California delaying high-speed rail EIS

California High-Speed Rail Authority representatives said the project's environmental impact report will be delayed until next year to help the agency deal with concerns from cities along the bullet train's proposed path, the Orange County Register reports.

Buena Park is one of
those cities, with dozens of condominiums, several businesses, and even the city’s Metrolink
station smack in the
high-speed rail’s proposed right-of-way, depending on which plan is consulted.

David M. Thomson, an
engineer with the consulting firm STV, said the rail authority has pushed back
publication of its draft environmental impact report to January to allow some
of those issues to be sorted out. The document originally was scheduled to be
finished in May. He made the announcement during this week’s Buena Park City
Council meeting.

State officials said
pushing back the environmental studies will not affect more than $2 billion in
federal stimulus funds that have been given to the project.

The authority is
proposing to build an 800-mile-long rail line that would transport passengers
from Anaheim to San Francisco in about three hours. The overall cost is
estimated at $42.6 billion and would be funded with private and public money,
including federal and state funds and bonds.

At the meeting, Buena
Park city officials expressed their support for a newly-revived proposal to run
a new bullet train along existing rails, which they hope will soften the
project’s blow locally. They also want sound walls and a new Metrolink station
considered as mitigation measures if a new high-speed rail service does run
through Buena Park on its way from Fullerton to Los Angeles. They officials
made the request with California High-Speed Rail representatives in the
audience.

The relationship between
the city and the authority hasn’t always been easy. Within the last several
months, the council was told Buena Park would lose some condominiums to the
high-speed rail, later learning that the city’s brand-new Metrolink station
would have to be sacrificed to save the condos.

Then earlier this month,
the authority agreed to revive a proposal to share existing tracks, which would
cut down on the need for right-of-way purchases, potentially saving hundreds of
homes if a high-speed rail line is built between Anaheim and Union Station in
downtown Los Angeles.

Buena Park Public Works
Director Jim Biery likes that idea.

"It has less rails,
so it has less impact," Biery said. "That’s something to get excited
about."

Up and down the state,
cities like Buena Park have had similar concerns about the high-speed rail
plans.

The city’s two-year-old
Metrolink station may or may not need to be destroyed to make way for the
bullet train, so city officials asked that a new one be built as mitigation –
and placed where the railroad tracks cross Dale Avenue, a location near the
current station. The Buena Park Metrolink station, popular with commuters,
opened in late 2007 at a cost of $11 million.

An earlier proposal would
have wiped out 40 condominiums built near the station to make way for the
high-speed rail. Even if their homes remain intact, the residents there want to
save the station because they bought condos near it, Mayor Art Brown said. If
the station were wiped out, Brown said, the residents worry the complex would
become "a run-down slum."

If a new station needs to
be built, the City Council wants it erected near Dale Avenue, close enough for
condominium residents to have easy access to the station to commute without
their cars.

"We really do listen
to what you’re telling us," Valerie Martinez, Southern California
communications director for the High Speed Rail Authority, told the council.