SANTA CRUZ >> The Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission will gather this week for its monthly meeting to consider items addressing millions more in cost overruns for an ongoing highway project, updates on climate change and passenger rail studies as well as potentially selecting one of its own to lead the local agency.

The ongoing effort to construct auxiliary lanes and bus-on-shoulder facilities along Highway 1 from 41st Avenue to Soquel Drive is over budget causing Caltrans, the agency in-charge for construction, to request an additional $3.9 million to see it through to the finish line.

A spokesperson for the commission confirmed that this request comes in addition to the $3 million commissioners previously OK’d in June to address the shortfall, bringing the overall requested total to $6.9 million.

While Caltrans is responsible for staffing and construction costs, the transportation commission is the designated project sponsor and as such, under the terms of state grants that made the project possible, must cover overrun fees.

On Aug. 14, the commission received a letter from Caltrans requesting $5 million more to address the cost overruns, but subsequent refinement of the change orders, done in collaboration with transportation commission staff, lowered that figure to $3.9 million, according to the agenda report.

The recommendation from staff is for commissioners to approve allocating as much as $2.5 million to cover part of the new cost overrun request while moving ahead with a phased approach to addressing the larger shortfall. This would bring the commission’s dedicated overrun total to $5.5 million.

The phased approach is favored by the staff because the estimated overruns are based on nine contract change orders arrived at through actual costs with 34 more that are still pending with estimated values.

The meeting is scheduled to start at 9 a.m. Thursday inside the county Board of Supervisors Chambers on the fifth floor of the county government building at 701 Ocean St. in Santa Cruz.

New executive director

Commissioners will also consider a hire-from-within approach Thursday when it looks at a contract that would make Sarah Christensen, currently a senior transportation engineer with the agency, its new executive director. The contract with Christensen, whose legal last name “Kim” is used in contract documents, includes a three-year term beginning Sept. 9 with an initial annual salary set at $255,200.

Christensen joined the transportation commission as an engineering construction manager in 2017, according to her LinkedIn profile, and would replace Mitch Weiss, who began serving as the agency’s interim executive director in December. Weiss filled in for Guy Preston who retired in December after five years at the helm.

Climate, zero emission train reports

The commission will also get an update on efforts to establish a zero-emission passenger train throughout the county as well as an assessment of which aspects of the local transportation network are most vulnerable to climate change and when each vulnerability should be addressed.Associate Transportation Engineer Riley Gerbrandt will share a summary of recent public engagement efforts and feedback around the commission’s exploration of a 22-mile passenger rail project running through the county. He will also share recent coordination efforts with the California Public Utilities Commission, a statewide regulatory authority.

Commission staff have also submitted a draft of Milestone 2 for the Climate Adaptation and Vulnerability Assessment and Priorities Report. The second milestone doesn’t seek to identify preferred resilience solutions, but instead focuses on the order in which the most vulnerable aspects of the local transportation network should be addressed.

The report — assessing threats that include landslides, flooding, extreme wind, fire hazards and coastal erosion — focuses on unincorporated roads across Santa Cruz County as well as the commission-owned Santa Cruz Branch Rail Line.