Before we get too worked up and politicized about the "waste of public funds" for the construction of the passenger depot and maintenance facility at Cloverdale, it might be useful to consider what might have caused these projects to be built.

The NWP track through Cloverdale had to be relocated as part of the construction of the 101 freeway bypass around Cloverdale.

Caltrans would have been required to replace any railroad facilities which were destroyed or rendered useless by the project. NCRA (and/or SMART) would have been foolish to not enforce this requirement - in fact not doing so could have been a "waste of public funds".

I'm not sure what facilities NWP had in Cloverdale, quite possibly a depot and some MOW facility. Replacing these (and redesigning the depot for what SMART probably needed) would have been a reasonable part of the freeway project. In terms of cost, the depot which was built is fairly modest and looks like the kind of construction which would have been easy for the contractors building freeway bridges and interchanges to do at the time.

Although the rail part of the depot is not used at present, Sonoma Transit does have a couple of bus runs which stop there. Google street view also shows that the maintenance facility is in use (apparently for signal maintenance).