Month: September 2024

Public Comment Period Extended to October 9 for Albion River Bridge DEIR/DEIS

jimheid Albion Bridge Stewards, Albion River Bridge, Caltrans , ,

Well, well.

At 5:59 pm yesterday, we received an email from Caltrans:

The comment period for the Albion River Bridge Draft Environmental Impact Report/Environmental Impact Statement (EIR/EIS) and Draft Section 4(f) Evaluation will be extended for another 30 days, ending on October 9, 2024. A virtual public meeting will be scheduled, and details will be released soon.

Our group had already submitted our public comments—54 pages worth—and we know that roughly 200 additional people from around the world (literally!) submitted comments through our comment template system. (If you’re in that group, thank you.)

Now we have another month.

Why the extension?

So why did Caltrans give the public another month to finish its homework?

Only Caltrans knows for sure, but we do know that some people were not properly noticed—that is, notified about the draft environmental impact statement/report and thus given an opportunity to comment. When a person or organization has requested to be noticed and they are not, there’s the potential for legal liability. By extending the deadline, Caltrans may have side-stepped this potential issue.

Why a virtual public meeting?

In teasing at another public meeting—this one via Zoom—Caltrans may again be addressing potential legal issues stemming from its incomplete noticing.

Will the meeting be a repeat of the in-person event held at Whitesboro Grange last month? A rehash of Caltrans’ incomplete and destructive plans, with a few minutes for Q&A? Or will there be a fresh set of doom-and-gloom scenarios about the beautiful, historic—and completely safe—Albion River Bridge?

We’ll see.

What’s next? Continue the fight

Now that we have another month, we have more time to gather signatures in our petition drive and to encourage members of the public to submit comment letters—optionally using our easy templates.

We have an extra month to continue driving home the point that Caltrans’ proposed plans are bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and bad for history. Rest assured, we plan to take advantage of it.

Caltrans’ bridge inspection report contains “severe problems”—world-class structural engineer

jimheid Albion River Bridge, Caltrans ,

Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, Ph.D., P.E. is a professor emeritus from UC Berkeley and a world-renowned expert on structural engineering.

He’s research and written extensively about the historic Albion River Bridge, and we asked him if he would be willing to review the most recent bridge inspection report for the bridge.

He responded with a detailed analysis. Summary: the bridge is in much better condition than Caltrans claims. He writes, in part:

There are severe problems in the 2023 Inspection Report and many violations of the FHWA National Bridge Inspection Standards (NBIS) requirements, making the 2023 Inspection Report almost invalid. Many statements and notes in this inspection report that declare the bridge’s current condition as “Poor” are not factual and contradict the data collected by the Caltrans inspectors and reported in the later pages of the 2023 Inspection Report.

The entire letter appears below. Read it or better yet, act today—September 9—and write one or more comment letters using our easy templates.

Dr. Astaneh Letter to Albion Bridge Stewards-September 9-2024Download