Opponents of Rainier crossing step up efforts to stymie Petaluma project

“Every year’s an election year when it comes to Rainier,” said former Petaluma City Council member David Keller.|

As Highway 101 climbs to span what would be Petaluma’s third time-saving route across town, vocal opponents of the long-promised, multi-million dollar east-west connector are once again stepping up efforts to halt the project they say will cost too much and make too little impact.

The push in recent weeks, coming more than 60 years after the crosstown connector at Rainier Avenue was first envisioned in north Petaluma, traces a similar path to that forged more than 20 years ago, when the Petaluma City Council passed a resolution removing the crossing from city plans and priorities.

That’s no coincidence. David Keller, the man who has spent the past several weeks offering up a “template” for killing the project to City Council members and staffers ahead of the city’s latest General Plan update, was on the City Council in 1999 when Rainier was first stricken from the city’s transportation planning efforts.

“I think the entire project, in either configuration, is misleading, does not do what it’s promised to do, and wastes $100 million in local money – develops land that shouldn’t be developed,” Keller said during a recent phone interview, referring to a Rainier project with- or without access to Highway 101.

Keller has a ready audience on today’s City Council, including Mayor Teresa Barrett, who says the project should “absolutely” be removed again, and City Council member Brian Barnacle, who said he’d prefer city staff not spend another minute on the project that has already cost the city more than $10 million.

Others, though, see the latest salvo in the long-running battle as coming at the wrong time, and without well-planned alternatives for relieving longstanding congestion problems in Sonoma County’s second largest city.

“I think the timing is curious,” said City Council member Mike Healy, pointing to the city’s ongoing work to revise the 2008 General Plan. “If you were to arbitrarily start canceling traffic projects, it could blow up the current (General Plan).”

The fraught fight over Rainier pits dueling visions for the city’s future. Progressive environmentalists see bikes and buses as fulcrums to soaring quality of life and reduced traffic, and view Rainier, in Keller’s words, as a “40-year solution to a 70-year problem.” More moderate, development-friendly politicos see an east side already etched in stone, and in need of practical, car-centric solutions to existing problems.

Estimates of the cost to finish Rainier vary widely, from Keller’s $100 million mark, to the city’s most recent estimate of $80 million, to calculations that could cut the cost in half pending major adjustments to the plan. But the impact of the Rainier fight, at least politically, can’t be overstated.

“Every year’s an election year when it comes to Rainier,” said Keller, weighing in on whether the coming district elections could ease debate surrounding the project. “Rainier is – it’s kind of one of those things…It’s always been a political issue.”

Any attempt to re-direct city efforts on the project likely won’t start until a City Council workshop on crosstown connectors tentatively planned for late this summer.

Petaluma has already spent $10.9 million toward making Rainier a reality, including $7 million on contracts to construct the undercrossing of Highway 101.

The city has also put away about $30 million in developer fees that could be used toward construction of the Rainier connector, but Barrett and others see little path forward to raising the rest of the needed money. And, even if that money materialized – all of these decades later – the latest studies show that a Rainier connector, without on- and off-ramps to Highway 101, would save just 12 seconds for cross-town traffic on Washington Street and Corona Road. For Rainier opponents, that’s just not good enough.

“There’s a cliché that we might want to think about, and that is, ‘Don’t throw good money after bad,’” Barrett said. “Or, if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. At some point, you have to realize that what we’ve been talking about is not achievable. And were it achievable – the building of a connector at Rainier – it may not get what it was promised to deliver.”

That promise alone is responsible for the location of the hospital, the police station and the Santa Rosa Junior College Petaluma campus, but where proponents see inevitability, Rainier opponents see a chance to change course.

Keller, for example, envisions sports fields on land west of Highway 101 that could reduce trips to the east side, and reduce traffic. And he sees investments in buses, bicycle lanes and pedestrian safety and access measures as a much smarter way to spend $100 million – while still improving traffic congestion.

“You can be really dumb about it…and continue the same old crap they’ve been doing for 70 years, or you can get smart and do what other cities have been doing for at least the last 50 years,” Keller said.

Although he acknowledged the most recent studies don’t cast Rainier as a sort of silver-bullet solution to the town’s congestion problems, Healy is quick to point out that the inclusion of Rainier and Caulfield crosstown connections on past general plans were key to responding to a growing city, and to concerns that congestion at critical intersections would cause city services – including emergency services – to fail to meet critical benchmarks in responsiveness.

“Rainier and the southern crossing were both absolutely necessary for the traffic to not fail at the General Plan buildout,” Healy said. “If that’s changed, I’ve got an open mind.”

Healy also said there are no studies showing that expanded investments on busses, bike lanes and sports fields would have a similar impact to completing Rainier.

With Petaluma planning to produce new traffic modeling within the next year, Healy said Rainier opponents should withhold judgment – for now. But he was also eager for proponents to keep going – namely, to explore seeking permission from the California Public Utilities Commission for an at-grade crossing of the SMART train tracks at Rainier – a move that would save millions of dollars versus the initial plan, which called for Rainier to go over the top of the SMART tracks.

Although he wasn’t willing to commit to opposing or supporting a Rainier crossing outright, City Council member Brian Barnacle also made it clear he isn’t interested in seeing more time spent on the decades-old promise.

“I don’t want staff spending another minute on it in my term on council,” Barnacle said. “Whether it doesn’t get include in the next general plan, or whether it’s getting it out of the current general plan, most importantly is that I don’t want staff spending any more time on it.”

Tyler Silvy is editor of the Petaluma Argus-Courier. Reach him at tyler.silvy@arguscourier.com, 707-776-8458, or @tylersilvy on Twitter.

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