Orlando's Rail Line Gain Brings Bay Area Pain

LAKELAND - In 2002, an Orlando-based planning group produced a paper titled: "Why Can't We Solve Orlando's Traffic Congestion Problems By Moving the Freight Trains?"

Five years later, the answer is they can and they are - by dumping the problem on Polk, Hillsborough and other counties to the west.

Florida is about to spend half a billion dollars in public money to move freight trains off the rail line running through the Orlando region and onto another rail line running west of it.

The benefits for Orlando are twofold: Easing traffic congestion in the Orlando area's urban core and clearing rail lines now used by CSX to make way for new commuter trains.

Orlando's neighbors lose on both counts.

Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio said she's all but given up on using CSX lines for the commuter rail she'd like to see in her community someday. The company has made it clear that freight train traffic will always have priority on its line linking Tampa and Lakeland.

"If CSX's attitude is going to be freight first, then it won't be appropriate for passenger rail because we need that to be people first," Iorio said. CSX executives came to Tampa on Thursday to meet with Iorio and other business and media figures, but there's no indication that meeting changed anything.

As to congestion, the state was told two years ago that moving trains out of Orlando would cause problems for West Central Florida cities. A 2005 state study, performed by a consultant that often works for CSX, referred to the "social implications of rerouting additional trains onto the CSXT 'S' Line." But it did not explore these implications further.

That S-line runs through Ocala, Wildwood, Dade City, Plant City and Lakeland, and the study noted the need to consult with those cities. But there's no evidence they were consulted, or even notified, as secret negotiations were conducted in 2005 and 2006 between CSX and the Florida Department of Transportation.

The lack of regional coordination has drawn criticism from officials in Polk County.

If a local government planned a major transportation project the way the state has planned this one, "we'd be nailed to the cross publicly," said Gow Fields, a Lakeland city commissioner, speaking during a recent public meeting on the rail realignment deal.

"I can't fathom that we're going to spend half a billion dollars, and we don't have a plan for doing commuter rail across the entire I-4 corridor," Fields said then. "I can't see doing just east central Florida and ignoring the rest of the corridor."

Moving The Freight Trains

The Orlando rail plan was never brought before the Legislature for hearings. No state transportation official can explain why the S-line cities and the "social implications" were never included in the process.

Gov. Charlie Crist, who has met with CSX to discuss the plan, has not accepted invitations to talk with critics of the deal in the S-line cities. And he has yet to make a public statement on the merits of the plan after repeated requests from the Tribune.

Former Gov. Jeb Bush, who left office in January, was a driving force behind the deal. Asked whether it is acceptable for the state to help one region get rid of a problem by moving it to another, Bush spokeswoman Alia Faraj said he would not comment.

One section of the state's 2005 study recounts 10 earlier studies, dating to 1976, that sought to address train traffic in Orlando. It noted that complaints arose in 2001 and 2002 when the Orlando Sentinel published stories on the conflicts of train and vehicle traffic.

The stories reported how delays caused by those trains "make the public irate and hinder economic prosperity in the [Orlando] region," according to the 2005 study.

After the stories, Metroplan Orlando, a regional planning group, published the paper titled: "Why Can't We Solve Orlando's Traffic Congestion Problems By Moving the Freight Trains?"

It suggested diverting the trains away from Orlando's A-line onto the S-line. But doing that would be expensive, "with all costs borne by the local governments," the 2002 paper concluded.

The state study in 2005 put numbers on those costs and came up with a detailed plan for improving the CSX S-line to accommodate more train traffic. By 2006, there was an agreement in principle for the state to pick up $491 million of the cost of transfer. Hundreds of millions more in federal money would set up the new commuter rail service, which Orlando-area lawmakers have long sought.

The deal hasn't been finalized, but officials say they are close.

The key to the relocation and easing of Orlando's burden is moving operations at the city's Taft rail yard to a massive new rail hub planned for Winter Haven, which the state has dubbed "the mother of all rail yards."

The move frees up the 61-mile commuter rail stretch by relocating freight trains westward.

Defending the rail deal in a guest column last week published in papers across the state, CSX Chairman and CEO Michael Ward noted Orlando's traffic and congestion woes but not the deal's potential effect on points west.

In Lakeland, for example, the CSX line runs through the core of the city and its downtown. It bisects north-south arteries that already back up when trains pass.

And more trains are coming under the deal. CSX refers to its A and S lines as "our I-95 and I-75." The rail deal and new hub essentially would merge those lines into a single freight superhighway that would run through the heart of Lakeland.

Boosting freight traffic on the line jeopardizes the only option on the table now for intercity passenger rail between Orlando and Tampa. CSX joined with Bush in 2004 to kill the other option a high-speed rail line along Interstate 4 that had been approved by the state's voters.

No State Money, No Relocation

Fields, the Lakeland city commissioner, appeared at a recent meeting of Polk County's Transportation Planning Organization and read aloud from the 2005 study.

It ended with this: "The decision to move forward with the CSXT 'S' Line Alternative should be made jointly by FDOT and the local communities and will require significant coordination and negotiations with CSXT."

Fields then asked a state transportation representative, rail office head Fred Wise, whether "local communities" referred only to those in the Orlando area.

"The study says what it says," Wise replied, without elaboration.

Wise also told the group CSX could move its traffic to the S-line anytime it wants because it owns the tracks. He did not mention, though he acknowledged later, that this could only happen after a costly upgrade of the line to handle the added traffic.

S-line upgrades and Taft yard relocation money account for more than half of the $491 million in public money, or about $280 million.

Would CSX move freight traffic to another line if it had to use its own money? No, says CSX spokesman Gary Sease.

"There is no reason to move our A line traffic to the S line without this agreement," Sease said. "We currently have adequate track and terminal capacity. We are making the move to accommodate the new commuter rail service through Central Florida. Without that need, we would not likely make any major expansion to either of our lines in the near future but would expand more gradually over time as traffic demands increase."