Quick Take
A new civil grand jury report faults the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission for decades of flawed planning on the coastal rail corridor. It says officials advanced proposals without adequately accounting for engineering, legal and financial realities, and recommends that the commission adopt stronger project evaluation and strategic planning processes.
For decades, the debate over Santa Cruz County’s coastal rail line has been framed as a bitter public divide. But a new civil grand jury report turns the blame squarely on the county’s transportation commission, arguing that officials spent years pushing unviable options because they failed to accurately evaluate costs and engineering challenges.
“[K]ey policy choices were not adequately grounded in a realistic assessment of the corridor’s physical constraints, engineering requirements, legal limitations, and financial costs,” the 28-page report reads. “As a result, the [Regional Transportation Commission] and the public have spent years debating options that, in some cases, were not viable given financial and engineering realities.”
The RTC has long tried to find a way to best use the Santa Cruz Branch Rail Line, a 32-mile coastal rail system that runs from Davenport to Pajaro Junction in Monterey County.
The grand jury’s report comes days after it released five reports on issues including the county’s behavioral health system and its housing crisis. The grand jury is a state-mandated, volunteer-led government watchdog composed of 19 members who carry out annual investigations on regional issues.
As part of its report on the rail corridor, the grand jury laid out its findings and issued a list of eight recommendations. It recommends that the transportation commission develop a framework for future major capital projects that would direct when projects can advance only after obtaining a certain level of confidence in cost estimates and timelines.
The grand jury further recommends that the RTC adopt a comprehensive strategic planning framework to lay out decision-making criteria for transportation investments, policy decisions and guidance for navigating conflicts when faced with competing transportation objectives.
Additionally, it recommends creating a plan to improve public communication to reduce misinformation, as well as exploring options to change the makeup of the board’s 12 members to “avoid deadlocks and delays.”
The RTC is made up of the five members of the county board of supervisors, one representative from each of the county’s four cities and three members from Santa Cruz Metro.
“This structure reflects county, city, and metro interests, but also creates a governing body with frequent turnover and competing priorities,” according to the report. “Personal and political considerations can result in delayed decision-making and makes maintaining consistent long-term direction more difficult.”
RTC Executive Director Sarah Christensen said in a statement that the report acknowledges the changes that the commission has made over the years to deliver on its goals.
“We’ve made significant investments in strengthening our project delivery and property management expertise,” she said. “These improvements have strengthened our ability to ground decisions in sound technical analysis, deliver complex projects, and responsibly manage our assets. We see the Grand Jury’s recommendations as a constructive roadmap, and we’re committed to continuing to build on the progress we’ve already made.”
Established in 1972 by the state of California, the RTC was initially limited to planning regional transportation and divvying out transportation funding to local agencies, and was not focused on or staffed for the development of projects. But with the public’s interest in preserving the rail corridor, it purchased the Santa Cruz Branch Rail Line in 2012 with the aim of maintaining freight and recreational rail as well as trail infrastructure.
The commission hired consultants who conducted planning studies into the rail’s development that “relied on 10,000-foot estimates rather than ground level engineering,” according to the civil grand jury report.
“They assumed passenger rail and a trail could coexist without rigorously analyzing the costs of retaining walls and bridge replacements required by the corridor’s topography,” the report reads. “The studies focused heavily on the benefits of rail but wildly underestimated the true costs.”
Over time, with ownership of the rail, the commission worked to develop in-house expertise and hired engineers and technical staff starting in 2017. Still, its reports didn’t “meaningfully advance environmental review or required engineering and scoping,” the report said.
The grand jury cites a 2021 Transit Corridor Alternatives Analysis that estimated a passenger rail system would cost about $480 million to build on the corridor. Only four years later, the commission released another report, conducted by the same firm, HDR, with much more extensive analysis that brought the total cost for the rail system to about $4.3 billion.
“This ten-fold increase highlights the failure of early studies to capture the difficult engineering realities of the [rail line], doing a disservice to both the [transportation commission] and the general public,” the report reads.
The grand jury report also evaluates the geographic challenges as well as the infrastructure constraints the rail system presents. To read the full report, click here.
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