the town dandy / By Hank Sims

World of Hurt

(Nov. 29, 2007)  Tuesday was a black, black day for the North Coast Railroad Authority, the public agency in charge of the 10-years-dead railroad tracks between Humboldt County and the Bay Area. It was the day when all the players who have been amassing in opposition to the authority’s quixotic mission finally laid down their cards. To brag just a little, Tuesday was the day that we forecast way back in July, when we published a cover story on the many impossible contradictions that have kept the authority afloat these many years, and which were starting to burble to the surface back then. (See “The Squeeze,” July 5, 2007).

The contradictions are many, but the main one is this: When did/does the authority plan to restore rail service to Humboldt Bay? The answer is/was astonishingly variable. If the audience was the California Transportation Commission, who last year wanted proof that the railroad was a financially viable proposition, the answer was four years — by 2011. If the audience was that subset of the Humboldt County community who believes that a revived railroad is the only possible solution to all our economic ills, the answer was the same — by 2011. If the audience was that subset of the Humboldt County community who would like to put the railroad right-of-way to immediate use by building a pedestrian trail upon a section of it, the answer was the same — 2011.

If, on the other hand, the audience was the citizenry on the south end of the line, the congested town whose communities those hypothetical trains will pass through, the answer was quite different. The answer in those cases was: maybe in 20 years, or possibly never. And all the other contradictions flowed from that one. How much business could the railroad be expected to do? A massive amount of business, or not much business at all. How much would it cost? Unknown. What will the environmental impact be? We’ll think about that later.

Things have been due to snap. So on Tuesday, everyone declared war on the hapless railroad authority at the same time. They did so by piling on to a lawsuit that has been filed against the NCRA by the city of Novato. The county of Marin voted 4-0 to join in the lawsuit. Five environmental groups — including our Environmental Protection Information Center, Friends of the Eel and Californians for Alternatives to Toxics, along with two Marin County groups — petitioned the court to join.

“The NCRA goes up to Humboldt and says that people can’t have a trail around Humboldt Bay, because the trains are going to be back in 2009,” Marin County Supervisor Judy Arnold told the Journal after the meeting, referring to an even more optimistic recovery date bandied about by NCRA board member Charles Ollivier. “And then they come down to Marin and say they don’t have any plans to go up there.”

If the charges in the lawsuit can be summed up in a phrase, it is that the railroad authority’s weaselishness on these many topics has bordered on the illegal. It charges violations of California’s good government laws (the Brown Act) as well as its environmental laws (the California Environmental Quality Act). It charges dirty financial dealings. It goes to trial on Dec. 12. (You can download a copy of an early petition in the suit at the NCJ Blogthing — ncjournal.wordpress.com. It lays out the case pretty well, in clean language.)

Does the lawsuit have a chance? Who knows? There’s a whole lot of legal firepower going into it, in any case. Marin County’s attorneys will now be lending their support, as will the environmental orgs. But win or lose — that’s hardly the point, at this stage.

What matters now is that the authority has irretrievably pissed off not only the richest county in the United States of America, but also several high-powered environmental organizations. The Novato lawsuit is just round one, and in the long run it doesn’t really matter whether NCRA opponents win or lose. Since the NCRA is a public entity, ultimately a creature of the state of California, the next round of the battle will take place in the California legislature. And it’s there that the authority no longer has a country.

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