Repaving What Mendo Wrecked

There’s been some local fanfare about the County’s plans to repave the deteriorating Mountain View Road as if it’s some kind of significant accomplishment. It is, on the surface (sic). But it shouldn’t be. If Mendo hadn’t screwed up Mountain View Road with its permit process years ago, the road would probably still be in usable shape and the funds could go to fixing much worse rural roads. We gather that not many people remember the Couhty’s role in ruining Mountain View Road in the first place. If one knows the backstory about this particular road and the totally unnecessary damage done to it, the fanfare fades.

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When Williams Communications first proposed to bury miles of “wholesale” fiber optic cable under two of Mendo's rural County roads back in 2000 (Highway 253 and Mountain View Road to the Coast where the cable goes underwater to Hawaii and Japan), Governor Gray Davis's PUC over-ruled the state Attorney General who had strongly recommended that such major cable installation projects require an Environmental Impact Report. The Attorney General wrote a convincing explanation for why an EIR was legally required: basically the work was over the San Andreas fault, Northcoast soils are inherently unstable, improper precautions or methods might result in major road slippage, etc.

The PUC's heedless decision to waive the EIR in that case meant that relatively cashless Mendolanders near the proposed trenching would have to come up with the big bucks themselves to challenge the PUC's ruling in favor of Williams Communications, one more decision in favor of a private entity achieved, as it turned out, at public expense.

Neighbors couldn’t afford the legal fees, so there was no challenge to the trenching, and no EIR.

But Williams still needed encroachment permits from Caltrans (for 253, a state highway and a small portion of Highway 1, also a state highway) and the Mendocino Board of Supervisors (for Mountain View Road, a county road) before they could dig. Caltrans approved the Highway One and Highway 253 permits on the condition that the cable be "undergrounded" — a more costly method than simple trenching that meant using a horizontally-drilled underground tube-like hole for the cable.

Caltrans and many locals knew that a four-foot trench in Mendo's coastal rural roads would permanently ruin them and greatly increase the cost of future maintenance. But Mendo's then-Supervisors let Williams go ahead and dig an old-fashioned trench in the middle of Mountain View Road and Fish Rock Road when Williams' lawyer stoutly "guaranteed" to Mendo that the roads could and would be restored to "the same or better condition" upon completion. A token permit fee was paid to Mendo. 

But, as predicted, stretches of both roads were permanently destabilized by the trenching.

Mendo's clueless supervisors at the time — Michael Delbar, Richard Shoemaker, Tom Lucier, Patricia Campbell, and David Colfax — approved the Williams permit over the warnings and objections of a small group of Anderson Valley and Coastal residents. (If Cowboy Johnny Pinches had been on the Board things might have been different…)

Permit in hand, Williams proceeded to pay a low-bid contractor to dig their trench, although it was never clear who was doing the actual work since much of the heavy trenching equipment was rented — a sure sign that Williams was trenching on the cheap, and that the work wasn't particularly well planned or supervised.

Several large ranches whose lands bordered Mountain View Road didn't particularly like the idea of their primary county road being wrecked, but they didn't complain because they got some money from Williams for various forms of temporary neighboring land access rights during the trenching.

After months of local traffic snarls, the gaping trenches were covered up and the pavement patched, but the roads still looked rough and wrinkled to the mostly local drivers on the road — hardly “as good or better,” as Williams had promised.

(A google maps street view still clearly shows the remnants of the trench, paved over, but permanently weakened.)

A County-commissioned study — prepared later in response to citizen pressure in hopes of getting Williams to improve the patch job — released back in 2002, confirmed residents' predictions that the roadbed had been irreparably damaged. The two compacted six-foot wide slabs of soil created by cutting the road in half with the trench started moving inward toward the trench when it was first dug, and it has continued to slowly move inward toward the weakened area of the filled-in trench, even after compaction and refill.

The study, by Chico-based Chec Engineering, specialists in this kind of road damage, said that the roadbed has suffered “significant structural damage.”

According to the study, the only way to partially mitigate the damage was to substantially increase the pavement thickness and hope it holds it together — an expensive proposition. Perhaps to be done by the repave the County is preparing to contract for.

But the problem went deeper. In late 2002, Williams Communications' parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It seems the cable communications industry stuck way more cable into the ground than anybody wanted back before the 2000 dot.com boom went dot.bust. (Mendo County, by the way, got no cable access, no nothing from this destructive project.)

Using the new engineering study documenting the obvious and already known, Mendocino County asked the bankrupt Williams outfit to do something about the road damage Mendo’s Supervisors had naively allowed them to do. Williams' bankruptcy notice insisted that their day-to-day cable operations wouldn’t be affected by the bankruptcy filing. But Williams simultaneously tried to get creditors to accept their nearly worthless stock — not an optimistic sign.

Theoretically, Mendo had some leverage over Williams because all that they actually installed in the trench was an empty conduit. There's not even a cable down there to show for all the trouble! So at the time there was the possibility that Williams would have to get another permit to install the actual cable, a permit that could have imposed improvement conditions.

But Williams Communications, the telecom company itself, was later sold to a vulture capitalist by parent company Williams Communications Group, which itself was bailed out of bankruptcy by Warren Buffett on condition that it stick to energy pipelines and abandon telecommunications activity. So Williams Communications never applied for the second permit.

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As best we recall, Mendo eventually got a small cash settlement out of Williams in bankruptcy court, but nothing was done about the physical damage to Mountain View Road. The Independent Coast Observer used to run pictures of segments of Mountain View Road on the Coast side showing wrinkled asphalt and other road damage that was usually smoothed or temporarily patched by County road crews who probably don’t even know the history of how that trench got there or realize that there’s nothing in the trench except an empty conduit.

The ugly paved over trench is still visible in the middle of Mountain View Road as seen in the above Google Streetview pic.

Back in 2017 Mountain View Road had to be closed (again) because another chunk of the road had collapsed, making passage by low wheel clearance vehicles difficult and dangerous. 

Given the history, Mountain View Road has continued to collapse and be patched since then, making it a real obstacle course for local drivers.

County Transpo Director Howard Dashiell is pretty creative though. He has managed to find some funding (we think it might be FEMA storm damage money) to finance a repaving project on Mountain View Road. 

But if Mendo had simply taken the same position as Caltrans did, the repaving project probably wouldn’t be necessary.

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Randy Burke of Gualala added: “I recall after moving to Mendo county in 2001 the interest in resolving the issues you remind the reader of. What I find interesting is that there has been no mention of a performance bond or a maintenance bond. There may have been both of these in place, I am not sure. But had they been activated, the bonding companies would have ended up on the financial hook to make the installation whole and bring it up to county/state specs.”