Feb 2012

Yet Another HSR DEIR

TRANSDEF, the Planning and Conservation League, the California Rail Foundation and the Community Coalition on High-Speed Rail filed comments on the Partially Revised Draft EIR today. This is the HSR Authority’s third attempt to come up with a legally defensible EIR for the Bay Area to Central Valley portion of the Statewide HSR project. TRANSDEF and its allies, which include the cities of Atherton, Menlo Park, and Palo Alto, successfully challenged the previous EIRs.

These comments propose an entirely new Altamont route, based on the
Altamont Corridor Rail Project Preliminary Alternatives Analysis Report. (See an earlier Newsletter for an overview of this exciting project.) By avoiding the environmental impacts identified in earlier DEIRs, this alternative poses a challenge to the Authority’s stubborn insistence on the Pacheco route: An unbiased evaluation would determine the new Altamont alternative to be environmentally superior to Pacheco.

The comment letters and attachments are posted at the bottom of the
Altamont page.