Fountain Valley is looking at stripping parking from Euclid Street to add a traffic lane. The city’s Public Works director presented the plan at the March 17 City Council meeting, and the council went back and forth on who should pay for it. Nobody had a clean answer.

The short version of how this happened: Fountain Valley approved over 1,000 new housing units along a stretch of Euclid it had already identified as a failing road, the developers behind those projects declined to cover the traffic fix, and now residents who park there may be the ones who foot the bill — in parking spaces, if not in dollars.

The road was already failing

At a July 2025 special meeting, then-Mayor Ted Bui raised concerns about the 1630 Euclid Street project — 407 units proposed for the former Miller Farms site — and whether the city had a genuine traffic mitigation plan. A city consultant named Colin Drucker acknowledged that a 2019 general plan page had shown an incorrect lane count and an F level of service rating on Euclid. He said a 2021 memo corrected those numbers. That memo, however, was not included in the project’s environmental impact report.

Jackie Tutch, a resident who had testified at planning commission, told the council she was not against density. She was against placing density on a road the city already knew was deficient. She cited traffic data showing up to a 9% increase at Euclid and Warner Avenue from these projects alone. She also pointed out that Euclid serves as an ambulance corridor to UCI Health — and that adding hundreds of units without fixing the road first was not a neutral decision.

Bui moved to appeal the planning commission approval of the 1630 Euclid project. The motion got no second and died.

The second project is already under construction

A block north, the larger project is already in the ground. Shopoff Realty and Lennar paid $65 million in 2021 for 18 acres at the corner of Euclid and Heil Avenue — the site of a former strawberry field across from Mile Square Regional Park. The city approved 606 units there in July 2025. Grading started before the end of the year. Apartments are scheduled to open in summer 2028, with for-sale homes following in 2027 through 2029.

Shopoff’s representative, Blair Ruffin, told the council the developer would dedicate road frontage to allow Heil Avenue to be widened and commit roughly $1.5 million in public improvements on Heil. He also cited approximately $17.5 million in development impact fees tied to the project.

Impact fees go into a general fund. They do not automatically fix Euclid.

When it came to the parking removal and the southbound lane addition on Euclid itself — the piece of road actually showing the congestion — the developers said no.

A $100,000 study and a suggestion to just paint it

The city has been wrestling with Euclid’s traffic problem for at least a year. In October 2025, Public Works Director Scott Smith brought a proposal to study the corridor, estimating the cost at around $100,000. The council pushed back on spending that much.

Councilmember Glenn Grandis called the parallel parking on Euclid “very dangerous” and questioned why it needed a six-figure study. “I say just paint it and be done,” Grandis said, before acknowledging the city had to do it properly.

At the same meeting, council members asked Smith whether developer-supplied traffic data could be reused to save money. Smith said some of it might work as reference material, but that an outside traffic engineer probably would not accept older, uncertified studies as the primary input for a new analysis.

The council did not vote on funding at that meeting. They directed staff to come back with options.

March 17: the parking question comes to a head

At the March 17 council meeting, Smith returned with the proposal that put the parking question on the table directly: remove on-street parking on the south end of Euclid, between Edinger Avenue and Warner Avenue, and use that space to add a southbound travel lane.

Council members questioned whether developer contributions had ever been a real possibility. One member noted that prior approvals had included expectations of developer participation in traffic mitigation — and that those contributions had not materialized. Smith confirmed that city staff and traffic reviewers would need to provide more technical detail about whether any legal nexus existed between the projects and the specific road improvements being discussed.

In other words, the city may not be able to make the developers pay. If there is no documented, legally defensible connection between a specific project’s traffic impact and a specific mitigation measure, the city cannot require developers to fund it after the fact.

What happens next

The parking removal has not been voted on. The council has not formally committed to the plan. But the direction of the conversation is clear: Euclid has a traffic problem, the road cannot stay as-is once 1,000-plus units come online, and the cost is falling on the city rather than the developers who drove the demand for the fix.

A separate appeal involving a development at Magnolia and Warner is also pending before the council. Euclid is not the only street in Fountain Valley where this dynamic is playing out.

Residents who currently park on Euclid between Edinger and Warner were not included in the March 17 discussion. No public comment period on the parking removal plan has been scheduled.