Neighborhood Feels Relief at Project's End
This week residents in the Nyes Place area and nearby businesses, along with Coast Highway motorists, saw a measure of normalcy return to their lives with the wrap up on Tuesday of a lengthy sewer project. It was originally estimated for completion by February.
"At last it's done!" waiter Momi Bartholomew of Tabu restaurant exulted.
Access restrictions and the elimination of street parking affected several side streets surrounding the city-funded project in Coast Highway and the disruption took its toll on most local businesses.
Tabu's owner/partner Nancy Wilhelm confessed that her business was off 25 percent. Wilhelm, though, refused to lay all the blame on the construction, noting that economic woe and last October's fires both occurred around the same time as construction got underway.
"It's a miracle. We never thought they would finish," Wilhelm said of today's construction wrap up. She acknowledged that Dizz's restaurant and the Black Iris florist suffered worse parking problems than her restaurant and said, "I bet they are happier than we are this is over."
During the months of construction when the restaurant crowds got thinner, one of the two wait persons at Tabu would be sent home so the tip odds would remain steady for the one remaining. "Business was definitely affected," said Bartholomew.
Had the project lengthened and also affected the upcoming tourist season, consequences could have proved worse, said Dominic Pitz, owner-manager of Dizz's As Is restaurant. Stripped of street parking, the restaurant had to forego booking big parties for Easter and Christmas. To cope with the project's parking inconvenience, Dizz's As Is changed tactics and remedies. Pitz hired valet crews and took reservations, which he had never done before, in order to bring in customers.
One silver lining, though, was that, "all our really good customers made it a point to come in more often," Pitz said.
The sewer repair project involved the safe transport of two million gallons of wastewater daily. A finesse piece of the design and construction involved routing pipes over the Victoria Drive overpass and slipping new plastic pipe through the old, rather than replacing the entire system. The new pipe is known as fusible PVC and it has the strength of thicker-walled conventional pipes.
Though the entire project ran longer than anticipated, the innovative pipe routing solutions, for instance, saved dollars and time. Conventionaltype reconstructive work could have gone on longer, creating more havoc for the restaurateurs and others in the vicinity.
"The project went over time a little with some extras that came up during construction and with rain delays," said David Schissler, the city's water quality director. "Unanticipated things usually come up on these kind of projects."
Laguna motorists, though, will enjoy easier passage south on Coast Highway, at least for awhile. The South Coast Water District plans another sewer and tunnel interceptor project between Three Arch Bay and Aliso Beach. Several staging areas for equipment and materials will be set up along Coast Highway.
The public is invited to a meeting about that project at the Aliso Creek Inn on Monday, April 21, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. on the lower level.
