Why a new ‘freeway’ is being built to connect three rapidly growing Sacramento suburbs
In eastern Sacramento County, a narrow, sometimes lumpy and twisty back road goes by a couple of old-fashioned names: White Rock Road and Grant Line Road. Those names recall the days when this once quiet corridor carried little more than farm and ranch vehicles, dump trucks and country teens out on rabbit shoots.
Today, as traffic snarls on Highway 50 and Highway 99, and subdivisions replace oak-studded grassland in Folsom, Rancho Cordova and Elk Grove, that trio of cities is racing to turn this hidden corridor into a high-speed beltway to serve eastern Sacramento County’s population boom, and to pave the way for plenty more in the decades to come.
Officials this spring have launched construction of three segments of the road, one near Folsom and two in Elk Grove, marking the biggest step forward yet for the $500 million mega-project called the Sacramento Capital SouthEast Connector Expressway.
Rancho Cordova Mayor Garrett Gatewood said the road, which will take a decade or more to finish, is key to turning the Sacramento metropolitan area’s east flank into a regional powerhouse in the next generation.
“This is what Roseville was like 25 years ago,” Gatewood said, standing amid tractors turning turf at White Rock Road and East Bidwell Street. “If we could complete this ‘freeway,’ it would be such a boon. It allows us to build out this area.”
A housing construction boom is already well underway in southeast Sacramento County, resurgent in the last two years after years of post-Great Recession doldrums. Some of it is aimed at local millennials starting families, and some at the flow of emigres from the Bay Area, a recent trend that has both encouraged and challenged regional planners who must figure out where and how to accommodate new arrivals.
New state data from the Department of Finance last week show that the three cities grew by nearly 5,000 residents in 2020, accounting for most of the growth in the county.
Sacramento County housing boom
In the last two-plus years, more than 1,000 homes have been built on the hills between Highway 50 and White Rock Road in the newly expanded city limits of Folsom, with 10,000 more to come. As of this month, Folsom officials estimate 1,700 new residents now live next to that corridor, some of them already packing onto the old farm road for commutes into Rancho Cordova.
Rancho Cordova and Elk Grove, similarly, are welcoming new subdivisions. Elk Grove saw nearly 700 new single-family homes pop up in 2020, according to the new Department of Finance numbers.
The expressway, when completed, would run from El Dorado Hills in El Dorado County, along the back side of Folsom, Rancho Cordova and Elk Grove, and then westward to Interstate 5 in south Sacramento County.
Key sections in Folsom and Elk Grove could be done in the next few years. Other sections, including around Rancho Cordova and the extension westward to I-5, may be more than a decade in the future, depending on the flow of federal, state and local transportation funding.
PLANNED EXPRESSWAY
Map: The Sacramento Bee
The expressway would not be a true freeway, at least not initially.
The current 20-year plan is to straighten and widen the corridor to four lanes with limited intersections, making it a high-speed commute corridor, offering an alternative for tens of thousands of commuters who would otherwise use Highway 50, Highway 99 and Interstate 5.
But, like Highway 65 in south Placer County, it could potentially be upgraded in increments over years into a full freeway.
A short early section of the connector expressway was built a few years ago on a section of White Rock Road, as well as two freeway interchanges, although progress had been slow over the years because of limited money.
This spring marks the first major multi-pronged construction effort.
Three sections of the road now represent the biggest burst of segment construction in the decade-plus that the project has been in the works.
- Between Folsom and Rancho Cordova: Two miles of White Rock Road from Prairie City Road to East Bidwell Street. Finish date, November of 2022.
- In Elk Grove, 1.3 miles of Grant Line Road between Waterman Road and Bradshaw Road, which connects to a short section already constructed along with a widened interchange at Highway 99. Completion date spring 2022.
- Also in Elk Grove, 2.5 miles of Kammerer Road from Lent Ranch Parkway to Bruceville Road. This is the first step toward eventually extending Kammerer to Interstate 5. Completion date in late 2021.
Rural, suburban Elk Grove meet
It’s on that stretch of Grant Line between Waterman and Bradshaw where the collision of old, new and future Elk Grove meets. On the north side of Grant Line, workers aboard heavy earth movers were busy last week scooping out shovel-loads of soil for the connector expressway just a few yards away from subdivisions built years earlier. Nearby, rumbling tanker trucks sprayed plumes of water on the construction site as yet more haulers headed eastward up Grant Line.
Elk Grove is looking to annex another 500 acres for light-industrial and manufacturing at Grant Line and Waterman roads, just to the west of the construction. The city is in talks with equipment giant Kubota Tractor Corp., to site a new 701,000 square-foot West region headquarters on a portion of the land — an international brand that could draw more industry and jobs to Elk Grove. On the Kammerer side of Highway 99, work continues on the future Sky River Casino, set to open in late 2022.
Along two-lane Grant Line Road sit the signs of an older, rural Elk Grove: New plantings of wine grapes in long, neat rows. Strawberry stands ready for the summer. And ranches like the one where the Daehling family has lived for five decades.
The Daehlings raise thoroughbreds, grow pinot grigio and chardonnay grapes and, since 1992, have run their Big Oak Nursery, all on the 400 acres that stretch south to Dillard Road. Julia Daehling Oldfield looked out at the crews and machinery working atop a berm across Grant Line Road from her family’s Big Oak Nursery as she stood under the canopy of the towering tree that gave the nursery its name.
“Our mess,” she said.
The workers won’t be on the Daehlings’ side of the road until summer — an accommodation worked out with officials so crews wouldn’t cut into the nursery’s busy spring season.
“It’s been fine so far,” Daehling Oldfield continued. “We live here on the property. My parents have been here since the ‘70s, we’ve seen the progress .... They’ve seen it through the last 50 years.”
Still, Daehling Oldfield said, she hopes there will still be room for the rural life — and land — that her family has enjoyed for a half-century. “We’d like to keep it in agriculture,” she said. “We love what we do and we’d love to keep it as long as we can.”
For a growing Elk Grove, the connector is also a way of moving traffic without a slog through the city’s center, said Councilman Pat Hume. One of the Sacramento region’s longest serving city leaders, Hume has known the connector project since its inception.
But, Hume said, city planners also see an opportunity for the sprawling project to be more than an Elk Grove bypass. On the stretch from Kammerer Road to Bruceville Road, city planners are examining how to create an “urban, built-in environment — a space different than everywhere else” on the connector, he said.
The city’s Kammerer Road Urban Design Study lays out a road map to “leverag(e) the value of a new thoroughfare beyond its ability to carry vehicle traffic, to lay the foundation for a walkable city.” Planning commissioners held their first hearing on the study in January.
The first incarnation can already be seen, Hume said, in new corridor-close developments near Kammerer and Bruceville roads, including Poppy Ridge and Madeira Meadows. Meantime, the project also addresses the more immediate needs of an overtaxed Kammerer Road, much of it today a narrow, shoulderless two-lane strip, still more farm road than byway.
“It’s important that we do the right thing and accommodate the planned growth,” Hume said. “It’s a long time coming and it will take a long time to get to completion.” He added local leaders need to continue to keep the corridor on the radars of state and federal lawmakers. “This is important to the region. This could be a pretty important corridor for locations in Silicon Valley.”
Critics cite sprawl issues
Derek Minnema, who oversees the SouthEast Connector planning and construction, estimates 600,000 more residents will live on that flank of the metropolitan area in the next 40 years, mainly southeast of Highway 50, and on both sides of Highway 99 in Elk Grove.
The vision the three cities have for a beltway has long been disputed, however, by the Environmental Council of Sacramento and some planners as old-school suburban planning — a roadway that will induce sprawl growth. They argue local officials should establish stronger policies that guide future growth back inward to infill and unused sites in the existing metropolitan area.
The environmental group has pushed the cities and counties to codify the expressway as a permanent urban boundary end line, saying no development should occur on the southeast side of the roadway, where the Cosumnes River and Deer Creek flow.
After years of struggles to find funds to continue the incremental project, local officials are encouraged by the new Biden Administration’s focus on delivering a major infrastructure spending plan, some of which likely would go toward the SouthEast Connector.
Ami Bera, a Democratic congressman representing Elk Grove, said the connector is the most significant road project in the Sacramento region. He has requested money be earmarked to include broadband internet service and bike trails along the corridor.
Standing along White Rock Road last week, he pointed up the hill to street after street of new houses going up in Folsom. “Just look at the construction.” he said. “President Biden has asked us to go big.”
Minnema said the next section of the roadway likely up for construction after the current three segments is a 2.5 mile section of Grant Line Road from the intersection with White Rock to Douglas Road in Rancho Cordova.
“It’s momentum,” Minnema said. “We’re excited about the momentum.”
This story was originally published May 17, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
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