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An Alto Tunnel Primer
The following letter has been submitted to the Board of the Transportation Authority of Marin, regarding the misguided discussions about "re-opening" the Alto Tunnel.
Dear Members of the TAM Board,
I am writing in my capacity as President of the Scott Valley Homeowners Association, some 195 households strong, which has consistently opposed the reconstruction of the Alto Tunnel for 3 decades, having polled on the subject and found the great majority of our constituents not in favor - 87% at the last poll.
The term “re-opening”, when used in conjunction with this proposed project, is a misnomer, given its massive scale.
I’ve been writing about the Tunnel since 1994, for the Mill Valley Herald, the IJ, etc., and have appeared before earlier iterations of the Marin County Board of Supervisors and the Mill Valley City Council on the issue. I have also provided a lot of information to County authorities who have, inadvertently, I’d like to believe, from time to time passed along misinformation (more on that later) to the public or downplayed the realities of this proposal.
Attached please find two documents; Mill Valley’s Resolution 00-36, signed by then-Mayor Dennis Fisco, which represents the City of Mill Valley’s unchanged position on the matter, and a pamphlet I wrote in 2003, “An Alto Tunnel Primer,” describing the history of the Tunnel and the many engineering studies as of its then date. Please note the list of 11 issues that the City asked to be thoroughly investigated; to date, only #3 has been fully completed, and #9 has been partially completed.
Tunnel advocates fail to adequately consider, every time they attempt to bring this project to public attention, the following facts:
The Northwestern Pacific RR and its successor, the Southern Pacific RR, stopped running trains before the neighborhoods on both sides of the access routes to the Tunnel were built up and populated. In fact, I have a copy of a letter the SP RR submitted declaring the Tunnel abandoned, an important fact with regard to several easements required to use the Tunnel, which were effectively relinquished with that abandonment.
Approximately 1/3 of the Tunnel’s length is filled in with either concrete or pea (small) gravel, and the center portion has caved in, according to the County’s engineers and its chief consultant on this matter, Jacobs Engineering. I spoke with the lead engineer from Jacobs and he confirmed my suspicion that reconstructing the Tunnel is as massive a project as constructing a new bore, and would require roadheaders to bore it out.
Roadheaders are massive pieces of equipment big enough to support a boring head either 16 feet wide (the actual width of the Tunnel), or 12 feet wide-plus, the latter being the size of the smaller bore used in the 2010 County study to determine the estimated cost to create a new tunnel within the existing Tunnel.
The 2010 study proposed a 12’ wide new tunnel within the existing Tunnel because it was the only way they could get the cost, then estimated at approximately $60 million including estimates of all ancillary costs (improvement of access, acquisition of rights of way, etc.) to be under $100 million in 2010 dollars, according to Jacobs. Since the 2010 estimate, which was done in 2009 at the height of the recession, but published in 2010, construction costs including concrete, steel, lumber, labor, etc. have skyrocketed, as has the value of the land necessary to perfect access rights to the Tunnel itself.
I can’t imagine why anyone would want to ride or walk in a 12’ wide tunnel, which leaves only 3 feet of width for bikes and 3 feet for pedestrians, strollers etc. in each direction. The tunnel rises in the middle (it’s not flat, despite what advocates say) and bends in the middle, so no natural light reaches either side once one enters. Given all that, why are we not focusing on creating cheaper, healthier, outside alternatives which require no policing, no maintenance, no lighting, no closure to prevent homeless encampments, and which do not have strong neighborhood opposition?
Rights of way: This is a big one, and one the County’s own real estate department consistently gets wrong. Early on in this saga, the County’s own real estate experts stated to the Board of Supervisors, in writing, that the County possessed all the rights of way necessary to access the Tunnel (the middle is still owned by the railroad unless it has been acquired since the 2010 study), until I proved to them that there were several mistakes in that statement.
I have been in the commercial real estate business since 1978, have run an investment and management firm since 1984; I pulled all the relevant deeds, read them carefully, and prepared an analysis with the assistance of the railroad right of way expert of a local title firm. I made all that work available to the County’s real estate department, and finally, many years after I first pointed out these errors, the department publicly acknowledged them.
No agency, County or otherwise, has any right whatever to access the southern entrance of the Tunnel, over which sits a house worth at least $3-4 million. That property on Underhill Rd was granted to the railroad’s own Chairman of Real Estate, Mike Casey, in the early 80’s after the railroad bought and rebuilt it following the ’82 collapse of the southern portal.
Mike was smart enough to get both a Grant Deed and a Quitclaim Deed, which granted him ALL rights, known or unknown, which the railroad had to the property. It’s a true blocking parcel, and one which the County will have to take or purchase in order to perfect access. There is no way that any construction could occur, and certainly no reasonable way to insure such a massive project, with the family in residence.
There is a similar issue at the northern portal, not a blocking parcel, but a construction/insurance/occupancy issue too complex to go into here; I am available to meet with the board to explain it.
There are 6 parcels on the Corte Madera side with easements the County needs to purchase to perfect access, as the easements were expunged by the railroad’s letter of abandonment. County analysts grossly underestimated the cost of acquiring those rights, and of the right to enter the Underhill property, in the 2010 study. The estimate was way too low then, and is even more so today. There would certainly be costly litigation in retaliation for any attempted taking, even if the cities of Corte Madera and Mill Valley managed to not become involved, and I believe the title companies which issued title to those 6 parcels would be drawn in as well, and possibly required to bear the cost of fighting any attempt on the County’s part to take them.
Folks in the Chapman neighborhood of Corte Madera have in the past, and certainly would again, also be inclined to rise up against any attempt to reconstruct the Tunnel, as their homes would be directly impacted by the staging and construction as well.
There are viable, open air alternatives to the Tunnel which have broad neighborhood support, as opposed to the proposal to reconstruct the Tunnel, which turns into an acrimonious pitched battle every time a new generation of less-than-fully-informed advocates raises the battle cry. I worked with the Mill Valley DPW and then-Mayor Moulton Peters to create a bike lane on the Mill Valley side of Camino Alto Avenue from East Blithedale Avenue to the summit, which benefits bikers and autos as well by creating at least some separation between them, and would be happy to rally neighborhood support for the sensible, relatively inexpensive alternatives to the Tunnel that already exist, but simply need to be improved.
As stated earlier, use of the term “re-open” with regard to the Tunnel is grossly misleading. Words matter, and I have asked repeatedly that all parties use the term “re-construction”, which itself is still a euphemism, given the magnitude of the proposal, yet I still see the term “re-open” in common use.
As President of the local HOA adjacent to the Tunnel route, neither I nor the keeper of our association’s website were given any notice of this meeting on the 22nd until I was personally informed 2 days ago by Mr. Carmel. I imagine that the Chapman Meadows folks in Corte Madera were similarly excluded. I’m going to guess that the Marin County Bicycle Coalition probably was notified, so if you’re wondering why more neighbors aren’t showing up for the meeting, you might look to your noticing.
With proper noticing, previous meetings following the 2010 study were well attended by homeowners from both affected neighborhoods. In the future please send me any notices regarding the Tunnel in a timely manner, and I will see that the Corte Madera folks and my constituents are notified. I will supply you with the appropriate email addresses of other neighborhood representatives in both Corte Madera and Mill Valley.
As you might imagine, there is a lot more to know about the Tunnel, but this presentation is enough to give the Tam Board some things to chew on. As stated, I’m willing to meet with any or all of you, or anyone who wants to discuss this issue rationally.