For years, Greenway has urged Santa Cruz County to base corridor decisions on sound engineering, realistic costs, and projects people can actually use. This summer, a blunt Civil Grand Jury report and a revealing federal rail filing strengthened that case.
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The Grand Jury confirms the central problem
The Santa Cruz County Civil Grand Jury found that key corridor decisions were not grounded in the corridor’s physical limits, engineering needs, legal constraints, and true costs. The result was years spent debating options that were not always realistic.
That has been Greenway’s central concern from the beginning. Before committing the public to passenger rail, the RTC needed credible engineering and cost information.
The ZEPRT study finally provided it. The passenger-rail concept is estimated to cost about $4.285 billion to build (in 2025 dollars). Annual operating expenses are estimated at $34 million—or $41 million with contingency. The RTC’s financing analysis says the project will require a new countywide sales tax ranging from 1.5 to 2.25 percent.
Passenger rail remains an enormous and unfunded commitment. Meanwhile, the RTC has secured $115.8 million for Coastal Rail Trail Segments 8 through 11 (the Boardwalk to State Park Drive). That money can deliver a real public benefit if the county moves forward without further delay.
What the STB filing actually does
St. Paul & Pacific Railroad, a Progressive Rail subsidiary, has asked the Surface Transportation Board (STB) to discontinue its obligation to provide freight service over 28.39 miles of the line north of Watsonville.
In plain English, the railroad is asking the federal regulator to recognize that freight service there has ended. Discontinuance is a common regulatory step when a line has had no local freight traffic for at least two years, any overhead traffic can be rerouted, and no qualifying service complaint is pending.
The northern portion of our line has had no freight customers for years. Approval would end a dormant service obligation. The discontinuance filing would not remove tracks, build a trail, abandon the corridor, or decide the future of passenger rail.
Nevertheless, former RTC executive directors Linda Wilshusen and George Dondero—longtime and forceful passenger-rail advocates—asked the STB to stop the proceeding. FORT separately stepped in, hiring GKG Law, a Washington, D.C., firm specializing in federal transportation matters, to seek rejection or a stay of Progressive Rail’s filing.
That is a remarkable intervention. Wilshusen and Dondero once led the RTC. They are now asking a federal agency to impede the RTC’s current plan by using a freight proceeding in which there is no freight traffic and no shipper has claimed harm.
Progressive Rail’s response was damning
Progressive Rail brought the argument back to the issue before the STB: freight service.
Its response states that no current or prospective shipper has asked for service, no shipper has been turned away, and no freight customer would be harmed by discontinuance. It also says that the northern line has been out of service for years and is largely inoperable.
FORT argues that discontinuance could eventually lead to track removal or trail construction. Progressive Rail answers that those are separate questions requiring separate review and that they are not part of this case.
Progressive Rail also argues that the opposition filings arrived too late and should be rejected on that basis alone. FORT disputes that reading of the deadlines. The STB has not yet ruled. But before being impressed by FORT’s legal firepower, read Progressive Rail’s short response. It exposes how little of FORT’s argument concerns an actual freight need.
Delay has a real cost
Greenway cannot know anyone’s private motive. We can only judge the effect. Every request for a stay, a rejection, or an added proceeding delays resolution. That delay consumes public time and money, threatens grant-required groundbreaking schedules, and postpones a trail the community could be using.
Save the corridor—not obsolete tracks
FORT has made “save the tracks” a centerpiece of its campaign and its STB filings. But preserving the corridor is not the same as preserving today’s rails.
RTC Executive Director Sarah Christensen has said the existing tracks were built for occasional, slow freight and cannot support passenger rail without complete reconstruction. If passenger rail is ever built, the track infrastructure will have to be rebuilt. The valuable asset is the public right-of-way—not the aged railroad tracks—and the Interim Trail preserves it.
County alternate Commissioner Andy Schiffrin has been one of the RTC’s most vociferous voices for passenger rail. In December, at his suggestion, the Commission directed staff to examine whether some tracks could be left beside the Interim Trail or left uncovered.
Whatever the intent, that study has cost staff time and risks more delay. It also revives the problem that made the adjacent trail unaffordable: squeezing a trail beside the tracks requires expensive retaining walls, bridges, and other structures in a narrow corridor. It can also mean a narrower, less direct, and less useful trail.
Keeping old rails does not bring passenger rail closer. It makes the Interim Trail harder and more expensive while preserving tracks that the RTC says cannot carry future passenger service. More critically, these delays threaten the use-it-or-lose-it Active Transportation grant funding received from the state, leaving our rail corridor empty and weed-choked indefinitely. Is this what FORT wants? What happened to the “Trail” in the FORT name?
Who is paying for FORT’s legal campaign?
The STB docket identifies FORT’s lawyers, but it does not disclose their fees or who paid them. FORT’s lead attorney, Daniel Elliott, served two terms as STB chairman and is a highly specialized rail lawyer.
That expertise is unlikely to be cheap. The Justice Department’s 2026 benchmark for a Washington attorney with 35 or more years of experience is $998 an hour. Based on the petition, exhibits, reply, research, and strategy involved, a market-rate cost of $40,000 to $80,000 or more is plausible.
That is an estimate, not a known bill. FORT may have paid full rates, received a discount, or obtained donated services. A lawyer’s credentials also do not prove that the client has a strong case. A lawyer’s job is to make the best available argument.
FORT operates as a project of Social Good Fund, a 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor. FORT therefore may not file its own public tax return, and federal disclosure rules generally allow public charities to keep donor identities private.
That arrangement is legal and does not prove wrongdoing. But it leaves the public unable to see who is financing this campaign. When specialized lawyers intervene in a proceeding that could affect $115.8 million in public trail funding, voluntary disclosure of the donors and costs would be appropriate. Shouldn’t we know who is funding an opposition campaign that could put both the funding and construction of this important community asset—a bicycle and pedestrian trail—at risk?
It is time to build
Santa Cruz County now has better engineering, realistic cost estimates, and funding for trail Segments 8 through 11. The public should not have to wait through another decade of studies, procedural fights, and unaffordable promises.
The Interim Trail can deliver transportation, recreation, and safety benefits now while preserving the corridor for the future. We urge the RTC to defend the project, protect the grants, and keep construction moving.
Please stay informed, write to the RTC, speak up at its meetings, and support Greenway. The strongest answer to obstruction is a trail the public can finally use.