A new regional ad hoc committee is bringing together representatives from Banning, Beaumont and Calimesa to address ongoing issues with traffic congestion and truck routes throughout the San Gorgonio Pass area.
“There’s been a lot of growth in our area and around us that we’re a big passthrough,” Beaumont Councilmember David Fenn said. “We affectionately say all roads lead to Beaumont.”
But between cars, trains and the growing truck traffic from warehouses, Fenn said any traffic issue really wreaks havoc on the entire area, but the one that really sticks out in his mind happened in the summer of 2022 when a train broke down for nearly six hours and turned the city’s streets into a virtual parking lot.
“It blocked three railroad crossings,” Fenn said. “So that was kind of the catalyst that really just blew things up to say, ‘OK, we need to do something about this.’”
Fenn, who will serve on the city of Beaumont’s ad hoc committee with Mayor Pro Tem Jessica Voigt, said that the goal is for the three cities to come together, share information and leverage their combined resources to advocate for additional funding for projects to help ease congestion.
“These projects are bigger than the budgets that each of our cities have,” he said. “Other cities, like Temecula, Murrieta, Corona, Menifee, some of those cities are larger than ours, and they’ve gotten more attention for infrastructure projects, for traffic relief than we have, and now we kind of feel like, ‘Hey, it’s our turn.’”
Fenn and Voigt will be joined on the regional ad hoc committee by Banning Mayor Sheri Flynn and Councilmember Cindy Barrington who were appointed at last week’s Banning City Council meeting.
“I think it’s wonderful that we’re going to be working with them on truck routes, because it impacts them as well,” Flynn said at the meeting.
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Originally, Fenn said the committee was proposed to include just Banning and Beaumont, but he said if it was going to be a regional committee, they needed to include Calimesa, since all three cities are facing similar challenges.
“We’re good neighbors to each other, and we want to stay that way,” Fenn said.
Representing Calimesa on the committee will be Mayor Linda Molina and Councilmember Edgar Garcia, who were appointed earlier this month during the Calimesa City Council meeting on Feb. 3.
“We’ll get back to the council at a future date to let you know what the outcome of that is and what to expect from this,” Molina said at the meeting. “Hopefully we’ll have some good things come out of it.”
One of the things Fenn said he hoped would come from the committee is a better understanding of how the three cities can align their current and upcoming projects to best meet the needs of their communities.
“I first ran for council in 2020, and the most common complaint that I heard was, taxes, taxes, taxes,” he said. “Well, now I hear traffic, traffic, traffic, so we’re trying to address it.”
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