GUEST OPINION
Mayor Maloney and CM Wang question consultants at the February 9, 2026, Council meeting (Photo – Melissa Michelson)
Alhambra has spent $3 million (with millions more already contracted) and more than three years waiting for traffic relief, only to find itself in a position worse than square one.
By Sean McMorris
At the February 9, 2026 Alhambra City Council meeting I attended, Councilmembers and local experts and citizens exposed a taxpayer funded set of transportation projects in freefall: millions already spent, years of schedule delays, and a City being pushed into multiple multi‑million‑dollar “environmental studies” for projects that experts warn may never be built. Cost erosion due to delays now exceeds $100 million, and continues to climb.
Public Comment
Frustration dominated the meeting. Residents said they feel shut out of the process and increasingly alarmed by how their tax dollars are being handled as delays and inflation erode the original pre‑COVID budget of $240 million.
Many pointed to a troubling leadership gap. City staff have acknowledged they lack the technical expertise to answer basic questions and they have therefore deferred everything to outside consultants. At the same time City management has blocked the public from accessing those same consultants. Fed up with the lack of transparency, residents are now demanding a Community Town Hall, a space for real dialogue instead of a five‑minute timer at stage-managed City Council meetings.
The “Price Tag” Problem
Councilmembers Ross Maza (Dist. 2) and Noya Wang (Dist. 4) seemed to be aware that the math might no longer work. The City received $240 million in 2019 to fix traffic, but years of delay have caused construction costs to skyrocket.
While the City’s 2019 funding will never increase, project costs have ballooned. Yet, consultants, apparently ignoring schedule delays and cost realities, are urging the City to commit millions more to multi‑year environmental studies, promising to provide scope and cost answers only after more contracts and checks are signed.
Lack of Data and Logic
When pressed, consultants admitted they have no data proving that a $100 million freeway ramp, of no demonstrated use to Alhambra, is necessary. They said actual analysis would occur only after the City commits millions more to the next environmental study.
Councilmember Wang cautioned against “moving blindly” into a multi‑million‑dollar process while basic questions remain unanswered. Mayor Jeff Maloney (Dist. 3) suggested shifting priorities, proposing that the City advance a different project, the 710 Stub, before the Fremont Interchange/ramp project. “Since the Stub is the more popular project and there are unaddressed questions for Fremont, I don’t see why we can’t move on the Stub first,” Maloney said.
But consultants insisted the Fremont project must go first to relieve a “bottleneck”, yet admitted they have no data to support that claim. That data will come in the next, “environmental” phase. Meanwhile, the Fremont project assumes the Stub will be completed, even though the 710 Stub project is being sequenced after Fremont project and has no guaranteed funding.
“You Don’t Write Blank Checks”
Public commenters with direct expertise were blunt. Commenter Conkle contradicted the consultants’ justification for the freeway ramp, saying he sees no traffic backup caused by the I‑10 “weave” and it is part of his commute. Commenter Sahu, who has decades of CEQA and EIR experience, said he was stunned by the City’s mismanagement and noted that the Council has been misled.
“The job of a project manager is to proactively mitigate risk, not wait and see what works,” Sahu said. “You don’t spend $5 million analyzing environmental impacts before you’ve even defined a project design. You’d be writing a blank check for a project that may never be buildable because of cost. The time to figure out what works is now.”
Commenters identified at least three “fatal flaws” in the current approach:
1. The Lead Agency
Mayor Maloney asked a basic question: who is actually in charge once the EIR begins? While the City has been led to believe it will have control, consultants eventually acknowledged that Caltrans is the Lead Agency. According to Sahu, the City does not have final say, Caltrans does.
“If we start this study without a design Caltrans likes, we are writing a blank check for a project that will never be built. Right now everything points to Caltrans liking the freeway ramp, with no demonstrated benefit to the City.”
2. Backwards Process
Sahu explained that an EIR evaluates the impacts of a defined project, one that already meets project objectives, alongside less‑preferred and less developed alternatives. Consultants misled the Council by suggesting the EIR will analyze everything equally, downplaying the need for a fully designed main project before starting the EIR. The EIR is an impact analysis, not a design phase. Consultants also overstated the role of the public in influencing the EIR.
3. Piecemealing Projects
Consultants want to study Fremont, the 710 Stub, Atlantic, and Garfield projects separately—an approach that costs more and benefits them. Even they acknowledged that traffic will shift among these corridors. Piecemealing makes no sense, Sahu said. “These projects are interconnected and must be studied together.”
Alhambra Districts Most at Risk
District 5, represented by Vice Mayor Adele Andrade Stadler, suffers the worst congestion from the incomplete 710 Stub. Although the issue carries significant implications for her constituents, she took a more limited role in the deliberations, voicing support for a Town Hall while posing few substantive questions to the consultants. Councilmember Katherine Lee (Dist.1) similarly asked relatively few detailed questions throughout most of the discussion, though toward the conclusion, she noted that traffic diversion from Fremont to Atlantic and Garfield could be a serious issue.
The $6 Million Question: Where is the Accountability?
With millions already spent, millions more contracted, and City staff deferring everything to consultants, one massive question remains: Who is responsible? If the City decides to finally manage these projects proactively, can the public trust the same leadership/consultant team that brought them to this point? As the funding gap widens by the day, residents are left wondering: when the money runs out, who will be left paying the bill?
Sean McMorris is a policy analyst in the San Gabriel Valley. He is speaking for himself.
My wife and I lived in Alhambra for many years. She was a hometown girl, who loved her city and the San Gabriel Valley. She witnessed the gentrification of Main Street, overdevelopment, and the issues of poor planning.
Alhambra blindly followed the rubric of a “housing crisis” and facilitated construction of more overpriced apartments which didn’t solve any affordability problems. The bright lights that run that town believed HUD would massively increase Sec 8 subsidies, which would become a publicly subsidized rental cash flow to corporate landlords.
But, HUD has created the opposite policy, meaning they’re cutting Sec 8 and other rent subsidies, leaving the city with a growing vacancy rate. What’s occurring is more people are living in apartments which weren’t built for that number of tenants. What has resulted is increasing traffic congestion, which could have been avoided if Alhambra had the integrity to initially admit we don’t have the infrastructure for any of our plans, and to say NO to developers and investors. Unfortunately, real estate interests are big campaign donors to local political hacks…
This article is an excellent example of a “disinterested party” providing common-sense observations to a complex and very expensive problem for which the local decisionmakers may have lost their way. This provides a very real service to Alhambra’s residents, and to the Alhambra City Council, if they have the humility and intelligence to admit it.
To me, this is a wonderful example of the power of a quality local newspaper. Congratulations.
It’s shocking the consultants after all these years and all that money received, have no data. They instead are telling the council a D-EIR needs to be done, which they estimate is 25% of project costs, so another $60M!???And then there will be some data. By then, it’s a fait accompli. These Kimley Horn consultants should be fired, and so should whoever has been asleep at the wheel.
Councilman Maloney articulated a position shared by many over the years: that concentrating on the stub and directing those funds toward solving Alhambra’s pressing local transportation challenges was the most practical and responsible course of action. This approach ensured that limited resources were invested where they would have the greatest direct impact on residents, while appropriately leaving the resolution of freeway bottlenecks to Caltrans, the agency specifically tasked with addressing them.
Thank you, Sean, for writing this article, and thank you to Colorado Boulevard for providing a platform for sharing such important information.