DO YOU WANT a longer commute? Those who commute Highway 4 are familiar with the bottleneck westbound in the morning and eastbound in the evening.

For those morning westbound commuters, it typically starts at the top of the Willow Pass grade to Port Chicago Highway as five lanes squeeze down to two lanes (three if you count the HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lane.

For afternoon eastbound commuters, the backup starts where Highways 242 and 4 join all the way to San Marco Boulevard.

This is the section of Highway 4 that has the Willow Pass Grade lowered (to accommodate BART) and lanes added. There are no plans on the books to widen Highway 4 west of the Willow Pass Grade.

Now, add new community on the grounds of the former Concord Naval Weapons Station (CNWS) with 12,000 dwelling units and 28,000 residents and East County's commute will be unbearable.

Believers in Transit Oriented Development (TOD) are convinced that the vast majority of those 28,000 residents will use BART from the adjacent North Concord BART station or ride their bicycle or walk to work (kind of like being in Fantasyland at Disneyland or Disney World).

In the real world, those residents will be getting onto Highway 4 at either the Willow Pass Road or Pacheco Boulevard intersections. Just imagine what those morning and afternoon commutes to and from Pittsburg, Antioch, Brentwood, Oakley, Discovery Bay, Bethel Island, Knightsen and

The Concord Community Reuse Project for the former CNWS has circulated its Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for comment. Have you seen it? Are you aware of it? Were you notified about it? The answers to these and many more questions, is probably "no."

The city of Antioch has been "monitoring" discussions by the Concord City Council and the public meetings they have been holding on the reuse of the former CNWS.

I guess you could say that we had an "insider" with Antioch's former Economic Development Director Guy Bjerke also having been appointed to fill a vacancy on the Concord City Council.

As such, you would think that this would have been an agenda item at every single Antioch City Council meeting due to its potential deleterious effects on Antioch's residents. But, such has not been the case.

Now East County's Regional Transportation Planning Committee TRANSPLAN has drafted a response to the DEIR, which it expects the representatives of Antioch, Oakley, Brentwood, Pittsburg and District 5 Supervisor Federal Glover to sign with the approval of their respective elected bodies.

What is sad is that the majority of the TRANSPLAN comments address bicycle lanes, paths and trails, whereas the major impact to East County will be vehicle traffic on Highway 4 and 242.

There is no firm requirement that freeway improvements will be made before any new housing or commercial buildings are built (which is reminiscent of what happened in Antioch back in the 1980s). You would have thought that we'd all learned that lesson: Road improvements must be made first to accommodate the expected additional vehicles using those roads and freeways.

Clearly, the CNWS will have to establish a Fee & Financing Authority and assess an appropriate fee on each dwelling unit and commercial building to fund the necessary improvement to Highway 4 and 242 (much as was done in East County to fund the construction of the bypass, widening of Highway 4 and improvements to major arterials).

This week, the Antioch City Council had the TRANSPLAN DEIR response as its only regular agenda item.

So my question this week is: What did the Antioch City Council do to contact every single home and business owner months ago to advise them that they could individually send in responses to the DEIR?

The cutoff date for any responses has been extended to Oct. 26, so you still have time to let your voice be heard.

Arne Simonsen is a former Antioch City Councilman from 2000-2008.