SMART committee selects Guerneville Road site for train station

After looking at the pros and cons of where to put a northern Santa Rosa commuter rail station, North Bay transit officials Wednesday selected a site near Codding Town Mall it believes has the potential to revitalize the area.

"As you walk around the site, you think that this is the perfect site for a station," said Barbara Pahre of Napa, who chairs the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit real estate committee.

The station site on Guerneville Road is next to the railroad tracks and is land that now has a Kelly-Moore Paint Co. store and Sonoma Kitchen & Bath store on it. A third parcel, now vacant, would also be acquired.

The site would be easy to access by pedestrians, motorists, bicyclists and bus transit passengers and is highly visible, which will work to advertise itself on a daily basis, said SMART planning manager John Nemeth.

In making the selection, however, the committee rejected a site on Jennings Avenue that has been the preferred station site since it was recommended in 1997 by Berkeley urban designer Peter Calthorpe, an icon in the transit-oriented development world.

"The idea is 13 years old, things have changed," said Debora Fudge, a Windsor councilwoman and SMART chair. "Even Calthorpe would approve of this site."

It is the final site to be selected for the 14 stations on the line, which runs 70 miles from Cloverdale to Larkspur and is scheduled to open in 2014.

The previous site, 9.8 acres, is former Northern Pacific Railroad right-of-way which is adjacent to a low-income housing project, has space for 630 parking spaces and is closer to Santa Rosa Junior College if the city follows through on plans for a pedestrian overcrossing of Highway 101.

However, a century of railroad use has heavily polluted the soil and groundwater and could cause problems getting the site cleaned up by the present owner, Union Pacific, to the satisfaction of the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board.

The Guerneville Road site was proposed to SMART as an alternative several months ago by Codding Enterprises, owner of the mall nearby that also paid $20,000 to study the site, and by a group of Sonoma County urban designers and architects that held a design competition.

Nemeth said the preliminary estimate to buy and develop the sites is similar, $6.5 million for Jennings Avenue and $6.8 million for the Guerneville Road site.

The Guerneville site also has a higher density of residential and business development around it than the Jennings site, Nemeth said.

However, it is also smaller, allowing about 350 parking spaces, and it is farther from the junior college, although both stations are still a mile or more away.

Regardless of which site is chosen, students going to the junior college will likely want a bus shuttle or will bicycle rather than walk that distance, said SMART committee member Madeline Kellner of Novato.

Geof Syphers, Codding Enterprises sustainability officer, said it would obviously be a boost for the mall, but he sees it a boon to the entire Guerneville Road corridor.

"People will be able to live, work and shop all in one area," Syphers said.

The SMART committee instructed its staff to proceed with an environmental assessment, property appraisals and site preparation costs.

Barring any surprises, the site will be recommended to the full SMART board at its June 16 meeting.

The city of Santa Rosa has a $400,000 grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission for a $500,000 project to plan the development around the station.