the town dandy / By Hank Sims

More in Sadness

(Jan. 24, 2008)  It’s no great pleasure to pop someone else’s balloon. Over the last couple of weeks, the North Coast Journal — and your correspondent, in particular — has found itself involved in painful correspondence with old friends, and with strangers with whom we would otherwise have no beef. The subject of these recriminating conversations is the grand plan to rebuild the railroad and the Port of Humboldt Bay, a plan about which we have often discussed with a great deal of skepticism. Specifically, the subject is the North Coast Railroad, the government agency that owns the 10-years-dead railroad tracks from Humboldt County to the Bay Area.

“Well, have you killed the railroad yet?” says one person.

“So I’m a nutjob for believing in the railroad, huh?” says another. “Why don’t you think about what you say before you say it?”

“Please don’t spread falsehoods about the railroad,” says a third. “Your information is outdated.”

There’s no question that these people are trying to achieve something for their community, according to their lights. They’re not getting paid for it. They’re not evil, and they’re not duplicitous. That is to say, they’re not consciously duplicitous. It’s just that they’ve accepted a dubious premise: The future of our county, our children, our economic well-being, even our medical care, depends solely and entirely on the rotting railroad being brought back to life. When the stakes are this high, niggling little questions about the viability or desirability of such a project seem outrageous and possibly sinister.

Well, to make it clear, we don’t hold anything against the folks who have been remonstrating with us over the railroad issue. We’re startled at the gigantic fraud of the whole enterprise, and we’re stunned at the militancy of those who have so allied themselves with it so fervently, and we’re flabbergasted that after, lo, these many years, people still talk about it as if it hadn’t been dead and deteriorating for a decade. But earlier this month, after the back-to-back meetings of the railroad authority and the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Conservation and Recreation District, we came to understand that these things are not the fault of any one person or cabal of people, but of the strange bureaucratic inertia that has enveloped the railroad ever since the public took over operation of it in the early ‘90s.

This is an atmosphere deadening to the senses, in which the impulse to swindle anyone within reach is blandly accepted as a dull, everyday event. At issue in the twin meetings earlier this month was an out-of-the-blue proposal to go after $19 million in state funds earmarked for traffic congestion relief. The railroad authority and the Bay District dropped down a proposal to use such funds to rebuild the northern Humboldt section of the line, from the Avenue of the Giants around the bay to Samoa.

The failures of the proposal were many, and were pointed out by skeptical board members and commenters from the public. The proposal itself contained absolutely no data to suggest that there was any traffic between Samoa and Avenue of the Giants to relieve. Likewise, it didn’t even attempt to sketch out a rationale by which the rechristened railroad would relieve such congestion, even if there were any to relieve. The private operator contracted to run trains for the NCRA, John Williams of NWP Inc., said in the grant application that he could ship 6,000 cars per year from Avenue of the Giants to Humboldt Bay, but he refused to identify any potential customers. Likewise, he said that he was sure to get state-required matching funds for the project by applying for a grant from the federal government, even though he had not yet applied for such funds.

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