Pine Grove residents don't want $40 million in state transportation funds.

At least, not if it means turning the already overburdened ribbon of highway twisting through their town center into a bustling, five-lane thoroughfare designed to unclog one of the county's main arteries. That was the overwhelming sentiment of eight upcountry residents who spoke passionately at a well-attended Amador County Transportation Commission meeting last week. The thing of it is, both the community's and local transportation planners' hands may be somewhat tied.

Talk of a Highway 88-Pine Grove corridor project has stretched back 20 years, when an engineering study was done in 1988. Back then, the study by Omni-Means Ltd. concluded that widening the highway would be infeasible due to limited right-of-way and the impact to the surrounding area.

In 2002, the ACTC and California Department of Transportation conducted three community workshops with the Pine Grove Civic Improvement Club on a corridor project for that stretch of highway, which curls through the center of an upcountry town of roughly 4,500. At that time, Pine Grove stakeholders managed to whittle a list of 10 to 15 possible projects down to three - installing a northern bypass, building a southern one or widening the highway to five lanes. They would get no closer.

"There was no consensus among the group after all these town hall meetings," said Ginger Rolf, a Pine Grove Council member who has lived upcountry for 35 years.

The lack of consensus, which privately nagged at county officials unable to focus the clamoring community, kicked any project for that corridor down the road. Transportation planners focused their efforts on the now-completed bypass that wraps around Amador City and Sutter Creek, and Pine Grove residents would wait until the next round of State Transportation Improvement Program funds were to be doled out.

But consensus was not necessarily the goal of those 2002 "preliminary, preliminary" workshops, said upcountry resident Debbie Dunn. Rather, planners engaged only Pine Grove residents and not the rest of the upcountry community, which would be affected by whatever project came to pass. And after narrowing down the list of alternatives to a handful, Pine Grove residents were told planners had what they needed to go back to the state, "and they never came back," Dunn said. "They were not consensus-building meetings."

Last year and the year before, the transportation commission conducted two workshops with the board of supervisors on worsening areas of service. Jackson, Martell, Plymouth, Ione, Pioneer and Pine Grove were the six communities identified as in danger of suffering significant transportation issues in the near future, said ACTC Executive Director Charles Field. With construction costs ballooning and a limited pool of funding, those sessions with the board resulted in officials deciding to spread future STIP allocations around the entire county, rather than reserving the county's share for a sweepstakes-like winner.

That message was reiterated at ACTC meetings last summer, Field said.

Meanwhile, the projected cost for a bypass around Pine Grove had ballooned from $25 million in 2004 to $83 million this past November. Even with that marked increase, transportation planners decided to try their luck. They included the Pine Grove bypass project on the list they sent to the California Transportation Commission, which ultimately decides how to distribute STIP funds across the state. The money Amador officials were asking for took them well beyond the 20-year planning scope the state desires, which was expressed in a meeting with ACTC staff in January. "Unrealistic," was the word Field remembered state representatives using.

But Caltrans District 10 Director Kome Ajise told ACTC staff to stick to their guns, so they sent the bypass proposal to the state. Not much was said about it at a March CTC meeting, Field said. When the commission's funding recommendations came back in May, they included money to conduct the environmental review phase of the corridor project without questions about where the rest of the money would come from.

That changed in a follow-up meeting on May 29, when the CTC implied a tri-county funding partnership between Amador, Calaveras and Alpine was a hoax, Field said. When it comes to state transportation funding, the three counties agreed to pool their resources under the auspices of a memorandum of understanding, which was up for renewal at the time. The state likes the idea of fostering regional partnerships and the partnership has paid off for its members in the past. The Highway 49 bypass benefited from Calaveras and Alpine counties delaying major projects until the four-mile route was completed. Calaveras planners are in the midst of building a bypass for Angels Camp. Alpine County received upcountry passing lanes to improve access on highways 4 and 88.

But when the CTC made its initial wave of funding recommendations, Alpine's next project - reconstruction of Emigrant Trail, a local conductor road - was left off the list, endangering a partnership that had garnered the small counties an unusually resonant status on a crowded stage. Originally, ACTC representatives traveled to the CTC meeting in southern California to show solidarity for Alpine officials pleading their case. It was then that state officials called out the partnership for applying for projects it had no money to complete.

"It was then we wondered, 'Do we have to come clean with these guys?'" Field said Wednesday.

The county was given until the end of June to come up with an answer.

A lot went into that formulation. The state wanted its STIP funds to go toward improving circulation on Highway 88, rated as failing according to state highway standards. Amador's new focus on regional transportation planning meant regional circulation had to be a goal. Alpine needed local roads money to remain in the tri-county partnership, which came to be seen as a virtual necessity. Using its share for a bypass in Pine Grove would tie up Amador's STIP funds for the next 50 years, leaving nothing for other impacted communities.

"At the same time, the state is saying you can't shoot the moon on an $80 million bypass project," Field said. "The only alternative that left that we can afford is the through-town alternative."

For Pine Grove residents, that's no alternative at all.

Widening the highway to five lanes would necessitate the relocation of several businesses and parking lots, community members say. Natural spring and watershed areas from Irishtown Road to Sanghera's Market could be replaced by relocated parking lots. A town center community members have worked so long to cultivate would vanish beneath a gray expanse of freshly paved concrete.

"We're really disturbed that this is under consideration to the exclusion of all the other alternatives," said Linda Berman, president of the Pine Grove Civic Improvement Club. "I don't want to see Pine Grove become a throughway to Alpine County, to Tahoe or wherever."

Dunn, a member of the Upcountry Community Council, told transportation commissioners she couldn't understand how a surface street bypass in Pine Grove could be estimated at almost twice the cost of the Highway 49 bypass.

But it may be too late. Upcoming community meetings in the winter will have to start with the three alternatives left on the table in 2003, Field explained. Since two of those involve a bypass the county says it can't afford, there may not be much of a choice left. But Field said the county is pressing the state to make contact sensitive solutions a major part of what gets considered, meaning the desires of the community have to be considered along with all the other factors.

Field's pledge to community members at a July Pine Grove Community Council meeting he attended was, "We can't do this without you. We all have to do this together."

"If the balancing act couldn't be done," Field remembered saying, "ACTC would be on the community's side."

Further assurances came from transportation commissioners Greg Baldwin and Louis Boitano, a Plymouth council member and the District 4 county supervisor, respectively.

"I would never support a five-lane anything through your community up there," Baldwin told the crowd gathered at the ACTC meeting. "Nobody wants to destroy your community up there."

"I certainly don't want to, either," Boitano added.

The MOU the three counties signed allows Amador to use the $40 million in STIP funds anywhere on Highway 88, Field explained. A compromise may include some widening of the highway through Pine Grove with less invasive traffic calming measures.

"If we can't find an agreed upon solution then the MOU gives us the ability to move the money to Jackson, Martell or another Highway 88 corridor project," Field added.