The light-hearted banter at the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District meeting on Friday, November 14th at the Wharfinger Building in Eureka served as a metaphor for the way the Commission chose, in a 3-2 vote, to move forward with a Redwood Marine Terminal development project that still contains an extremist rail-dependent container port in its long term plans.

The stage for the metaphor was set when 1st Division Commissioner Ronnie Pelligrini passed around a photo of an 85 pound salmon someone found dead on Battle Creek, and 5th Division Commissioner Pat Higgins, not to be outdone in the fishing enthusiasm department, passed around a photo of his recent 30 lb salmon caught on the Klamath with sea lice still on it.  “I’m flush with Omega threes,” he said.

The figurative giant dead fish at the meeting was the railroad, which despite all kinds of impediments, would be essential to the proposed long term expansion of the proposed Redwood Marine Terminal into a portal for containers filled with goods from Asia.

The railroad has not operated in Humboldt County for over a decade. Its route winds through one of the most geologically unstable regions in the United States, the Eel River Canyon, where it is plagued by landslides, slip-outs, earth-flows and tunnel collapses. The circuitous route through the canyon would mean that container shipping through Humboldt Bay could not be competitive with other west coast ports according to the Humboldt Bay District’s own 2003 revitalization plan.

Rather than wait to line up shippers as clients and to receive two promised reports from the North Coast Railroad Authority (see NCRA, p.XX) on the recent geological situation in the canyon, the Commission’s majority elected go beyond just receiving and filing the report. In addition to receiving and filing the report, they elected to include long-term rail-dependent port expansion as they enter the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) process that will almost certainly require studying the impacts of rebuilding the railroad, likely a very expensive and contentious process.

Pellegrini made a motion to receive and file the final business plan, initiate the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) process, pick a consultant to do the EIR, commence some of the EIR assessments, enter into a long-term agreement with the Timber Heritage Association, which has short-term leases of some structures on the property, and negotiate an agreement to conduct a Health Impact Assessment of the proposed port development.

Before the motion was even seconded, 3rd Division Commissioner Mike Wilson offered an amendment to separate these actions into parts.  This would have enabled the commission to discuss each step and weigh their options.

But once 2nd Division Commissioner Roy Curless seconded the original motion, Pellegrini refused to accept Wilson’s amendment, leaving the commission to vote on six actions in one motion.

After lengthy public comment, mostly in opposition to the plan, the motion passed with the approval of 4th Division Commissioner Dennis Hunter, in addition to Curless and Pellegrini voting for the measure, and Wilson and Higgins opposing it.

Wilson described the way the commission was moving forward as a tractor pull. The further the tractor pulls, the deeper the thing it is dragging digs into the ground.  It’s an impressive effort, but in the end the tractor comes to a stop as the resistance increases. One might add that the big dead fish of a railroad is still dragging behind the tractor and it’s just a matter of time before it hangs things up and has to be cut loose. This action by the Humboldt Bay Commission provides just enough of an illusion that the dead railroad fish can be resuscitated, insuring the NCRA will continue to resist railbanking of their non-operational right-of-way. All the while, trail projects move forward in Arcata and Eureka spending over $1 million on planning, engineering and design to build around the decaying railroad fish carcass.