I'll refresh your memory. The year of the missed Christmas Eve paycheck was 1999, more than six months before NWPY came to town. The company involved was RailWays, a wholly separate company from NWPY with different owners, a different "home" state, a different NCRA contract, mostly different officers and many different employees.

As I recall the situation, RailWays had been carrying the NCRA for months, but the State and federal reimbursements began to dry up (on account of the money NCRA had to pay back for prior misuses of funds?). The last straw was when the NCRA Board voted to pay Herzog Contracting for their work rather than pay RailWays. That meant (and the NCRA knew) that RailWays would have no money with which to pay its employees. RailWays employees held a protest demonstration at the NCRA Board meeting in mid-December at Healdsburg. But the only result of their expressions of outrage was the NCRA became angry that RailWays’ employees had the nerve to think that the workers should get their money at Christmas rather than a big international corporation. In any event, that incident had nothing whatsoever to do with NWPY.

The first NWPY paychecks were cut and issued in July 2000. It is a fact that all NWPY employees got every paycheck on time – except for the very last one.

Curious Sidenote: I went to the NCRA Website to refresh my memory by looking at the minutes from that December 1999 Board meeting only to find that all agendas and minutes for meetings before January 2001 have been removed from NCRA’s archives. Wonder why?