The City of Claremont has been busy all along Base Line Rd. between Mountain Ave. and Monte Vista Ave. The street, which the State of California had owned and managed through Caltrans, was handed over to Claremont, along with $2 million to fix all those cracks in the road surface. Base Line has been a mess since before the 210 Freeway opened, and a makeover has been long overdue.
During the Glenn Southard years, Claremont fought Caltrans to try to get the agency to do all the road repairs prior to giving it over to the city. After Southard left, the new administration worked out the deal for the $2 million. The work's been going on for a few weeks now, but a reader noticed some problems:
Dear Insider,
As part of resurfacing and upgrading of Base Line Road (east of Mountain Ave.), new landscape medians are being installed. Sounds good except that the City has decided to install "half ass" patches of landscape medians which look silly - not the normal more complete stretches that include "finger" extensions at left-turn pockets as was installed west of Mountain Ave. The reason? "Lack of funding!" Yes, it is true that when Caltrans relinquished Base Line Road to the City, the agency gave the City about $2 million for repairing the road. The $2 million amount was apparently not enough to upgrade the road with full landscape medians - hence the patch work that is now underway. If our City Council was not busy expending thousands of dollars on frivolous non-essential items (Village trolley, Friends of the Library book cataloguing, etc.), may be we could have complete landscaped medians installed on Base Line Rd.
We were wondering about those medians ourselves. They look awfully funny, stopping short as they do before the left-turn pockets. On the other hand, no one important lives up there, so who will ever notice if we skimped a little or a lot on the road?
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