MERCED, Calif. — Merced elected officials are calling for more transparency and discussion on a risk management plan before signing off on building a high-speed rail station in a new location in the county.
Merced Mayor Matthew Serratto, City Council members Sarah Boyle and Shane Smith and Merced County Supervisor Josh Pedrozo sent a letter to the California High-Speed Rail Authority last week.
They decided to write the letter following a meeting in Sacramento with local, state and federal leaders, including Democratic Rep. Adam Gray. The letter addresses the High-Speed Rail Authority’s June pivot when it announced a plan to move the station to a southeast corner of the county instead of downtown.
“It memorializes discussions we've been having more informally for some time,” Serratto said about the letter. “But we're looking to move forward and make progress and kind of crystallize a clear vision, one way or another, for this project.”
Smith said this will help bring the city and community into the fold as the High-Speed Rail Authority’s plan progresses.
“Our community is wanting us to understand more of why this decision has been made, but also we need to understand, as a community, how are we going to address the impacts of a southeast Merced station,” Smith said. “The downtown station was discussed for maybe 10, 15 years, and this just seems to be happening on the fly.”
Smith said he expects the High-Speed Rail Authority board and the CEO, Ian Choudri, to collaborate with the city and answer lingering questions.
This collaboration, officials said, would result in a mitigation plan for the economic, transportation and infrastructure impacts of the potential relocation of the station to East Mission Avenue and Highway 99.
Letter asks for further discussion
The letter highlighted the need for more conversations around the High-Speed Rail Authority’s suggested change and the creation of a mitigation plan for future impacts.
City officials extended an invitation to reconvene with members of state agencies and elected representatives, including UC Merced, Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria and the California Department of Transportation.
The mitigation plan listed a variety of remedies and commitments, including completion of current transportation projects and the widening of Highway 99 through Merced and Atwater. The plan also includes a determination on how and whether the new station will connect with Amtrak and Altamont Corridor Express (ACE) services. Officials said in the letter that the mitigation plan should be finished before the High-Speed Rail Authority moves forward on any final station decision.
“The City of Merced and Merced county have been committed partners in the high-speed rail project for decades,” the letter says. “If the state now determines that a different station location is necessary, it must also accept responsibility for the transportation, economic and infrastructure consequences of that decision.”
Officials wrote in the letter that because of the initial plan to put the station downtown, the city, county, and surrounding communities made transportation, landuse, infrastructure and redevelopment decisions based on its intended location.
That included $500 million in state funding for the expansion of ACE services and a project that further connected UC Merced to the rest of the city, but those projects are not yet complete.
When it comes to achieving the risk management plan, “the sooner the better,” Serratto said.
“We're in the middle of a general plan update, so it's really helpful to have a clear vision of what's going to happen there,” he said. “We have significant development both downtown Merced and in southeast Merced where they want to put the proposed station…. It’s a complex, kind of fluid situation, for sure.”
Smith told The Merced FOCUS he’s looking for more answers about how the new location would benefit Merced.
“My expectation is that the Authority board and the CEO will engage us in discussion, and we can work collaboratively to figure out answers to these questions,” Smith said. “The other hope is that, with representatives from the governor's office and the state legislature, that we can actually get some binding commitments from the state and put some real dollars on some of the infrastructure needs that we're going to have if we're going to build a station outside of town.”
In the letter, Smith and the other leaders said they are prepared to evaluate a different station location, but it must be “negotiated, funded, and approved together.” They also said that discussions about the relocation should not be interpreted as support for the project.
“We're kind of trying to create a platform for everybody to have this conversation and hopefully come to some kind of consensus,” he said.
