High School District also needs to provide busing service. Our community is simply too spread out to ask parents to drive three or four (or more) miles to school and wait in long lines to drop off and pick up students. And more than an inconvenience, it is a major safety issue.

A prime example is the drive faced by motorists heading to and from Liberty High School. There are only two direct east-west routes to the school from Menifee – Scott Road and Garbani Road. There are no shortcuts, unless you count a short stretch of Wickerd Road that leads to the back of the school. Overall, the situation is a mess.

And wait until MUSD adds an elementary school in a rural area south of Garbani, which will be approached by a dirt section of Briggs Road. There are no sidewalks on the roads surrounding that school site, nor are there sidewalks on most of the roads approaching Liberty High.

Similar scenarios will be played out across town starting this week. School officials simply must find the money to restore bus service, which will in turn restore the sanity of motorists and take a considerable number of cars off local streets…

As we stated previously, the City of Menifee has given George Krikorian a Sept. 1 deadline to submit updated plans for his ill-fated theater and retail complex in Menifee Town Center. With less than a month of his three-month timeline remaining, Krikorian has yet to file any paperwork with the City.

The question is, what will the City do to back up its threat if Krikorian fails to meet the deadline for a resumption of work at the site? Claim the site by eminent domain? Tear the buildings down? File a lawsuit against Krikorian, who is already being sued by sub-contractors?

In a recent L.A. Times poll, readers voted Murrieta as the best city in the IE, not Menifee. You think the ghost town in the middle of the downtown area might be hurting our appeal?...

While work on the Holland Road Overpass keeps chugging along, there already are preliminary plans for a 215 Freeway interchange at Garbani Road – even though that won’t be built until after both Holland and the expansion on the McCall Boulevard interchange.

The Garbani project will have on- and off-ramps – unlike Holland, which will be just a crossover bridge because it is located too close to the Newport Road interchange to have its own ramps, according to Cal Trans standards. The problem for both Garbani and Holland bridges is that, while the bridge will be constructed with four lanes, both roads are just two lanes on both sides of the freeway. Get ready for the bottleneck traffic jams a few years down the road…

Our reporting that the City of Menifee is hoping to share the swimming pools at local high schools for public use met with some criticism on our social media pages. Readers want to know why the City can’t find the money and space to build its own public pool.

If that were to be considered, City officials could look at a plot of land it already owns – the vacant lot at the southwest corner of Bradley Road and Cherry Hills Boulevard. Previously the site of the Kings Inn during Sun City’s heyday, the land offers plenty of room for an aquatics center and parking lot.

OK, so it’s in what is largely a 55+ retirement community. Believe me, people both young and old would travel there to use such a facility. That location for a pool makes more sense than an alternative that has been mentioned for the site – a City-owned police station. Although the current police headquarters is a leased building, it is much more centrally located than the Sun City site would be for balanced law enforcement coverage.

Speaking of the current location, one wonders why so many people get away with running red lights at the intersection of Newport Road and Haun Road, which is practically the front driveway of the PD station. Maybe one of the squad cars that are always heading in and out of there could be stationed at the corner for several hours a day. Just a thought – even though nobody asked me.