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Thursday, May 17, 2012
Regional Focus: March 2007
Folsom’s Final Stretch
Obstacles give way as Folsom rebuilds in the north and stretches to the south
Story by Wes Sander
For years, there’s been constant traffic through historic Folsom. But it’s not long now before the problem will run its course.
At its south end, Folsom continues to stretch toward Highway 50, filling in space and looking to hop the freeway in the next few years. That section of town is built for heavy traffic, the more the better.
But at its north end, where Folsom came to life a century and a half ago on the tall, sloping south bank of the American River, efforts and plans to make historic Folsom a tourist destination have stirred for years.
Being clogged by dense traffic for most of each day isn’t bringing people downtown quite the way Folsom’s planners, business owners and boosters had in mind. The daily commute has only become worse in old Folsom in the past half-decade, and the situation won’t alleviate until the city’s new bridge — an Army Corps of Engineers project that’s been fast-tracked for completion inside of two years — is built.
The new bridge will cross the American River just below Folsom Dam, a short distance upstream from Old Town. It is a pivotal piece in north Folsom’s puzzle, the expected answer to the sheer density of rush-hour traffic that has piled through historic Folsom since 2003, when terrorism concerns brought a permanent closure to the road atop Folsom Dam.
Without the dam road, as Folsomites have always called it, commuters on the route between the bustling suburb of El Dorado Hills and the bustling employment center of Roseville began opting for the next river crossing downstream, heading straight through Old Folsom to reach the historic Rainbow Bridge.
It’s a tight fit down Riley Street and across the 90-year-old bridge, but many motorists prefer that route to the Lake Natoma Crossing, a four-lane span that opened on the far side of Old Town in 1999.
The newer bridge plays an important role in lightening cross-river commute conditions for the surrounding region. But for the daily traffic of Riley Street, its effect has been limited. Why circumnavigate Old Town, after all, when one can simply cut through it? Even if those drivers opted for the newer bridge, traffic would still ring Old Town for most of the day.
“That 20,000 cars a day has negatively impacted the historic district,” says Jeremy Bernau, president of the Folsom-based Bernau Development Corp. Bernau’s company recently finished a mixed-use building on Sutter Street, historic Folsom’s main drag, with new tenants moving into the ground-floor storefronts and upper-level living units.
Bernau is also one-third of a partnership called Folsom Railroad Block Developers LLC, which is working to recreate the bustle that once characterized downtown Folsom. Directly across from Bernau’s new building is Old Town’s last block to the west, which is now known as the railroad block but will soon become known as Historic Folsom Station (see story on page 103).
Folsom planners have a solid plan that brings the finish line into view.
While tourism is certainly on the minds of Folsom’s planners, city leaders have spoken of wanting a true community-based mix of businesses in Old Town. Bernau’s new building on Sutter Street is contributing to that mix as the site of a new organization, Folsom Lake Bank.
Historic Folsom has many attributes to build on, Bernau says — including its lack of blight and its heritage as a site of the West’s first commercial railroad, linking Folsom and Sacramento.
Folsom also enjoys the unusual attribute of a historic core on the bank of a major waterway, in this case Lake Natoma, a widening of the American River behind Nimbus Dam. But the need for thousands of motorists to cross the river each day causes that attribute to weigh old Folsom down as much as it helps it. And that’s why the new bridge, a federal project within city limits, is so important.
A year and a half ago, Folsom City Council Member Steve Miklos journeyed to Washington, where he received assurances that Folsom’s new bridge would get as much federal attention as necessary for a late-2008 completion. That timetable is still in place.
In January, Kiewit Pacific of Omaha, Neb., secured the corps’ $74.6 million contract to build the span. The corps is covering two-thirds of that cost, while the city covers the balance using Sacramento County transportation funds from Measure A sales tax as well as funds from the California Department of Water Resources and the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency. Planners say the bridge is designed to accommodate the 40,000 cars that are expected to cross the bridge each day in the next few years, well above the 20,000-plus that funnel through north Folsom now.
Folsom planners have employed patience and a solid plan, one that brings the finish line into view. And in that plan, there’s a significant element of timing, with another of Old Town’s linchpins running on schedule.
That piece of the puzzle is a parking structure that will soon take shape adjacent to the light-rail terminus at the western end of Old Town, one of the four new structures that will soon occupy the railroad block. Ground is being broken this month on the parking facility, and the schedule calls for completion by next spring, six months ahead of the new bridge.
And there’s more at Old Town’s opposite end, where Sutter Street was blocked to prevent Rainbow Bridge drivers from using the adjacent neighborhood’s streets as thoroughfares. That’s where Sac Commercial Properties is completing a structure just down from the Powerhouse Pub, offering retail and office space topped by living units.
While Folsom works to recreate the character of its past, it is pushing its frontier ever farther southward.
For decades, Highway 50 bypassed Folsom a few miles to the south; city development has only recently filled in most of that space. Folsom is expecting to soon hop the freeway with annexation of a 3,600-acre rectangle on the highway’s far side.
But for now, the two big elements coming to Folsom’s southern area are an open-air shopping mall — to include Folsom’s second multiplex theater — and the beginnings of a Kaiser surgery center and medical complex. Kaiser is expected to break ground this spring, while the Palladio mall, after years in planning, is now navigating the city’s approval process.
And just across East Bidwell Street, along Folsom’s main street, Saca Development is fine-tuning plans on a new retail, hotel and restaurant complex nestled in the corner of Highway 50 and East Bidwell, where there’s already a location of the popular BJ’s brewpub chain and a handful of shopping malls.
Last year, CNN’s Money magazine ranked Folsom 34th on its list of the nation’s top 100 small cities, listing its optimal combination of schools, living costs, crime rates, local employment, open space and recreation. Later in the year,
Forbes magazine placed Folsom among the nation’s 25 best affordable suburbs.
With years of residential migration and the fast growth of its business community, Folsom has built a solid collection of the little things that make a community comfortable. Among the latest of those elements is an effort to explore Wi-Max technology, which broadcasts an Internet signal over several square miles.
Two pilot projects are being conducted in Folsom, one of them involving computer-chip maker Intel. The projects are looking toward some combination of Wi-Fi, which sends the short-distance Internet signal used in home or office environments, and Wi-Max.
Though the city’s main goal is to use broadband access for the benefit of city operations, says Assistant City Manager Evert Palmer, that’s not to say the widespread availability of wireless access couldn’t benefit the private sector as well. “We don’t know if it works or if it’s viable, so we’re trying to break it down to see if it works in the real world,” Palmer says.
There’s also a new library, completed last month with help from a state funding program, and the constant benefit of light-rail, which stretched a line to historic Folsom in the fall of 2005 and is slated to someday continue its route north toward Granite Bay.
For now, those plans are on hold, so Folsom opened the ramp a few months ago to bridge traffic, allowing entrance to historic Folsom from the north, something that, with the particular alignment of Old Town’s historic streets, hadn’t been possible before.
“All in all, the next two to three years are going to be a very exciting time,” says Joe Luchi, Folsom’s economic development director.
