MIDDLETOWN, Calif. – On Thursday the Middletown Area Town Hall heard an update from Caltrans on a proposed safety project on Highway 175.

Jaime Matteoli, Caltrans' Lake County projects manager, gave the presentation to the group during its regular monthly meeting at the Middletown Community Center.

Matteoli said the $12.5 million project extends two and a half miles along Highway 175, from 500 feet east of the Dry Creek bridge past the wastewater treatment facility and on to the area of Putah Creek.

The project arises out of the need to increase safety along that stretch of highway, Matteoli said.

“We identified that there is a fatal collision rate that is about five times the state average on this segment,” he said.

Caltrans data showed that from July 1, 2007, to June 30, 2012, there were 13 collisions on that stretch of highway. Of those, two were fatal and another eight resulted in injuries, Matteoli said.

Of those 13 crashes, 10 involved drivers running off the road and hitting objects – five trees, three utility poles, one ditch and one fence, he said.

Matteoli said the project's purpose is to reduce collision and the severity of collisions.

Highway 175 in the project area is not built to current design standards, Matteoli said. He showed pictures of the highway, which has horizontal and vertical curves, and a very narrow shoulder, ranging from places where there is no shoulder up to spots where it is as wide as 4 feet. Standard highway shoulder length is 8 feet.

Matteoli said the roadway also lacks a clear recovery zone, which is the area 20 feet past the highway highway fogline. The standard for highway design is that recovery zones cannot have fixed objects that are not shielded or yielding, such as the trees and fence posts that line that portion of the highway.

The project now is in the preliminary design stage, with the environmental process also under way, Matteoli said.

He said the goal is to add a 4-foot-wide shoulder on the highway's northern side and 6 feet on the southern side, with that wider shoulder offering Caltrans workers a place to safely pull over and conduct maintenance work. He said those wider shoulders along the side of the highway's 12-foot lanes are meant to greatly reduce issues with drivers running off the road.

Other aspects of the project will include improving and widening horizontal curves and correcting vertical curves, and providing a clear recovery zone to the standard 20 feet, with one 16-foot exception to minimize tree cutting.

Matteoli said the project timeline includes the release of the environmental documents on Wednesday; an open house in Middletown on Dec. 1; and approval of the final environmental documents on Dec. 15, the same day Caltrans intends to begin right-of-way acquisitions.

The project is expected to be designed and ready to build by March 1, 2018, with construction to begin in the summer of that year, Matteoli said.

Construction is scheduled to take place over two seasons, Matteoli said, with estimated completion expected in the winter of 2019.

He said the $12.5 million price tag breaks down as $10 million for construction and $2.5 million for the right-of-way, including the property purchases, moving utility poles and oak woodlands mitigation for trees that have to be removed.

The project impacts include the removal of trees from the right-of-way, which Matteoli acknowledged “is a huge issue,” because of residents' concerns about loss of trees in the wake of last year's Valley fire, which has resulted in tens of thousands of fire-damaged trees being removed by agencies – including Caltrans and the county – and utility companies.

Matteoli said he took those concerns to his design team and they started to look at what they could do to reduce that impact on trees.

“The major thing we could do was use nonstandard shoulder width and nonstandard clear recovery zone out there,” he said. “We found we could save some trees by doing that.”

That design exception for the clear recovery zone is within the area of “tree alley” from the Dry Creek bridge to the Dry Creek Cutoff, Matteoli said.

Matteoli said the design change is expected to save about 35 trees, however, shifting the road to the south will result in the cutting of about 100 trees total..

Altogether, the right-of-way will include 14 acres impacting 28 parcels. Matteoli said Caltrans is using an incentive program that pays an additional 10-percent of the property's appraised value to sellers if they sign the sales contract with Caltrans within 60 days. The incentive program offers a minimum payment of $1,000 and the maximum of $100,000.

Matteoli encouraged community members to attend the open house from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 1, in the multipurpose room at Middletown High School.

He said the right-of-way agent and the entire team working on the project will be in attendance to answer questions.

In other business at MATH on Thursday, a brief discussion was held on the possibility of altering the organization's bylaws in light of the recent formation of another municipal advisory committee for the Cobb area, which has been included in MATH.

MATH Board member Linda Diehl-Darms said the group's boundaries currently go up to Loch Lomond, and the suggestion was to go from Socrates Mine Road in one direction and Big Canyon Road in another to avoid overlapping boundaries with the new Cobb council.

Chair Fletcher Thornton said that when he wrote the bylaws he originally wanted the boundaries to just encompass Middletown, but agreed to expand it.

He suggested that everyone “just take a deep breath” and not take any action, suggesting there was no reason they can't work with the Cobb town hall. His main concern was that the Cobb group raises money, an activity MATH has not done.

Board of Supervisors Chair Rob Brown suggested that the boundaries could be the supervisorial district. He also pointed out that the 2020 Census could bring some big changes to the supervisorial district boundaries.

Lisa Kaplan said that MATH also could use the boundaries for the Middletown Unified School District.

Thornton said he would attend the Cobb group's meeting this Thursday. A bylaws committee also was formed to consider the suggested updates.

Board nominations for the new year also began on Thursday, with Kaplan nominated for an at-large position and Thornton nominated to once again represent Middletown.

The nominations process will continue at the December meeting.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.