on the cover / By Hank Sims

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

For the time being , though, the railroad can proceed as if such issues didn’t exist. An uprising in the populous, wealthy places at the south end; a lawsuit over the Island Mountain quarry; the chance that international shippers might not consider Humboldt Bay such an attractive port, or that Humboldt County citizens wouldn’t want such a port anyway — they all fall into the same category. As long as the railroad’s plans continue to exist only in the realm of speculation, there are no downsides. And so state and federal money can continue to flow to the authority, and the contradictions looming within the NCRA’s plans can be safely ignored. Out of sight, out of mind — at least for the time being, until the authority develops a solid plan for the north end of the line.

But that should be plenty of time to bog down any momentum the Bay Trail has developed. After receiving the preliminary Alta Planning report, Woolley and Arcata City Councilmember Mark Wheetley met with local Caltrans officials on a fact-finding mission. Their goal was to lay the groundwork for an expansion of Bay Trail options — to recast the Alta report as the beginning of a discussion, rather than a plan of action. What they are pushing for now is an expanded look at trail options, a look that will consider placing the Bay Trail on the east side of Highway 101 and across the bridge, down the Samoa Peninsula.

“I’m saying we can continue to look,” said Wheetley, who worked on the Marsh project as an HSU student. “You don’t build the $40 million option when you haven’t looked at the $10 million one.”

In fact, the east side and Samoa options were looked at in the process of developing the 2001 Bay Trail feasibility study, the one that Jennifer Rice worked on. At the time, it was determined that there were serious constraints to both options. On the Samoa side, for instance, it would be difficult and expensive to retrofit the numerous bridges that cross various sloughs. But last week Rice acknowledged that the Alta study was limited to studying only the west side of Highway 101, mostly because of the limited amount of funds available to pay the consultants.

In any event, even without additional studies, the tra il can probably safely be considered a dead letter for the time being. A (roughly) $30 million project is orders of magnitude more difficult than a (roughly) $5 million project, and the political grasp of the railroad backers is such that the latter option — the conversion of the fallow right-of-way to productive use — will be promptly round-filed as soon as the final Alta Planning report is released, which should be sometime this month.

Asked to gaze into his crystal ball last week, Mike Buettner, a member of an advocacy group called Trails Trust of Humboldt Bay who was at the meeting when Woolley and Wilson clashed, didn’t find much cause for optimism — neither for the railroad, nor for the Bay Trail.

“They’ll sidetrack the discussion and talk about running it along the east side or through Samoa, and they’ll talk about it for years,” Buettner said. “The trail won’t get done, and the train won’t come back.”

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