December 13, 2007
Resource Concepts Inc. Reports to County Commission

Photo by Dave Maxwell Jeremy Drew, Resource Concepts Inc., speaking at County Commission meeting.

By Dave Maxwell

Jeremy Drew, of Resource Concepts, Inc., Carson City, gave a special projects team report to the Commissioners at the regular meeting December 3 about the impact, alternatives and mitigations regarding the Caliente Rail Corridor. The Corridor is part of the Department of Energy’s plan to build the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility.

There are two volumes in the final report by Recourse Concepts and include several informative maps and graphs. Volume One deals with the executive summary on methodology, routes and alternatives, public land grazing and also data gathered from personal interviews conducted by L&H and Robison-Sidler.

Volume Two, Drew said, deals in part with the allotment grazing analysis done by Resource Concepts.

Drew reported that the so-called Short Route, an alternative to the DOE’s proposed route, “Did reduce impacts and the cost of that was shifting the impact and the burden of that from one set of DOE permittees to another.” The Cottontail Pass route, another alternative, did not reduce impacts as much as had been thought, he reported.

He did say, “All rail alternative alignments would have serious impacts to public land grazing allotments, permittees and ranching operations,” even larger than what the DOEs own impact statements says.

He said that for many ranching operations, mitigation must occur to keep the operation afloat; but even that might not be enough to keep some operations from going out of business because of the construction camps and haul roads that will be erected during the building of the railroad. “It would be very difficult to maintain an economically feasible operation given the alignment within their grazing allotments.”

Drew added, “It’s not the 1,000 feet of railroad construction space in the allotments that’s going to be upset. You go through the middle of an allotment, you’re disturbing that whole lot.” He likened it to saying Amtrak was going to reestablish rail service to Caliente, but was only going to involve 1,000 feet. Everyone knows that even that much would affect the entire town. “There’s a lot more than these allotments entail that is going to be impacted (by the rail line),” he said.

Right of way fencing was another important factor Drew explained. At first, it was thought that construction would involve just a roadbed for the railroad and one side road. However, as is being proposed now, the DOE will have a raised rail bed and two access roads, which broadens the area of disturbance. Drew said it is best to “limit the area of disturbance in the environments down there because the plant vegetation in that environment is very hard to reestablish once they have been disturbed.”