on the cover / By Hank Sims

The Squeeze: Why railroad dreamers will kill the Eureka-Arcata trail

(July 5, 2007)  A couple of weeks ago, one of the many small intergovernmental chat shops that hammer out Humboldt County public policy behind the scenes met for the final time. This particular working group had been meeting for over a year. Its goal was to study ways to build a hiking and biking trail between Eureka and Arcata — the “Bay Trail.” People had been talking about such a trail for many years. Now they were all at the table: representatives from the cities of Eureka and Arcata, the county of Humboldt, the Humboldt County Association of Governments, the Humboldt Bay Harbor District. Bicycle and trail advocacy groups, as well as other interested parties, were invited to attend. The general public was not.

At this meeting, which took place at a small conference center in Arcata’s Redwood Park, the working group would receive the fruits of its labor. Several months ago, it had found the money to commission a consulting firm called Alta Planning, which specializes in trail development, to study different ways to route and build the Bay Trail. Now the consultants would present their initial findings.

GALLERY >

The Bay Trail is a difficult proposition, because there simply isn’t much room to build in the most logical corridor — on the bay side of Highway 101. At some points, there is only a small sliver of land between the freeway and the water, and much of that land is taken up by a corridor owned by another public agency, the North Coast Railroad Authority. In one way or another, the trail would, in all likelihood, have to cross the authority’s right-of-way, which has not been used for almost 10 years.

The consultants presented their initial findings. One option, which involved Caltrans altering the highway to some degree, would cost around $45 million. Another option, which would rebuild the railroad’s degraded infrastructural so that it could accommodate trains and pedestrians, would cost around $31 million. A third option — removing the railroad for the time being and putting the trail in its place — would cost $14.5 million. That last figure would include the cost of putting the tracks back when the railroad was ready to run again.

According to several people at the meeting, Mike Wilson, who represents the Arcata area on the Harbor District, questioned the consultant about the final option. What if the costs of putting the tracks back were taken out of the equation? What if that were accounted for separately? The consultant wasn’t certain, but he estimated that the trail in that case would cost only about $5 million.

Humboldt County Supervisor John Woolley, who sits on the NCRA’s board of directors, argued that it didn’t make much sense to look at the cheap option. Who would give money to build a trail when the trail would have to be rolled up as soon as rail service to Humboldt County is restored? The railroad authority’s forecast was that trains would be rolling down local tracks in just four years’ time — by 2011.

The mention of this date so soon in the future seemed to agitate Wilson. “No one in this room believes that,” he said. At which point a stony silence filled the air.

The North Coast Railroad Authority, a public agency, an arm of the state of California, has been dinking around with the old Humboldt-to-Bay Area railroad line for 15 years now, consuming tens of millions of dollars in public funds and accomplishing very little. It’s been six years since the NCRA has run any trains at all, nearly a decade since the last train made it to Humboldt County.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 NEXT PAGE >SHARE