A less-than-capacity crowd almost filled the Healdsburg High School cafeteria on Thursday last, to hear a SMART board-mandated community presentation on what is increasingly apparent as SMART’s preferred Healdsburg location, on Vine Street.
Their usual feast table of mini-sans, pinwheels, cookies, fruit and cakes offered refreshment if not enticement to attend. When it came to the presentation itself, the highest production values were left behind: the slide show was slightly out of focus (to those of us in the front row) or too small (to those farther back). General Manager Eddy Cumins spoke a bit too casually into the microphone, as if this was his first public pitch of a project. Which it was not.
If he spent more time on the benefits of the Vine Street station, that was his responsibility. After all, in September the board of the Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transport agency asked him to make this presentation. And in fairness, Cumins sometimes looked like he’d rather not be there.
Following the brief presentation, there was no opportunity for direct questions to Cumins from the 100-plus in the room. But many who had come to the high school that night wanted to voice their opinions, and many wished to press their preference for the Hudson Street Depot location.
Plans May Change
It had been the clear preference of the City Council in February 2024 (though no vote was taken), and the city has since moved forward by creating a 15-member Station Area Community Advisory Committee to evaluate how to plan ahead for SMART’s arrival at the Hudson Street location.
That committee is on hold, “pending SMART’s decision on the station location in December,” said City Planning Director Scott Duiven. “The location of the station is central to the planning effort in terms of land use discussions, station area access and circulation, etc. We anticipate resuming the planning process in January,” he continued.
The day prior to the Oct. 22 community meeting, Duiven and City Manager Jeff Kay spoke to the SMART board at its monthly meeting in Penngrove about Healdsburg’s plans for the southern depot and its neighborhoods.
“Essentially they wanted city representation to talk about the planning efforts around the two stations,” Kay said at the high school on Thursday. “Scott very quickly went back 30 years to try to put it in context … . We talked about the different CHAP [Central Healdsburg Area Plan], and then the current station area plan.”
He summarized, “We had a long conversation. There were a lot of questions. They were engaged.”
The Downtown Option
Kay acknowledged that a downtown station had been discussed in previous years, but said the impracticalities outweighed the advantages. “When it came back around in 2022, it was pretty quickly determined that it was in fact not practical, for a few reasons,” he said. “You could see it: There’s not that much room there. And given that they intend to double track, it was just never going to happen.”
Regarding the sudden reappearance now of the Vine Street option, Kay said, “It’s not totally out of the blue, but there’s been no civic planning or anything around that.”
Some recall that it was former City Council member Joe Naujokas who suggested a Vine Street station when the fate of the former Cerri Building (now the Pavilion) was being considered. At the time he wondered if the Foley Family might be tapped to start building a station.
“I asked the question, ‘Is it possible?’” he said.“Now that it has SMART funding, we’re going to get it [a station] regardless.”
Free Money
Now he’s firmly on the side of a Hudson Street station. “And here’s why,” he added, “and this is a point that I’m really going to hammer home, something that’s really not well known:
“There’s a federal loan program, a railroad rehabilitation infrastructure fund. And it’s essentially free money …” He went on to describe the generous terms of Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement financing, buried in the 1998 Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century.
“Billions of dollars are allocated to this program,” Naujokas said. “But it’s got to be within the half-mile walkability of the station. So we could use that money, that free money to put services across the [river], which there are none now.” He was referring to the southern end of Healdsburg, across the Russian River. “What’s half a mile from Hudson Street? The Syar property falls within that.”
The tantalizing prospect of essentially unlimited funding to develop (and remediate) the former gravel mine makes a Hudson Street station sound like more than just a throwback to an earlier, romantic era of train travel, and more like an open opportunity to explode Healdsburg’s growth southward.
“We could use that free money to build all kinds of housing,” Naujokas said, again. “All that open property that they’ve acknowledged is available, fair game.”
High Density or Bust
Ariel Kelley, who finds herself in the delicate position of being not only on the Healdsburg City Council but a board member of SMART, also recognizes the opportunity, but doesn’t think it’s necessarily a good thing.
“The TOC (Transit Oriented Community) standard basically says if you have a regional rail line, you have to build high density,” she said, as the Thursday meeting neared an end. “It can be residential; it can be mixed-use. But that is the expectation within this [half-mile] radius around the station. They showed those plans and they are vast, and for me it’s a little bit alarming.”
Kelley spoke frankly. “I think that people in the Ward Street neighborhood and the Tucker Street and the Hayden area, I don’t think they believe that things are going to change as dramatically as they will,” she said. “I don’t think people really know the TOC policy and how drastic it is transforming other communities.
“And it gives me pause,” she continued. “Because I don’t think the community has been informed about what that level of intensity of development is. And it is not going to be a nostalgic transition back to yesteryear. It is going to be a dramatic pop forward. And if that’s what the community wants, great.”
Because the Vine Street area available for TOC high-density development is far less than the historic depot area, she implied, it’s possible that a downtown location would be less impactful than the historic one.
As she said: “I get emails every single day from those who want the station downtown. I’m happy to say that I do in fact represent a viewpoint that is reflective of a portion of our population.”
Follow the SMART train planning at sonomamarintrain.org/healdsburgextension.
