A disadvantaged Valley town will see millions in investment, with high-speed rail agreement
For years, residents in the small town of Fairmead in Madera County fretted about the prospect of their community being split by California’s planned high-speed rail route.
Now, a new agreement between community advocates and the California High-Speed Rail Authority calls for the state to commit millions of dollars toward investments in the unincorporated town to help make up for the future effects of the bullet-train line as it slices across the northern end of the community.
Representatives of Fairmead Community & Friends and the state rail agency last week signed off on the agreement that will ultimately provide for a new sewer connection to the nearby city of Chowchilla, an expanded and improved water service system, and a new community center.
Once construction of the rail route begins in the community, the agreement requires the rail authority to repair existing roads, build sidewalks and storm drainage, put in street landscaping and other improvements, said Michael Claiborne, a staff attorney with Leadership Counsel for Justice & Accountability, an advocacy group that collaborated with Fairmead residents in negotiations with the state, the city of Chowchilla and Madera County.
“There’s definitely a sense of accomplishment among the residents of Fairmead who we worked alongside and represented,” Claiborne told The Bee on Thursday. “They spent 10 years working with the rail authority to make sure that if it comes through Fairmead, they mitigate the damage that will be done to the community.”
Garth Fernandez, Central Valley regional director for the rail authority, acknowledged that for a major transportation project that is ultimately planned to extend 500 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles, there are going to be effects on cities and towns that cannot be avoided.
“We have to go through various communities, and we try to be sensitive to the issues they identify,” he said. “Our goal is to leave the communities we traverse in a condition that is equal to or better than when we started.”
Last fall, the rail authority’s board of directors certified an environmental review and made the final choice on a route for a Y-shaped junction that will join the agency’s planned north-south line between Fresno and Merced to an east-west route that will connect the San Joaquin Valley to Gilroy and San Jose.
The junction, called the Central Valley Wye, will take the bullet-train route from the Highway 99 corridor north of Chowchilla along Road 11, west of the city, where it will connect with an east-west line that runs along the north side of Highway 152. As it heads east, the route cuts across the north end of Fairmead and eventually flow south toward Madera and Fresno along the BNSF Railway line. The tracks will carry high-speed trains on a path that runs about a quarter-mile north of Fairmead Elementary School.
The option was chosen from a collection of more than a dozen possible configurations involving different roads and paths around and through Chowchilla that at one time was likened to a “spaghetti bowl” of lines on a map.
Fairmead sits along the east side of the Union Pacific Railroad freight tracks and Highway 99 southeast of Chowchilla.
Longtime Valley residents may remember it more as the site of the last of the old Mammoth Orange drive-in burger joints that used to dot the highway years ago than for the 1,100 or so residents who call the town home.
Beyond the highway is a humble community of about 350 homes, two churches and an elementary school – and not much else. There are no sidewalks along the streets, no sewer system, limited community water service, inadequate storm drainage, no community center and no parks.
That will eventually change under the agreement with the rail agency.
“Fairmead, as a historic community of color, has been impacted by years and years of disinvestment,” Claiborne said. “The things that you’d expect in a community just aren’t there. You don’t always think about a sewer system or water when you look at a community, but that affects the ability of a community to grow and thrive.”
In earlier years, many of Fairmead’s residents were Black; now, like many other towns in the Valley, the majority of the population is Latino. It’s also an economically disadvantaged community. There’s no grocery store and no gasoline station; residents have to either head northwest to Chowchilla or south to Madera for shopping, fuel, recreation and other needs.
What’s included in the deal?
The highlights of the agreement include:
- A contribution by the rail authority of up to $6,286,000 to Madera County for the design and construction of a new community center and a library, including a commercial kitchen and outdoor park space.
- A commitment of up to $7 million toward the cost of extending Chowchilla’s city wastewater treatment system into Fairmead, and potentially up to $1.5 million more to cover any cost escalation for the project. The deal also calls for the rail agency to subsidize operation and maintenance costs for the expansion of the system for 10 years at a cost of up to almost $666,000, which means Fairmead residents won’t have a sewer bill for that period.
- Providing a one-time payment of up to $250,000 payment to Madera County to pay for improvements to a county water system that already serves some homes in the community; the upgrades would allow the system to serve more homes now relying on private wells that are at risk of going dry.
- Road construction of two over- or underpasses for drivers to move from one part of the community to the other across the bullet-train tracks.
- A multi-use trail to maintain pedestrian and bicycle access between the northern and southern parts of Fairmead.
- Road repairs and new sidewalks for nearly six miles of streets in the community.
- Street landscaping improvements in the community, including along the high-speed rail corridor/
- Installing streetlights at a bus stop at Avenue 22 1/2.
“A lot of these things have been community priorities for a long time,” Claiborne said. “Achieving this much investment all at once is really hard to do. … This goes a long way to mitigate the impact that the rail will have.”
Barbara Nelson, president of the nonprofit Fairmead Community & Friends, grew up in Fairmead before marrying and moving to the Bay Area for career and family, and returned to the community with her husband after they retired to be near their parents in the town.
“When I moved back to Fairmead years ago, nothing had changed; it was still a sad little town,” Nelson said. “I wanted to make a difference so people’s lives could be better.”
Nelson said she and other residents never wanted the rail project to cut through their town. Her 97-year-old mother lives on property that’s in the path of the route and will eventually have to relocate.
“But if they do what they say they’re going to do, we’ll be satisfied,” she said of the rail authority’s commitments in the agreement. “We couldn’t stop that train, so we had to work with that train along with Madera County and Chowchilla, and we accomplished something good.”
“We can live with it,” she added. “We feel blessed.”
Fernandez said there are lots of details that needed to be worked out between the rail agency and the town. “We made a determination that we did impact the community, and worked with them for their input and what it would take to mitigate the impacts,” he said. “It even includes painting the water tower in the town to give a greater sense of belonging.”
“From the authority’s standpoint, this is an example of how the authority can partner with a community and ensure that the entire community will be lifted as a whole by the project,” he added.
When will things happen?
It’s going to take time for some of the anticipated work to come to fruition. Fernandez said that Madera County has already begun construction on a new well for the water system to serve Fairmead, and the authority’s $250,000 contribution will be made to the county once the final agreements are signed.
Also on its way will be the contributions for the community center. “I believe they’re going to start procurement of a consultant for the design in very short order,” Fernandez said.
Claiborne said county officials have indicated they already identified some potential sites for the center. He added that it’s expected to take about a year to design the facility and buy property before construction could begin.
The sewer extension from Chowchilla is likely to take a little longer. The city needs to apply for grants from the State Water Resources Control Board for the work — an application and review process that Fernandez and Claiborne said could take a year or more. Construction, once the grant is approved, may take another couple of years.
“We’re hoping to see a sewer project complete within the next three years,” Claiborne said. The $7 million commitment from the rail authority is intended to cover any shortfall from a state grant.
“We’re trying to time the sewer project so at the same time the (rail route) is built, the sewer is in place,” Fernandez said.
As for the rail construction itself, engineering design work will depend on legislative approval of the state budget, Fernandez said.
Once that reaches a substantial degree of progress, the agency will work on purchasing the land it needs for the railroad right of way that it needs. Together, design and property acquisition could take a couple of years, he said, followed by several years of construction.
Nelson said she also hopes that the long-overdue water and sewer infrastructure could eventually lead to the development of new affordable housing in the community, with a growing population potentially attracting a grocery store or service station to serve residents.
Claiborne, the advocacy attorney, said that the improvements would likely remain undone if the rail route weren’t coming through the community. More important, he added, was the determination of the residents to not be railroaded.
“None of these things would have happened if the residents hadn’t organized and were engaged in this process for so long,” he said.
This story was originally published May 30, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "A disadvantaged Valley town will see millions in investment, with high-speed rail agreement."
