The folks at Norfolk Southern keep trying to tell the Charlotte Area Transit System and the starry eyed elected officials in this county that the Red Line to Iredell County is dead, but no one will believe them.
First, Norfolk Southern sent letters. There must have been phone calls. So why are local elected officials bizarrely carrying on with discussion of the line as if it will one day be built?
In January, Norfolk Southern, whose property and rail lines the commuter rail project is supposed to share, sent a letter to the NC Department of Transportation spelling out a key problem that the consultants CATS paid millions to to assess the future of the line somehow seem to have missed:
The dual commuter-freight plan is “fundamentally incompatible” with the company’s plans to grow its rail freight business in the state, John V. Edwards, Norfolk Southern’s general director of strategic planning, wrote recently to Paul Morris, deputy director of the N.C. Department of Transportation.
“Current publicity and discussions indicate that Norfolk Southern has agreed to, endorsed, or otherwise has consented to the Red Line project, which is simply not the case,” Edwards wrote. The Observer obtained a copy of the letter this week.
News of that letter ran in the Charlotte Observer in January. For those who have followed this whole saga, it was a shocker. Voters were told the red line was thoroughly assessed by consultants before the vote to create the tax to fund it in 1998. It was assessed again in a broader study by a second set of consultants that fleshed out the transit plan about six years ago. City and county leaders were told everything was peachy keen.
So um, did these multi-million dollar consultants ever actually call Norfolk Southern? How could this have been missed? The (now apparent) lie that Norfolk Southern was on board with the project dates back to 1998, when voters were sold the transit plan. The (now apparent) lie was repeated during the failed 2007 attempt to repeal the transit tax, when voters were again assured that all the promised lines in the spoke plan could and would be built with the revenue from the transit tax (which has subsequently turned out to be another lie).
In fact, Norfolk Southern’s support for the line — the company was supposed to let the train use its property and track — has been used multiple times to justify the creation and fast-tracking of the line, which would supposedly be cheaper to launch since CATS wouldn’t have to assemble land or build new track for the project.
Was any of this ever true? The Red Line has always been priced assuming Norfolk Southern’s support in the transit plan. It was used to get the votes of northern Mecklenburg County voters — and later elected officials on the board that makes CATS decisions — to raise taxes to pay for the transit plan and to keep it intact.
Whatever the case, Norfolk Southern’s insistance that the line is dead apparently wasn’t enough for local elected officials to get it.
So once again, as pointed out by pundithouse.com, Norfolk Southern is sending letters.
This time the company spelled things out a little more bluntly, if that is even possible.
Norfolk Southern cannot support the current “Red Line” plan as proposed by NCDOT for use of Norfolk Southern’s property. The “Red Line” plan is fatally flawed and based upon assumptions about the projected freight use of the O Line that are no longer valid. For those reasons, the current proposal is not feasible and does not constitute a starting point for further discussions. The JPA development process, therefore, is premature and will not lead to an accelerated construction schedule.
This should leave local elected officials stumped. I’m not. North Meck voters got hosed.
