the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Come to Jesus

(Oct. 18, 2007)  The board of directorsof the North Coast Railroad Authority held its monthly meeting in Eureka last Wednesday. Many insightful things were said during the public comment period of that meeting. For me, the most insightful comment of all belonged to local realtor and staunch railroad supporter Marc Matteoli.

“We’ve had some very serious setbacks in terms of weather, which I hope we can change,” he said.

Too true. And that, in a nutshell, serves as the most succinct possible statement of where the North Coast’s defunct public railroad stands right now. Besieged from every possible direction — from the south and from the north, from the left and the right, from the halls of power in Sacramento and from the very ground beneath our feet — the railroad bureaucracy knuckles down and swipes at the sky.

It’s been a bad couple of weeks for the North Coast Railroad Authority. Up here in Humboldt, the ranks of the trail-boosters have swollen and grown rambunctious, and they’re agitating for the authority to consider other options for its publicly owned right of way. Down in Marin County, the rebellion against the authority is growing ugly. The equation is shifting, and not too slowly, either. Here’s just a few of the bad things that have happened to the railroad in the last couple of weeks.

l Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed SB 861, a bill that would have provided the NCRA with another $5.5 million in funds, most of it pegged for environmental remediation. The state departments of Transportation and Finance voiced their opposition to releasing even this piddling amount to the NCRA, as the the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’ League; despite a concerted letter-writing effort from railroad backers, Schwarzenegger stiffed the railroad.

l The City of Novato filed a great big lawsuit against the NCRA, accusing the authority of shirking its environmental duties and illegally hiding its operations from the public view. The suit seeks to stop all work being done on the southern end of the line until the authority completes a study that will detail the environmental effects of reopening the entire line, all the way to Humboldt Bay. On Monday, a Marin County judge denied the city’s request for an immediate stop-work order, but the suit itself is still alive and will be back in court on Dec. 11

l Green Wheels — a group of young, fresh-faced, active Humboldt County residents — is intensifying its campaign to pressure the NCRA to consider “rail-banking” its unused track around Humboldt Bay, so that a Eureka-Arcata trail might be easily and cheaply built. The group showed up in force at Wednesday’s meeting, and it extracted a promise from NCRA board chair Allen Hemphill that trails would be on the agenda next time the authority came to town.

l KHUM radio deejay Cliff Berkowitz launched a new regular segment called “Happy Trails.” Airing every Tuesday morning, it seeks to keep trail-building at the front of the public conscience and to grill public officials about what they’ve been doing to help the trail.

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