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Santa Cruz County deserves rail leadership with actual rail expertise. Sarah Christensen, executive director of the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission, is a highway engineer, not a transit planner, not a rail specialist. Yet she is publicly campaigning on the claim that removing tracks from our rail corridor is irrelevant to the future of passenger rail service.
This isn’t a highway interchange. Rail infrastructure has specific physical, regulatory and funding requirements that highway engineering simply does not prepare you for. The federal corridor identification program, Federal Railroad Administration readiness criteria, competitive Step 3 funding, these are not concepts a highway engineer casually picks up on the job.
Santa Cruz County’s rail future is too important, and the funding stakes too high, to be guided by someone whose professional background has no connection to the decisions she is making. Ms. Christensen should defer to the rail experts, who disagree with her, like Rob Cunningham of Caltrans.
Makena Macambridge
Santa Cruz
