FORT BRAGG, CA., 3/12/25 – Another long night in the Fort Bragg City Council chambers revealed ongoing public disagreement over whether to negotiate or litigate with the Mendocino Railway, aka the Skunk Train, over the future of the former Georgia-Pacific mill site on the Fort Bragg headlands.
The purpose of the special meeting on Monday, was to solicit comments from council members and the public on whether to continue trying to reach an agreement with the Skunk Train or to move forward with the city’s lawsuit against the railway.
The Skunk Train bought the former mill site from Georgia Pacific in 2021 and assumed the environmental clean-up obligations arising from decades of lumber mill operations. Fort Bragg sued the railway in August 2021, asking for a court order that any new development on the mill site must comply with local laws and regulations. The Skunk Train has argued that as a railway it is governed exclusively by federal law and that local requirements are pre-empted.
Both sides agreed to pause the lawsuit in early December 2024 to try to reach a settlement. The 90-day stay approved by the court expired on March 3, 2025.
During the stay both sides engaged in what they called a collaborative process and came up with an Illustrative Plan proposing various uses of the 300 acres that remain available for development. Monday’s council meeting followed a “visioning” workshop in late February attended by a capacity crowd and resulting in hours of public input about the proposed plan.
At the Monday meeting city staff presented a “Development Strategy Report” recommending that the city continue with the negotiations and extend the litigation stay for another six months. Per the decision tree outlined in the report, the next step would be the negotiation of a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding between the city and the Skunk Train. If and when an MOU is adopted, the city and the Skunk Train, along with tribal interests and various other constituencies and agencies, would then move on to negotiate a Master Development Agreement.
Both sides have tempered their public statements since the stay has been in effect. City Manager Isaac Whippy sought to assure the public that “we haven’t made any decisions behind closed doors” and there would be many “opportunities to build consensus before any final decisions are made.”
Mendocino Railway VP Chris Hart said that the discussions over the last three months have been “productive,” and pointed out that the Skunk Train has retracted its original proposed use of the site and now plans to use only 10% of the land, about 30 acres, for “railway” purposes that would be exempt from local oversight.
The California Coastal Commission, which joined the lawsuit in 2022 and is seeking enforcement of Coastal Act requirements for the mill site, filed a written objection to the initial stay and seems less committed to the negotiation path. The Coastal Commission’s Assistant General Counsel, Alex Helperin, said at Monday’s meeting that, prior to last November “we weren’t even aware that discussions over” mill site development were taking place and that the Skunk Train did not meet with the Commission’s staff until January. The Development Staff Report says only that the planning team “has been in contact” with Commission staff in an effort to “obtain informal guidance” and that “formal review” under the Coastal Act will occur later in the process, a point that Helperin underscored.
The public, meanwhile, was decidedly split over whether to keep talking or let the court decide.
Former Fort Bragg Mayor Doug Hammerstrom objected to the Skunk Train having any say in the decision on what to do with the mill site and urged the Council not to “abandon the lawsuit.” Fort Bragg resident and activist Jade Tippett asked the Council to move slowly and not “rush” to a resolution. Peter McNamee of the GrassRoots Institute said that making plans for the headlands without “a clear definition” from the court of who has regulatory jurisdiction would be “a failed and doomed option.”
Others came out squarely on the opposite side. Resident Jacob Patterson expressed his “wholehearted support” for continuing the stay and coming up with “a negotiated contract,” versus “having nothing happen for a decade.” Joe Harris, co-owner of a local restaurant, supported a plan that would include “innovative” residence options, thriving small businesses and recreational uses, saying he was “very opposed” to not developing the site.
After the comments were exhausted, the council went into closed session. Mayor Jason Godeke reported out from that session at a Special Council Meeting on Tuesday, that the Council had “directed our attorney to seek an additional stay in the case with Mendocino Railway in order to pursue continuing settlement negotiations via a master development agreement.”
The stay will have to be approved by Mendocino Superior Court Judge Clayton Brennan before it can go into effect.
NOTE: This story initially had an incorrect date for the council meeting and the name of a California Coastal Commission official misspelled. The official has also clarified the timeline of when he communicated with city and railway authorities.
What is the solution when ALL parties are assholes? Skunk Train and Chris Hart – give me a break, you’re not even a real railroad and run a fake train to nowhere that does nothing. 4 miles in and turn around? You’re barely a bike trail. Why should you get to fuck up something else when you can’t even keep 40 miles of track going? Didn’t you get free government money to fix the damn thing? Do that and then we will talk!
City of Ft. Bragg – seriously? You had decades to figure something out and then you stick your dumb snouts into somebody else’s business. It’s not like Ft. Bragg doesn’t have plenty of vacant real estate and real problems to develop and solve. Incompetent and entitled children, play nice with one of the only reasons tourists come visit you, dumb as they are.
And lastly the California Coastal Commission?! These NIMBY busybodies are the kind of people we can all get behind and hate! They think they should get to regulate a fart 4 miles from the sea if it might blow near some seagull and cause him distress. Nobody can do a goddamn thing near the ocean without intrusive, near satirical levels of bureaucracy swooping in to kill everything except some miserable, useless snail darter. Their motto should be “fuck people, the sea is for fish!”
I doubt that there is any development plan which will satisfy all the parties trying to have a say. The railroad owns the land and nothing will get built there unless there is a revenue incentive for the railroad’s owners. That is a fact of life. Fort Bragg lacks the tax base to develop the land. That is a fact of life. So does the city, and thus the people, want to have the land developed in a way that brings at least some revenue to the city and its citizens do that want to let it sit abandoned and molder away for years? Once that question is answered then there is a reason to negotiate.