Measure D: Personal Attacks on Guy Preston
Guy Preston is helping vet an interim plan and an ultimate plan. Photo credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz
This article is was written by Mark Conley of Lookout Santa Cruz about the middle road Guy Preston must take on Measure D. The article reveals the controversy surrounding Measure D, the personal attacks, the misunderstanding of the RTC’s role, and railbanking. To read the entire article, go to the link below.
Guy Preston steps over the railroad tracks a stone’s throw from his home in Seabright and points up toward the redwood fence sitting atop a dirt embankment that climbs some 30 feet above him. Then he lets his civil-engineer mind do its mathematical gymnastics.
“So I’m going to put a 12-foot trail in here, where’s it going to go?” he says. “It’s really tight in here, so it’s going to be against a retaining wall that will need to be built and behind that fence which has encroached on our right of way. That building there will get clipped and then there are more buildings up ahead.”
Preston, executive director of the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission, is the man trying to get his arms around the complicated plan that will guide the future of the Santa Cruz Branch Rail Line corridor — and the county’s public transportation issues as a whole.
He is also, quite perplexedly, the man caught in the middle of the most contentious political battle anyone can remember in this small county. The grizzled Bay Area public transportation veteran has long witnessed the squabbling over the state’s on-again, off-again high-speed rail project and the debates that ensued with the plans for rail transit in Marin and Sonoma counties in the early 2000s.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” says Preston, who took the job in 2018, coming from the California High-Speed Rail Authority, with 32 years in the transportation world.
As both sides of the Measure D issue have dug in deep on the politics, it is Preston’s job to dig in deeper on those rail corridor geometry equations, cost evaluations, legal precedents and any other empirical evidence he can find. That work might ideally be the fact-first information and analysis to guide decisions on tangled public policy questions.
Lookout: Have you taken some heat, especially from those who question why you’d even consider the concept of railbanking?
Guy Preston: There have been personal attacks on me online, some of which were deleted because they were really awful, and not true, and could have gotten people in legal trouble for some of the things they alleged. I think they question what I’m doing. But my job isn’t to make the decision. My job is to deliver transportation projects and provide as many options as possible for the decision-makers and not box ourselves in.