the town dandy / By Hank Sims

North and South

I e-mailed Stogner, asking if this was the case, and if so, how does one account for the discrepancy between what he’s telling SMART and what he’s telling us? Five minutes after sending my message, Stogner called me on the phone. And I spent the next hour talking with a very weary, beleaguered man.

The first thing he wished to get out of the way was that his memory did not square with McGlashan’s. “I don’t know what meeting he’s recalling it from,” Stogner said. “I’ve never talked about anything taking 30 years — that’s just not part of my vernacular. I don’t recall having said anything like that at all.” (I left a message with SMART General Manager Lillian Hames, hoping she could resolve the matter; she didn’t return the call.)

But the question remained. By 2011, or not? There was no straight answer in our long conversation. There are innumerable factors to take into consideration, and the NCRA doesn’t even know what all those factors are. The authority would have to undertake an environmental and financial assessment of the costs involved in reopening the rocky and remote Eel River Canyon section of the line. It would then, somehow, have to find the money — as little as $150 million, maybe, or as much as $500 million or more. Then it would have to physically repair all 316 miles of its track. Also, in order to justify running any trains to Humboldt County, one of the other of the big, rail-heavy North Coast projects on the table would have to be permitted and built: either the massive new gravel mine on the banks of the Eel River, or the massive new container port on Humboldt Bay.

So all the stars would have to align, said Stogner, but yes, that’s the plan — 2011. “That is our current best estimate,” he said. “That is the plan we’re proceeding under.”

How strange, then, that this plan is completely out of the picture when it comes to Marin County and SMART. Why is that? This question, one feels, is destined to be answered in Marin County Superior Court, when the gathering anti-train forces there sue SMART for publishing an environmental document that doesn’t consider the NCRA’s “current best estimate.” SMART — a project meant to alleviate the chronic traffic difficulties in Sonoma and Marin — could be the second worthwhile endeavor to be killed by the NCRA, after the Humboldt Bay bike trail.

What’s remarkable is that even without the Humboldt County traffic, Marin is flipping out. Even the 32 trains per week estimated for the south end of the line, only — even that number has plenty of people in the richest county in the United States very riled up. They don’t want the noise, the pollution or the impacts to traffic. (The railroad crosses streets 54 times between Windsor and Napa.)

The Marin County Board of Supervisors meeting last week was filled with plenty of invective aimed at the NCRA, and all agreed that the county would, in the future, play a more active role in the authority. Supervisor Judy Arnold, who took one of Marin County’s vacant seats on the NCRA board when all this erupted, said something that will surely send chills up the railroad authority’s collective spine. “There’s no question about the fact that the NCRA has a lot of political support in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.,” she said, “which I think it’s time for us to start looking at.”

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