The Great Redwood Boondoggle

At the first meeting of the Great Redwood Trail Agency, Bay Area weatherman Mike Pechner accurately predicted that the “new” agency’s project was “a financial boondoggle that would spend several billions of dollars in maintenance and repairs for little economic gain.” (As quoted in the SF Chronicle.)

Why?

According to last week’s Press Democrat report on the Agency’s first meeting, “The Great Redwood Trail Agency begins with the same board of directors as the NCRA with Healdsburg Councilman David Hagele is serving as chair.”

So the train scam agency that never ran a train has simply been re-named so that they can continue their “financial boondoggle” with a core of naive diehard trail lovers waving the flag to make sure the Democrats in Sacramento continue, and in fact increase, the funding of the re-named “Agency.”

The nine-member NCRA Board which included Mendo Supervisors John Haschak and Maureen Mulheren has been renamed the Great Redwood Trail Agency board and the only difference between the old NCRA board and this new bunch is that they are a not as bald.

The PD notes that the NCRA “was forced [sic] to take on loans to conduct routine track upgrades and other infrastructure projects. Much of its debt was held by the only freight rail operator on its line, the Northwestern Pacific Railroad Company. The company is co-owned by former North Coast Rep. Doug Bosco, who helped create the NCRA. Bosco is an investor in Sonoma Media Investments, owner of The Press Democrat. Bosco’s freight company operated on clearly favorable terms with NCRA: The contract did not require any payments from NWP Co. to NCRA until the freight operator reached $5 million in annual revenues — a threshold it never met. McGuire smoothed SMART’s acquisition of the freight rail system with a $4 million purchase of NWP Co.”

 NCRA was "forced" to borrow from Bosco? The only people “forced” here were California's taxpayers who are being forced to finance this boondoggle.

That’s at least some honest reporting by the PD, and a surprise because Bosco owns the paper, although the story was only up for a few hours.: In a nutshell, the NCRA was “forced” to borrow money at very high interest rates from Bosco for “track upgrades” for a train that never ran. The NCRA didn’t have to pay Bosco back because they never made any real revenue besides storing some dangerously explosive propane railcars on an abandoned spur in Sonoma County. But with the renaming of the NCRA to the GRTA Bosco gets his fraudulent loans paid back — with interest. 

Your tax dollar at work. In Bosco's pocket.

And that’s the real reason for McGuire’s great redwood boondoggle.

For a full report of how corrupt this entire arrangement has been (and will continue to be) read former NCRA board member and retired Marin attorney Bernie Myers’ explanation of how the Bosco scam worked from the inside. (Link available on the AVA’s website)

* * *

SUPERVISOR HASCHAK said the other day that he was “proud” to be a member of the Great Redwood Trail Agency. Supervisor Mulheren, also presumably proud, is also one of the persons on the committee rubber stamping expenditures of public money devoted to this mother of all boondoggles, advertised everywhere in sum by this sentence: “The Great Redwood Trail Agency will build the trail from Cloverdale to Humboldt Bay.”

NO, IT WON'T, but like the promise of eternal life if you don't lie, steal, and murder in this life, it's enticing. Who wouldn't like to bike it from Sausalito to Eureka through the wild and scenic Eel River Canyon, presently impassable but a bargain fixer-upper at maybe $2 billion? Hell, Ukiah's already completed three-mile stretch of the Great Redwood Trail which only cost a million-plus a mile.

THE GREAT REDWOOD TRAIL AGENCY had been the Northcoast Railroad Authority, a Democrat-created fiction that pretended for years that the Democrats would resume rail service between Marin and Eureka. In the meantime, however, they had to borrow several million dollars from former Congressman Doug Bosco, now due and payable, as the previous fiction of a railroad segues into the new fiction of The Great Redwood Trail.

A GRAY GHOST named Mitch Stogner, Bosco's former chief of staff when Congressman Bosco was running interference for Georgia-Pacific and Louisiana-Pacific as those mega-corps cashed in the Northcoast's forests, now apparently oversees the cash register for The Great Redwood Trail, a purely mythical project dreamed up by hustling little fellow out of Healdsburg, State Senator Mike McGuire, to lend dubious credence to Northcoast Democrats as people who get things done. (On further checking Stogner may have been replaced a female equivalent from the Coastal Conservancy; they’re not being very forthcoming on this stuff.)

STOGNER, incidentally, maintains an office at 419 Talmage, Suite M, Ukiah, in the same building as the Salvation Food Distribution operation. Stogner hasn't been the only prominent Democrat to enjoy pass-through pay pretending to run a railroad; former Northcoast assemblyman Dan Hauser was in charge of the non-existent train after he was termed out of office.

LOCAL DEMOCRATS Dave Nelson and John McCowen arranged to have a new county courthouse erected on contiguous lots owned by the NCRA at the McDonald's end of West Perkins, which the state's judge's office bought from the bogus railroad agency presided over by Stogner. The new courthouse, unneeded and logistically impossible if ever built, is on hold.

JOHN PINCHES has been a long-time critic of the North Coast Railroad Authority. Pinches knew first hand that a train would never run on the disappeared tracks along the Eel River near his home at Island Mountain, deep in the Eel River Canyon. 

PINCHES suggested years ago that we look into the NCRA’s books maintained under contract with the Sonoma County Auditor’s office. We emailed that office and the response — after going through several staffers — was that those books were the private property of the NRCA whose Executive Director Mitch Stogner would have to approve us looking at them. 

WE KNEW that Stogner would turn down our request. We considered filing a Public Records Act request for the reams of paperwork that would likely have to be involved, and they would fight it and delay it. But before we could, NCRA whistleblower Bernie Myers ,wrote up a detailed, clear expose of the NCRA's fraud scheme from the inside.

And the Major didn’t need to pursue the question any further.

PS. THE NCRA website listed the newly renamed GRTA board meeting agenda on March 10 which had four items of “business.” Three of them were about themselves and one was about hiring their attorney — at $282 per hour. The New Boondoggle Has Begun.

(o) Discussion and Possible Action Regarding Resolution 2022-01 Authorizing Continued Teleconference Meetings 

(o) Discussion and Possible Action Regarding Election of Chair and Vice Chair 

(o) Discussion and Possible Action Regarding Approval of Sonoma County Legal Counsel Services Agreement 

(o) Discussion and Possible Action Regarding Establishment of Time and Place of Regular Meetings of Great Redwood Trail Agency 

Their next meeting will be June 13, 2022.

* * *

THE GREAT REDWOOD GRAVY TRAIL — behind the press releases…

In a press release dutifully circulated by the Northcoast's tame media last year, State Senator Mike McGuire, the primary proponent of the never to be built “Great Redwood Trail,” wrote: “The Budget Act that was passed in 2021 included two significant groundbreaking items related to the Great Redwood Trail. No. 1, it appropriated the last bit of funding needed to pay off the remaining debt from the North Coast Railroad Authority…”

In his presser McGuire curiously omitted the amount of the “remaining debt” but elsewhere it was reported to be about $4 million owed to Doug Bosco’s Northwest Pacific Railroad Company.

“And it also added $10.5 million to pay for stepping up the master planning process of the Great Redwood Trail.”

Nowhere does it say how they arrived at that large number, nor who specifically gets the $10.5 million, or what exactly it will be spent on.

IN RECENT MONTHS, McGuire and his state Democratic Party hacks, er, colleagues, screamed wolf for several months in opposition to a clearly bogus phantom bogeyman they called “The Coal Train,” which they said wanted to convert the North Coast Railroad into a train that would ship raw coal from somewhere (not specified) up the North Coast along the Eel River and to the somnolent port of Eureka where it would be shipped to China. The logistics of such an endeavor are mind-boggling, even if they figured out a way to re-track the Eel River. If the demon train was allowed to proceed, said McGuire et al, it would wreck environmental havoc on the Northcoast and had to be stopped!

INSTANTLY, government bodies and non-profits up and down the Northcoast issued overwrought statements and passed panicked resolutions denouncing the phantom coal train and its proposer(s) — even though it was clear to everyone that such a train would never run for a host of obvious reasons.

So why the big uproar against something that would never happen? 

According to a December 21 article in the Eureka Times Standard by reporter Isabella Vanderheiden:

“In August [of 2021], the newly formed North Coast Railroad Company, LLC filed a complaint with the Surface Transportation Board in opposition to the North Coast Railroad Authority’s request to railbank the dilapidated rail line in an attempt to export coal overseas from Montana, Utah and Wyoming through the Port of Humboldt Bay,” reported Ms. Vanderheiden. 

Then quoting McGuire:

“We know that this shadowy corporation is worth over a billion dollars and they have put in a competing application with a Great Redwood Trail to federal regulators to start a toxic coal train that will run through our communities,” Senator Mike McGuire said. “Their application to start a toxic coal train will be up at approximately the same time when federal regulators review our bid to be able to rail bank the rail line from Willits all the way up to Humboldt Bay and turn the rail line into a trail. Here’s what I say to them: We are not going to let that happen.”

So the threat from the “shadow corporation” is a problem because it might present an obstruction to or delay of the flow of millions of dollars McGuire wants to hand over to Bosco and McGuire’s insider Trail advocates, not because there was ever any chance that the coal train would run.