City leaders fret that the Washington Department of Transportation’s study of a possible Amtrak stop at the Transit Station is breaking in a direction that does not bode well for Auburn.

So concerned are City leaders, Public Works Director Dennis Dowdy told members of the Community Development Committee on Tuesday, that they have asked for a meeting with the Washington State Secretary of Transportation “to see if there is some way we can get this train back on track. It’s sort of derailed.”

What’s happened, Dowdy said, is that WSDOT’s own work schedule, which sets dates for the completion of various important study benchmarks, has “collapsed,” leaving crucial technical work unfinished that the WSDOT should have completed five to six months ago.

And the June completion date looms.

Because the City does not yet have the technical report it should have, Dowdy said, it has not had the quality time it needs to review the state’s work and make suggestions.

Dowdy said that WSDOT staff also have said that they are relying upon a market survey piece with specific criteria that Amtrak has mandated they apply in choosing Amtrak stops.

Thing is, the WSDOT has been reluctant to share the results of that survey with the City of Auburn. And when Dowdy asked to see a copy, he said, the response he got was that it was “proprietary information.” After more than a week of pressing the issue, Dowdy said, the state claimed that the only way Auburn could get a look at the survey would be by submitting a public disclosure request (PDR).

More than a week has passed since the City made its request, Dowdy said, and all that he has gotten so far is an assurance from the woman handling the PDR is that she is trying to get the quasi-public Amtrak to release the “proprietary information.”

All of which puzzles and frustrates Dowdy.

“Truth be told, all they would really have to do if they had it, would be to mark it as exempt from public release and give it to us,” Dowdy said. “That’s about how difficult it is to release the information to us.”

For three to four months Auburn has been piping its displeasure into state ears, without much to show for it.

“The result is that we are in a holding pattern, hoping that we get that technical survey report to be able to review, so we can modify comments according to each of the technical documents that we have reviewed so far,” Dowdy said. … “We would like to get it back on track and following a schedule that’s deliberate. We would like to have a chance to give them a good, quality review. Even if it means delaying the study by a few months, it would be far better, so at least we understand it, even if we don’t like the results.

At the request of the City, state Sen. Joe Fain (R-Auburn, District 47) last year asked the WSDOT to conduct the study of the Auburn area to determine if a stop here would work.

Passenger trains came to Auburn for about 80 years, and Mayor Pete Lewis makes no bones about his desire to make it an Amtrak stop once more.

“The City of Auburn has been a train town almost since its beginning,” Lewis recently told the Auburn Reporter. “The reality is that Auburn has been made a central location by geography and our road system for the transportation needs of communities from Lake Tapps and Enumclaw, Black Diamond, Maple Valley and Covington, along with Algona and Pacific, with many of the residents of Federal Way needing to use Amtrak.”