SMART planners select Guerneville Road site
By BOB NORBERG
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Commute rail planners settled on a new site for a northern Santa Rosa station that is closer to housing, government, schools and shopping and cheaper by $3 million than one in a previous plan.
The location on Guerneville Road east of the railroad tracks is about half a mile from Coddingtown Mall.
It will cost the rail agency $12.2 million to build the station and acquire needed property on Guerneville Road where two stores are located, Sonoma Kitchen & Bath and Kelly-Moore paints.
The location is a half mile north of the initial site near Jennings Avenue, which was a former railroad junction called a “wye” and was heavily contaminated. That site would have cost $3 million more, not counting possible environmental cleanup.
“This is the best site for the station,” said Debora Fudge, Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit chairwoman, on Wednesday. “It is better for buses and it gets us away from the contamination of the wye site.”
A map showing the two proposed locations of a SMART station in northern Santa Rosa
SMART planning manager John Nemeth said SMART could scale back the Guerneville station by more than half, saving $6.7 million, by acquiring just the Kitchen & Bath store and providing less parking in a first phase.
The savings could help SMART build a longer line for a first phase of construction, scheduled to be open in 2014.
SMART’s board on Nov. 6 adopted a controversial plan to begin service from Railroad Square in Santa Rosa to the Civic Center in San Rafael, instead of the 70-mile line from Cloverdale to Larkspur that had been envisioned.
The truncated line is necessitated by a $350 million gap in what district’s sales tax, depressed by the economy, can raise and what the 70-mile line is estimated to cost.
However, SMART officials hope to go out to bid early next year to take advantage of the economic downturn’s affect on construction, which has caused bids on highway and other public works projects to come in 20 to 30 percent below estimates.
The hope is lower bids could allow SMART to open an initial line that goes to Guerneville Road or Windsor to the north and downtown San Rafael to the south.
“In the near term, we would continue to do station design work, but not buy property until a formal decision to extend the line,” Nemeth said.
The cost of extending the line 2.5 miles from Railroad Square to the Guerneville Road site is estimated to cost $24 million, half of which is for the station.
The Guerneville Road site is preferable because it is closer to the Sonoma County Administration Center, Santa Rosa Junior College, Coddingtown Mall, bus service, businesses and homes than the Jennings site, according to Nemeth’s report.
Codding Enterprises, which co-owns Coddingtown Mall with Simon Properties, paid $40,000 for the study.
The study does not take into account proximity to a bicycle and pedestrian bridge Santa Rosa was planning to build over Highway 101 from near Coddingtown to the Santa Rosa Junior College.
The new station site is slightly farther away from the proposed bridge, which is now mired in controversy at the Santa Rosa City Council.
SMART’s real estate committee Wednesday approved amending the environmental impact report for the Guerneville Road site. It will go to the full board Dec. 15.
source:
http://www.watchsonomacounty.com/2010/12/featured-articles/smart-planners-select-guerneville-road-site/