This organization was formed with one goal in mind: to restore Locomotive #18 to full operating condition. In order to do that, we required four things; a large shop building, a locomotive display area, a piece of land suitable for the first two, and enough money to carry out the restoration project. We have the land, we have the building, we have the display area. Now, we're looking for the money. The goals are simple but actually achieving them is complicated. Bear with us while we explain the complexities we've had to deal with and why it is taking so long.

Item #1. The Locomotive Shop Building.

The large, prefabricated metal ship building which was donated to the C&C required 180 man-days to dismantle and move the steel beams and other salvageable materials down out of the mountains to Independence. It needs a new slab and foundation, utility hookups, some more girts and purlins, and a new roof and siding material, which is going to cost about $100,000. When reassembled, this 160'x60' clear-span building will give us a lot of floor space (9600 sq. ft.) for a variety of activities, but the building is barely tall enough to get the lcomotive inside. We have been exploring some interesting alternatives...we'll keep you informed.

Item #2. The Land.

We have it but we need sewer, electric and water lines, a slab, a parking lot and other amenities, and a foundation for the building. That's going to require another $100,000.

Item #3. The Money (obviously, the hard part!)

We have done as much as we can to restore the locomotive. What remains is to have the boiler tubes removed, the inside of the boiler inspected, and then tested and certified. The is going to cost in the neighborhood of $100,000.

Our donations have not even begun to approach that level, so the only source we know of is a program administrered by our Local Transportation commission (LTC), Caltrans, and the Frederal Highway Administraiton (FHWA). Conress requires each state to set aside 10% of the federal highway funds it receives for "Transportation Enhancement Activities" (TEA). We have been working for two years on developing a successful application to fund our project.

The Concept Paper

We developed a concept paper for our project, and gave copies to our County supervisors for feedback. It was based on discussions with Caltrans officials about the effect that the widening of Hwy. 395 would have on the town of Independence. The front part of Dehy Park is going to be ripped out and Locomotive #18 will have to be moved. We proposed relocating it to our building on our land. We found out our proposal was closer to being a mitigation project, which required a different and more competitive grant application process.

The TEA Project Proposal

After much more research and many more meetings with County and Caltrans officials, we developed a detailed 40 page TEA project proposal along with a 15 page business plan. We had to deal with all the issues that had been raised about moving the lcomotive, restoring it, financing the project, and using computer-based inteative exhibits to reduce the need for tour guides for the new display facility.

Since we are not a government agency, we have to have a government agency sponsor our applicaiton to do a TEA project. Federal regulations require the sponsoring agency to agree that the project will be completed as described, to pay for any cost overruns out of its own funds, and to insure that the resulting facilities will be open to the public for at least the next 20 years. If not, the federal government can require that all the money spent has to be returned. Technically, it is not a grant, but a reimbursable federal aid program, which requires that part of the federal funds be matched from local sources. Again, county officials are obviously reluctant to sign on to that kind of an agreement without a lot of evidence that the project is feasible, the budget is accurate, and that the result will be finanacially self-supporting once it has been completed.

Since the County has to guarantee the project will be completed as described in the application, everything has to be budgeted at the price the County would have to pay, if it went out to bid for contractors to complete the project if our organization falls apart, not what it would cost us to do it with volunteer labor and donated materials. Since most of the donated equipment and materials are second-hand items that will need to be modified for use in the project, that makes preparing a detailed, County cost-level budget a doubly difficult task and on that we are still struggling with.

Completion of the project proposal was delayed by all the time required for our small crew of volunteers to dismantly the Pine Creek mind building. At the time, we were the only group that we know of that was working with the County on a proporsal for theTEA money that was left in the LTC's budget. Other government agencies don't have to go throught he County to go to the LTC for funding for TEA projects, so what we didn't know was the the Forest Service had gone directly to the LTC and used up all the money that was left int the TEA "pot" just two weeks before we submitted our proposal to the Board of Supervisors. Our presentation died on the table for lack of funds.

The Stripped-Down Project Proposal

We developed another proposal asking the County to proceed with the lease for the parcel of land and let us build from scratch, since no grant money was available, but some additional donations of buildings and equipment were forthcoming. Developing this version required removing everything we had hoped the TEA funds would pay for, and involved so many changes that the proposal had to be completely rewritten. We gave copies of this new 43 page proposal and 17 page business plan to each of the County supervisors to review and comment on individually before presenting the final drafyt for the Board agenda.

Another TEA proposal

While we were waiting to get the stripped-down proposal on the Agenda, some TEA money became available again at the LTC, but not as much as before, so now we have to rewrite the whole proposal and business plan one more time and apply again for that new amount of money. Being required to read more of the fine print in government publications, we've found some inconsistancies between federal and state policies and new informations which wasn't available to us when we needed it a year ago. We've raised a series of questions about those inconsistancies which could not be answered in Sacramento, so out "tough questions" have been referred to Washington. We're waiting again!

We've taken the position of not asking the County to provide local funds required (11.47%) as match to the federal dollars. Instead, we are attempting to meet that match requirement entirely on our own through donations we receive. Since we don't have nearly enough cash donations we are trying to use a rarely implemented federal procedure to get credit applied for fair market value (FMV) of equipment, materials, volunteer labor and professional services which have been donated to our project. We can only receive match credit for donated items and labor which meet certain parameters, such as being items which are reimbursable expenses under FHWA regulations on federal-aid projects. Our list will be reviewed not only by the FHWA, but also possibly by federal auditors. We have to research and document the fair market dollar value of every item and every bit of labor which you have donated and for which we wish to receive credit. Every FMV dollar of donated labor or material which is approved will qualify us to receive $7.71 in federal funding if the overall project application is approved.

Right now, we are at a make or break point; if we don't get the match credit or don't get much of it, we won't qualify for enough federal money to do much of anything. The dollar value approved will determine how much federal funding we can apply for and how many items on our list of things we want to do can actually be done. Then the newest version of the project proposal (and hopefully the last) will be rewritten around that new budget.

If the financial parts of our project get pre-approved at the federal level, it should be much, much easier to get overall project approval. Our worry is that some other agency will come in to LTC and take the rest of the money before we can be considered.

The Long-Term Needs

There's a saying in some circles, "Be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it", which implies: Then the real problems begin! Restoring Locomotive #18 to full operating condition will be wonderful...but then a clock will start running that will require the whole certification process be repeated 15 years later(another $100,000).

Consequently, we need to plan some exhibit center or a small museum with a gift shop, which will attract people to spend money to pay the monthly expenses, and to cover the cost of re-tubing the boiler every 15 years. We didn't set out to become a narrow-gauge railroad museum organization, but to bring in enough people to raise enough money to maintain the locomotive in good operating condition, we may have to do that. One of the items on the list of approved TEA activities is the Establishment of Transportation Museums, which provides funding for the "acquisition of artifacts" and the "conversion of existing buildings to new use as a transportation museum". This is exactly what we need to do, but we don't have the resources to meet all six of the eligibility requirements. We have appealed to the FHWA for some flexibility in the interpretation of a couple of those requirements because they discriminate against small, rural communities ever having such a facility.

Another item on the list of TEA activities eligible for federal funding is preservation of a historic district, site, building, structure, or object. These terms all have a special meaning within the preservation community which we weren't aware of, so misunderstanding a couple of key terms threw us off course for a long time. We have been in correspondence with the State Historian's Preservation Office and have begun the research to support and application to have Locomotive #18 listed on the California Register of Historic Resources and/or the National Register of Historic Places, in order to become eligible to apply for funding as a historic preservation type of TEA project. Applying for federal funding as a historic preservation project instead of a transportation museum project involves its own complications including environmental clearances and strict regulation by the National Park Service's Historic Preservation Office. We're waiting to hear from FHWA before deciding which type of application to develop, but we're prepared to go either way.

Another Wrinkle

The County's grant application to Caltrans to mitigate the effect of the highway widening project on Dehy Park by reorganizing the park space did receive a good rating from the grant reviewers, but it was ranked low on the list of approved projects. The money available ran out before the list of projects ran out, so the Dehy Park project did not get funded. Since projects that were ranked at the top of the approved list were all from big cities, and since all the projects from small towns and rural communities were ranked at the bottom, it seemed fruitless to rewrite the grant and resubmit it the following year. The Parks Dept. decided, instead, to rewrite it as a TEA project and submit it to the LTC for a better chance of getting rfunded. That application was rejected when it reached Caltrans because TEA funds cannot be used for park projects. The Parks Dept. then decided to rewrite that proposal with a visitor center project in the park, because visitor center projects are on the list of approved TEA grants. The visitor center has to be linked to a surface transportation system, so the Parks Dept. decided to move the locomotive into a special building that would be part of the visitor center. Members of of C&C organization fear that once the locomotive is entombed in a Visitor Center, it will be bureaucratically impossible to get it out of there for the restoration process. We have suggested to County officials that one of the old freight wagons from the open-air display at the Eastern California Museum be placed in the building instead of the locomotive. Verbally, County officials agreed to a compromise solution: the application would state that the visitor Center will have "a historic transportation vehicle, such as the locomotive" inside the building. The Visitor Center in Dehy Park project proposal was recently approved by Caltrans and the FHWA, and construction will start before long. Our TEA project application is still in the financial development phase, so we are quite concerned about how this scenario is going to play out.

Thank you Bob Ennis for this report and all the endless hours you've donated to the Carson & Colorado Railway! And Thank you Bob Michaels and the Easter California Museum for your cooperation!