No official update for months: Goodhue Co. board member asks what's up with HSR

NOTE: See the update on this entry, posted below the embedded draft letter. We have also modified the headline for the sake of accuracy.

NOTE 2 (December 21, 2015) See the update on this entry, posted below the embedded draft letter and first update. The headline was tweaked again for the sake of accuracy.

Many residents of the "fly-over" land over which a high speed rail passenger line between the Twin Cities and Rochester have complained about the lack of transparency--no, downright being in the dark--when it comes to the project, whether said project would be publicly or privately financed.

Turns out they're not alone, as an agenda item for the December 15, 2015 Goodhue County Board meeting attests.

Covering the board meeting in a December 15, 2015 article, Nielsen property, Rt. 23 and zip rail of note at the County Board meeting, Gunnar Olson reports for the Kenyon Leader:

. . .To conclude the meeting, Rechtzigel brought up a letter he penned asking on behalf of his citizens for an update on the zip rail project.

“People are asking about where zip rail is at. People have been reading about it, but the official word is a little sketchy.”

Not having received word in months, the county board was in full agreement. Rechtzigel noted that in talks with the Dodge County administrator, he found that their county board invites the Olmsted County Regional Rail Authority (OCRRA) to address concerned citizens monthly.

The Goodhue board voted unanimously to extend a similar invitation to the OCRRA, with hopes they will have a representative present in the January or February meetings.

Here's a draft of the letter:

Goodhue County letter to Olmsted County Rail Authority about ZipRail

UPDATE 12/20/2015: Chuck Michael, the consulting engineer for the Olmsted County Rail Authority, disputes the characterization in first sentence of the draft of the letter embedded above that "It has been many months since we have received any official status report on the proposed Zip Rail project." Bold face emphasis added.

He contacted Bluestem Prairie to share some emails and math:

From: Anderson, Brad [mailto:brad.anderson@co.goodhue.mn.us]
Sent: Monday, November 16, 2015 9:29 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: TAC meetings

Chuck
Is there any future TAC meetings scheduled before the end of the year?
December schedules fill up fast and future meetings need to get on
participants schedules well ahead of time. Thanks in advance for your
prompt response.
Brad

From: Chuck Michael [mailto:Chuck.Michael@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, November 16, 2015 4:49 PM
To: 'Anderson, Brad'
Subject: RE: TAC meetings

Brad,

We do not currently have a TAC meeting scheduled before the end of the year
yet. We are currently completing the Alternatives Analysis Report, a major
document that needs to be completed before further work continues on the
EIS. We will be distributing the final Alternatives Analysis Report to the
TAC as soon as it is completed, hopefully by late November/early December.

Regards,

Chuck

Michael prefaced the forwarded emails with this headnote:

An update on Zip Rail progress was provided to Goodhue County Commissioner Brad Anderson, the designated Goodhue County project representative on the TAC, on November 16, 2015. Commissioner Rechtzigel's letter is dated December 9, 2015 - 23 days (0.77 months) later.

Apparently, Michael believes the email exchange is an "official status report on the proposed Zip Rail project." Readers can use their own judgement about that claim. According to the Ziprail information Center's, the last Technical Advisory Committee meeting was on June 25, 2015. Minutes of the meeting are online here.

As we noted in an earlier post, in an email to Olmsted County employee and three county board members, Michael claimed that only one member of the grassroots organization Citizens Concerned About Rail Line (CCARL) attended the CAC and TAC meetings; the minutes show instead that a total of five individuals who are members or who represented the group were at one or both of the meetings.

Perhaps there's simply a failure to communicate. [end update]

UPDATE 2, 12/20/2015: In his alacrity to supply Bluestem Prairie in with official Ziprail updates last night, Michael overlooked additional sources of information about the project. He kindly sent the documents this morning, along with this note:

You seem to have overlooked the meetings of the MnDOT Minnesota Intercity Passenger Rail Transportation Forum, of which Goodhue County is a member, that provide official updates on all current passenger rail projects including Zip Rail. The most recent meetings were held November 9, 2015 and December 7, 2015.

Readers can find the MnDOT Minnesota Intercity Passenger Rail Transportation Forum online. The meeting calendar is listed here. This is a separate group from the Technical Advisory Committee

The documents that Michael sent are not posted online, and so we post them below. Goodhue County's representative is Commissioner Brad Anderson (also a member of the ZipRail Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), which has not met since June.

Here is the Forum's membership list:

Intercity Passenger Rail Transportation Forum

Here is the November draft agenda:

Minnesota Intercity Passenger Rail Transportation Forum November 9, 2015 Agenda

Here are the draft minutes from the November Forum meeting:

Minnesota Intercity Passenger Rail Transportation ForumNovember 9 Draft Minutes

Here is the December draft agenda:

Minnesota Intercity Passenger Rail Transportation Forum December 7, 2015, Draft Agenda

We are attempting obtain a list of November and December 2015 Forum attendees. Answering an email query about the status of the Ziprail Alternatives Analysis Report mentioned in the minutes, Michael wrote:

The Alternatives Analysis Report is in final review at MnDOT. With the holidays upon us the schedule for release is probably the second week of January.

We thank Michael for all the additional information he has supplied to Bluestem Prairie.

[End December 21 Update]

Second Decembe 21 Update

While the Forum publishes a calendar of monthly meetings, the page notes that meetings are "canceled when there are insufficient topics to merit a meeting." Here's the meeting schedule and list of cancellations:

Date	Location / Time
January 2015	No meeting
Feb. 2, 2015	Teleconference
March 2, 2015	Canceled
April 20, 2015	Teleconference
May 4, 2015	State Office Building, Room 10, 10 a.m. to Noon
June 1, 2015	Canceled
June 8, 2015	Canceled
July 6, 2015	Rescheduled for July 13
Aug. 3, 2015	Rescheduled for September 14
Sep. 14, 2015	Canceled
Oct. 5, 2015	Canceled
Nov. 9, 2015	State Office Building, Room 10, 10 a.m. to Noon
Dec. 7, 2015	State Office Building, Room 10, 10 a.m. to Noon

It appears that of the eight meetings scheduled from June through December, five were canceled. [end update]

As we noted in Transition: will products of publicly-funded Ziprail development end up in private hands?, while the public ZipRail and the private North American High Speed Rail Group's "Velos" project are separate proposals, discussion of them by government officials and staff are often intertwined.

Image: An artist's vision of the public Ziprail project. The Velos line is projected to be elevated, while the Snowpiercer goes wherever the heck it wants to, tracks permitting.

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