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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental protection Information Center, and I'm joined by Alicia Haman, the executive director of Friends of the Eel River. Hey, Alicia.

ALICIA HAMANN:

Hey, Tom, how you doing?

WHEELER:

So we're gonna have a great show today. We are talking about the Great Redwood Trail and groundwater. This is Alicia's idea -- that I just have to point this out that the common uniting thing is the "grrr" sound before the two of these.

HAMANN:

You know, I should just say like I've got a toddler at home who is obsessed with books. And so these days I'm thinking a lot about phonetics all the time, how to sound out letters, how to teach a two year old how to read. And so so these, these are both things that make you go. But one of them is a great thing and the other one is a little bit of a girl kind of thing.

WHEELER:

Yeah. Right. Also teaching a two year old to read ... your kid is going to be the smartest best person with you as their mother and already working on phonics. Shoot, I barely know how to read and I'm 35. So

HAMANN:

That's so sweet, Tom, learning a variety of choice language from me. So we'll just leave it at that. She might not be radio friendly by all right.

WHEELER:

Well, neither is Scott Greacen. So another girl. All right, Here we go. So let's get into the Great Redwood Trail if you have been living under a rock. The Great Redwood Trail is a proposed super long trail that will connect Humboldt Bay all the way south to the san Francisco Bay. It is going to be a trail that runs through pretty wild territory on what was once a former railroad line Alicia. How did the Great Redwood Trail even come about? Because I think that friends that your river, your organization had like a pretty central role in in this thing.

HAMANN:

Yeah, that's right. And we've been hearing a lot about the Great Redwood Trail for the past several years. But when I think about the history of how we got to where we are, I go back about 13 years or so to when friends of the Eel River first started watch dogging and engaging with the North Coast Railroad Authority. They were the state agency that was tasked with managing the line. I think they got, Oh boy, they got the line back in 1989 I believe. And then it was embargoed in the late 90s because it just was a terrible place for a railroad, a highly erosive landscape along the watershed, a highly sensitive watershed. It just, it just wasn't working out. It was incredibly expensive to maintain all the constant landslides and for anyone who's been on the river on the main stem there between like dos Rios and Alder point where the railroad runs adjacent to the river. You see railroad cars in the river alongside the river, all kinds of debris and stuff. It was, it was a total mess. So friends of the Eel River, we, we were engaging with the agency and we ended up filing a lawsuit challenging their attempts to evade environmental review while trying to resurrect this defunct line. Ultimately, we had this incredible lawsuit that we, that we won at the California Supreme Court back in 2017. So that was about a decade of engaging with the agency and litigating and pouring tons of money and resources and time into making sure that we can hold this state agency accountable to following state environmental law. So shortly after we won, that is when Senator McGuire introduced his really groundbreaking legislation SB 1029 which established the Great Redwood Trail agency and the rest, as they say, is recent history. So I'm sure that listeners are pretty familiar with how that's all played out.

WHEELER:

So, so friends the deal. I think that your lawsuit was the final nail in the coffin of trying to keep this railroad line open or potentially reopen this railroad line. It was instrumental in in this state finally being able to move on from this dumb idea which was trying to maintain this rail line, which is, as you said, highly erosive the most costly rail line in the country to maintain and operate. So thank you to friends of the Eel River. Oh, and

HAMANN:

I should say it wasn't just friends of the river there at the end, listeners here are well aware of the saga of the coal train that we were all fighting over the last year? And I just have to give a huge shout out to all of our allies who were a part of the No Coal and Humboldt coalition.

WHEELER:

Well, so that's the recent history that let let's just briefly touch on that. So we have this idea that we're going to create the Great Redwood Trail to do that. We're going to have to rail bank the line, which means that we're going to pause operations of the line as as a railroad until some point into the future where rail operations might be feasible again. And in that interim period, however long it might be, we can use that rail line for some other purpose like a trail. And so this is, this is legally how we are able to move forward with the Great Redwood Trail is that we're able to move it from this like status where like it's only to be used for rail to this other world where it can be used for other purposes. As long as rail is not feasible at the moment. And so we have this fight and this is where the coal threat came in. Let's let's go back and talk a little bit about that cole threat because we almost lost a Great Redwood Trail and we almost got coal trains rumbling into Humboldt county spewing toxic coal dust and jamming up our communities with a mile and a half long trains. So like what, why, why was coal almost a real threat? And how did we kill it? But let's do like a quick post mortem on the Coltrane.

HAMANN:

Yeah, totally. So the surface transportation board or S. T. B. That's the federal agency that is responsible for managing railroad infrastructure and, and so that that's the agency that that we had to engage with. They were the ones who are responsible for completing the rail banking process. And as part of the rail banking process, there is an option for other interested entities to submit offers to take over that right of way. And so that's surprisingly what we saw in this case. As soon as the rail banking process started, there were actually two entities that that submitted the notice of intent to to file such offers. And those were the, that shadowy unknown company based out of Wyoming. They were called the North Coast Railroad Company. But we'll just call them the Coltrane because we all know that that's what they were up to. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And and then the other entity was Mendocino Railway, who was the parent company of the Skunk Train and Mendocino Railway. It wasn't clear at first what what their intention was that they were seeking to take over the entire right of way, but ended up being that it was just a segment of the right away, just about 13 miles. But, you know, keen observers would, would know that they, You actually had larger, larger strategy at play. They didn't really care so much about that 13 mile segment, which was not a financially feasible plan and kind of a wonky idea what they cared about was solidifying their supposed status as a public utility which would allow them to evade environmental review and permitting requirements in a variety of other development projects that they have in mind.

WHEELER:

Like taking over half of the city of Fort Bragg, which the, the train people have tried to do. Yeah,

HAMANN:

yeah. And there is, you know, I would say we'll get to the wonderful news in a minute that we are clear of that threat. But I just, I do want to say that there are still some shenanigans going on with Mendocino Railway. So folks who care about the neue headland in Fort Bragg really be, be paying attention to the lawsuit that the California Coastal Commission and the city of Fort Bragg and various others actually have various other lawsuits against Mendocino Railway and pay attention to how that plays out because this is a really important, it's really important overreach that, that folks are trying to prevent, hey Alicia,

WHEELER:

let's have a show on that in the future. Alright, alright, so now we have some good news. So the skunk train people, they were trying to take over a 13 mile section of what will become the Great Redwood Trail. So it was, if we would have lost that, it would have been like having a smile with some missing teeth in the middle. But I understand that they were unsuccessful. Talk to us about that.

HAMANN:

They were, Yeah. So, well the Coltrane was also unsuccessful. We didn't really finish that piece of, but you all heard that

WHEELER:

over

HAMANN:

the summer and just last week, the Mendocino railway they submitted and what's called an offer of financial assistance, basically their attempt to take over that segment and the surface transportation board rejected their offer, which was really, really just a huge relief to all of us because in addition to bisecting the Great Redwood Trail and really just screwing up this incredible vision and potential for our region, it could have caused a lot of damage to the farthest inland run of coho salmon that we have on the eel there. This really, you know, unique run of coho that go all the way up outlet creek, which is, which is pretty impressive given that Coho have a preference for much colder waters and colder temperatures for them to go that far inland. Like that's, that's a pretty unique life history and it's something that really needs to be protected And the train would have would have threatened that given that train loads full of gravel are gonna be shaking that highly erosive landscape and contributing a lot of sediment pollution to the water. So we're, we're really excited that the surface transportation board rejected many casinos offer. They, there, there was some confidential information that was a part of their offer and that ended up being the basis for the rejection. But essentially what the surface transportation board said was that they don't have a financially feasible plan. They, and, and they don't have the financial assets to complete their plan,

WHEELER:

which was effectively the same reason why the Coltrane people died. Was they just, you didn't prove it to us.

HAMANN:

Exactly, Exactly. And like you said at the beginning, tom this line was while it was an operation, it was the most expensive line to maintain in the nation. That just doesn't make sense,

WHEELER:

Especially for a low value product like gravel to, to try to, to try to maintain 30 miles of line never made, never made sense. But as you pointed out, it was not always about the gravel, was it? It was about other ambitions.

HAMANN:

That's right. And, and for folks who want to dig into any of that paperwork, you can find on our website under the Eel River dot org. If you click on the section of our website that talks about protecting the great the, if you click on the section of our website that talks about protecting the Eel River canyon, you can find links to the surface transportation board's docket where you can read every single item that was ever submitted as part of this whole proceeding, we've got a couple of really juicy ones linked right on right on our website there. It's a lot of reading, but there's there's definitely some interesting nuggets in there.

WHEELER:

Absolutely. All right. So we have eliminated the threats now to the Great Redwood Trail. So the skunk train folks, they're out the Coltrane folks, they're out. What does that mean now for the future of getting this thing built and for me to be able to go explore some areas of the Eel River which are virtually unexplainable, but by kayak raft now.

HAMANN:

Yeah, So Senator McGuire actually had a town hall meeting just last week where, where he addressed that along with staff and board from the newly formed Great Redwood Trail Agency. And, and I should say the timing was really, really wonderful because two days after the surface transportation board rejected Mendocino Railways offer, they went ahead and finalized rail banking and so now the Great Redwood Trail Agency because they already own that right of way. They can get to work immediately on master planning for the trail. So they were talking at Senator McGuire's meeting last week about what is master planning and what's that going to involve? It's gonna be about a two year process and it's going to address a whole host of questions about the trail. Some of the, some of the more interesting things that that they talked about at the meeting were plans for emergency preparedness, maybe exploring the option of having wifi beacons along the trail. So there are places where people can actually get cell phone service because if you've, if you've been out there, you know that that's not really something that you have access to. They talked about making sure that there's a lot of good way finding resources and, and maybe using ranger stations for people to check in like you do on on when you go on the pacific crest trail or some longer hikes. They talked about using the trail as an opportunity to kind of build in some wildfire mitigation and some extra resources for responding to wildfires. Although Senator McGuire was was keen to emphasize that of the wildfires that we have seen in California. They don't tend to be started by campers and hikers. They tend to be started by lightning strikes by PG and E. Sometimes by chains dragon on the highway from vehicles but usually not campfires. That being said they want to be extremely cautious with, They roll out this trail and make sure that they do it correctly and not quickly. That was something we heard over and over again during the meeting, which I should also say was attended by 2700 people. So many of you listeners actually could very well have been at that meeting

WHEELER:

2700 people. That's a ton of people for a zoom public town hall about the Great Redwood Trail I that just shows the excitement that people have all up and down from marin County all the way to up here in Humboldt county people want to want to see this land. They want to get out on the Great Redwood Trail. I'm super excited to like get into bike camping or whatever it's called, Eco News. We are talking about the Great Redwood Trail and groundwater.

HAMANN:

I personally would love it if there were some river access points and campsites and if there was a way that I could both hike and kayak along along that avenue, I think that would just be so awesome. There's so many opportunities that are going to be available for all the little communities along there. And so folks, if you want to be a part of the master planning process, there are surveys that you can participate in. You can sign up for email alerts for a opportunities to attend meetings and you can always get in touch with the board members of the Great Redwood Trail agency or the staff. The place to go is Great Redwood Trail plan dot org. I'll say that again. Great Redwood Trail plan dot org. That's where you can learn about this master planning process and what it's going to involve for for us here at friends of the Eel River, We're really going to be focused on one facilitating the Humboldt county chapter of Great Redwood Trail Friends were really excited about all the enthusiasm up here, working with trail advocates, transportation advocates, cycling and horseback riding folks and, and of course the tribes. So there's a lot of, a lot of enthusiasm here that we're really excited about working with, but we're also going to be really focused on making sure that trail development goes alongside with cleanup of all the railroad debris that's in the river and on the banks of the river and on the landscape and and of course the toxic hot spots, we really want to prioritize cleaning those up. Not all of them are the fault of the railroad. There are, there are old mill sites that we really should be testing the soil and the drainage of and and this is just a wonderful opportunity to get that kind of work done.

WHEELER:

Yeah, this is kind of once in a lifetime, right, we're gonna go and get in and do construction in this area and when we're going in and doing construction, we should, we should clean up as we go.

HAMANN:

Exactly yeah.

WHEELER:

Alright, well that all sounds great about the Great Redwood Trail and now let's talk about groundwater. So as I understand it, Friends, the ill river has a new lawsuit concerning groundwater. What's, what's going on?

HAMANN:

Yeah, well, I'll start off by saying that this week, Friends of the Eel River filed a lawsuit asserting that humboldt County has unfortunately failed in their duty to protect the public trust as it applies to groundwater management. So I can see the next question in your mind tom what is the public trust

WHEELER:

Alicia, what is the public trust?

HAMANN:

Well the public trust doctrine establishes that the waters and the wildlife of the state belong to the people and that the state in this case being the Humboldt county supervisors act as trustees to manage the resources for the people. Um so the Eel River, it provides habitat for fish and wildlife which are protected under the public trust doctrine. But there's other other values that are included as part of the public trust, recreation values and cultural uses and all of those are depleted when we don't effectively manage the use of a resource. So in this case, Humboldt county doesn't have a groundwater management plan that provides them with any kind of mechanism to say curtail use when when conditions require and so they are effectively failing in their duty to protect those public trust values. So the

WHEELER:

public trust, I'll go on a little law nerd rant. It is some of our oldest law, like very literally it has been passed down through different legal systems to America, it is like foundational to our, our system of law. It's the idea that like some things just can't be owned shouldn't be owned by individuals that they're owned by the collective and they should be managed in trust for for all people. It's really cool as like a socialist environmentalist like this is like my ideal kind of law and it's old as I said, it goes all the way back to like the code of Justinian right? Like it, it is ancient law that was adopted in England, we got our legal system from England, it came to the Americas and it's in California California has a very robust system for the protection of our public trust resources. As Alicia said, it's things like wildlife access to rivers, for recreation and for fishing and for transport, it protects things that are vital to us as Californians and so protecting the public trust resource is really, really important, but unfortunately it often falls to organizations like friends of the ill river to go and do the work even though it should be the government doing this work, in my view. So, so Alicia, you're protecting the public trust resource that we have in groundwater. So is this like an absurd hypothetical that I'm about to create, let's say I am a farmer, I'm on the banks of the Eel River, something you care a lot about and I just like sinking a well, I can pump from that well and that well could be hydra logically connected to the ground water adjacent to the river and I can deplete water from the river that is something that should be regulated under the groundwater management plan and that's some sort of a violation of the public trust right?

HAMANN:

That's right, yeah, so well and where the violation of the public trust comes in is really in the, in the lack of any kind of management system that allows the county to take action when the conditions are require. And the and the reason that I keep using that phrase that that it's wind conditions require is that the eel is a system that has an incredible range of flows in its in its watershed. Right in the wintertime, we we see a torrent of river some of water, it's it's an incredible how much water we can produce. But in the summer and particular, Clearly in very dry summers, we have seen that the river can actually go completely dry, which is something we saw happen for the very first time in 2014 and we saw again in 2021. So it's something that we anticipate, it's going to be happening more and more frequently as our climate is changing, big news flash people and and so there are times when the amount of water that's being taken from the surface water through groundwater withdrawals is significant enough to cause some pretty severe impacts on the flow in the main stem.

WHEELER:

And I feel, I feel like the conversation will automatically go to cannabis as as it should in part because we have permitted a bunch of cannabis operations in the county and we have restricted the ability to just kind of stick more straws into our rivers. But what we haven't done is we haven't effectively regulated groundwater. And so we are continuing to have impacts from, from too many people sucking out too much water and impacting their neighbors impacting these seeps and springs that neighbors are relying upon impacting groundwater levels that neighbors are relying upon and also impacting things like the ill river.

HAMANN:

Yeah. And the 11 thing that we hear from from folks particularly from irrigators in the lower river is that while the river goes dry, because of all those folks upstream who are taking too much water. And there is some truth to that every, every user in the watershed affects the watershed, right, particularly if you're, if you're a downstream, you you're looking upstream wondering what all those people are doing with all the water up there. But in this case there's some really interesting data and I'm not gonna get too into the data on the radio here because it starts to get a little bit wonky and complicated, but essentially we have flow gauges throughout the watershed and there's a flow gauge at Scotia that that will show a reasonable amount of flow. And then you get down to just above fern bridge and suddenly there's no water. So we know that there, there's something happening right there in that reach, in that groundwater basin reach in between that Scotia gauge and where the title influence starts, starts to affect the waters right around fern bridge. And we have another piece of this that's like a hot scoop that loco is gonna drop

WHEELER:

what's gonna happen next. So you filed this lawsuit, What are you hoping to accomplish? Yeah,

HAMANN:

well, and I do want to say one more thing tom, you mentioned that when you were talking about the public trust doctrine, how there are things that shouldn't be owned right? The air, the water, the wildlife, the way that many landowners think of groundwater is, in my opinion, pretty unusual. People seem to think that it's part of their private property, kind of along the lines of like when you buy property, you may be also by the mineral rights underneath your property. People believe that they own the groundwater that flows beneath their property. And, and to my mind that that is ludicrous. Like do you own the air that flows across that blows across your property? No, of course not. So why should you own the water that flows beneath your property? And that's really, I think what is at the heart of California's attempts to start managing groundwater is that no one should own that groundwater because it's all connected? We've all learned about the water cycle, right, It's all connected.

WHEELER:

So this sounds like it's gonna be an important lawsuit. What are you hoping to accomplish as a result of this lawsuit?

HAMANN:

Well, ultimately, we want to see the county develop an ordinance that gives them the authority to regulate groundwater use when conditions require. And we believe that should be a very public process. We at friends of the ill river are not the ultimate experts. I'm not a hydrologist, I'm not a geo morphology gist. I don't know why we need to really bring in some big, heavy hitting experts here to determine what the appropriate, what, what the boundaries of such an ordinance would be, what kinds of circumstances do necessitate a curtailment in groundwater pumping and yeah, so we just want to see the county develop such a mechanism for themselves. And in the meantime, our lawsuit also seeks to require county to stop issuing new permits for wells or expansion of wells. And, and we also want an acknowledgement that the county has indeed failed in their duty to uphold the public trust. So it's, it's pretty simple and we are really hopeful that this litigation will, will be seen as a tool by the county to accomplish something that they really should have been doing from the beginning, Folks who have been paying attention to the rollout of the Sustainable groundwater management act might remember that when humboldt County's groundwater basin was first designated as a medium priority basin and the county was told you need to do something about this, They appealed that they tried to deny that that what the Department of Water Resources was saying and they did everything they could to avoid complying with sigma. So now we're in a place where we're just, we're just trying to get the county to do what they really should have been doing all along. One thing

WHEELER:

that these lawsuits often do is that you will have folks within a government that want to do the right thing, but that they're prevented because of the politics because this is going to be impactful to some politicians constituency. And I, I often will hear that when epic files lawsuit, when some other group files a lawsuit that the staff really appreciated. And I imagine that this is a situation that will be similar where folks know that this is a thing that needs to be done. But there have been too many hurdles. There have been too many obstacles to get this released and to get working on it. So lawsuits like this often just kind of aid staff aid people to do the thing that they want to do in the first place. But that politics get in the way. So I, I imagine that this is gonna be a similar situation. So, so thank you to the friends of the Eel River.

HAMANN:

Yeah. And, and thank you for outlining it like that. Tom that's, that is exactly our hope. We, we see this litigation as a tool that can act as a catalyst and we hope that we're not hurting any feelings.

WHEELER:

Yeah. But if we

HAMANN:

are, you know what, I just have to say sorry about that because we're here for the fish.

WHEELER:

Yeah, absolutely. Right. Those are your constituents. Exactly. Yeah. And they don't vote. So they gotta have, they got to have power hitters like you guys. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. So if folks want to track what's going on in that lawsuit, where should, where should we tell people to learn more about friends of the river

HAMANN:

Eel River dot org. But of course, if you're a social media user, you can find us on instagram, you can find us on facebook. You can occasionally find us on twitter when we're really feeling active. And all of that is at Friends Eel River. Very cool.

WHEELER:

Alright, well congratulations on the new lawsuit. And also congratulations on the redwood trail. What a super time. I feel like there's not been enough positive news lately and so like that. We're getting this really cool long distance trail for our community. I think that that's, that's fantastic. And I really appreciate that the friends of the Eel River did the groundwork to make this possible. So thank you to the friends.

HAMANN:

Thanks Tom and I congratulations to us all the Great Redwood Trail when it's come, it's going to be the longest rail trail in the nation. And I just, I just can't emphasize enough what an awesome opportunity it is to do a wide spectrum of things that we, we've covered already.

WHEELER:

Heck, yeah. Alright. Thanks Alicia.

HAMANN:

Thanks Tom.

WHEELER:

All right.

HAMANN:

Good one by,

WHEELER:

well, this has been another issue of the eco news report join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.