Salt Lake City's fight against the Union Pacific Railroad could have been averted, an official from the Deedee Corradini administration says.
The railroad's plan to reactivate trackage along 900 South was known, and Mayor Rocky Anderson was warned about it in early 2000, according to Brian Hatch, former adviser to Corradini. Residents living near the track are protesting plans to reactivate the line.
"Efforts should be made to finish the abandonment of this track and achieve a great benefit to the neighborhoods along the alignment," Hatch wrote in a memo to Mayor-elect Anderson and his then-adviser, Mike Melendez, in December 1999. Union Pacific "has wanted to keep this as an alternative main-line path. This should be rigorously opposed."
Melendez resigned in March 2000. "I have not been contacted by the mayor's office since," Hatch said Monday. Anderson hired D.J. Baxter as his adviser four months later, but Baxter said he heard nothing of Union Pacific's 900 South plan until this summer.
Anderson is at the front now of a highly public court battle to force Union Pacific to remove the track from the west-side neighborhoods on 900 South. Early 2000 was not the time to sit down with Union Pacific, Anderson said. That's because, Anderson said, the city's case against the railroad stands on the 900 South track remaining idle for at least nine months.
"As soon as you sit down to discuss it with them, they're going to want to reactivate the tracks. The first thing they're going to do is run a train down there," Anderson said. Had trains come down 900 South in 2000, the mayor could not have cited the city's franchise agreement with Union Pacific — which states that if the track stays unused for more than nine months, the city can require the railroad to pull it up and repave the street crossings.
Anderson says it was in his interest, then, to let the sleeping track lie during the year and a half since he took office.
"This is the lawyer in me, but (I'm) a smart lawyer," the mayor said. "My first communication with U.P. was to notify them of the termination of the franchise," meaning the railroad was no longer permitted to occupy city property.
The Poplar Grove and Glendale neighborhood residents around 900 South have gathered 1,000 signatures on a petition asking Union Pacific to stay away. "These trains run counter to everything we're trying to do," said Poplar Grove Community Council chairwoman Edie Trimmer. The mile-long trains that would rumble past her front door and past two elementary schools would cut the area off from the rest of the city, endanger children and make the neighborhoods wholly undesirable to families who might have moved in, she added.
This week Union Pacific sent Anderson a letter stating the railroad's renewed efforts to take back its track. Railroad attorney Clare Williams describes the mayor's efforts, which include filing in federal court for an injunction against Union Pacific's plan, "a dramatic shift from cooperation to confrontation."
As anyone who's observed the mayor for any length of time, the "C." in Ross C. Anderson often stands for "confrontation."
"Do they think I'm going to back off and say, 'Go have at it in our (west-side) neighborhoods?' " Anderson asked Monday. The railroad plans to use the 900 South track because its "bottom line turns out better" that way, he added.
But the Corradini administration, according to Hatch, negotiated with Union Pacific to realign tracks in the Gateway district to preclude any need for the 900 South track.
"We had proposed improving the existing main line itself, by fixing the snarl of freight tracks behind the U.P. Depot," Hatch said this week. "Union Pacific accepted the reroutings, and . . . an alternative to using 900 South was well on its way as we left office" in January 2000.
But railroad spokesman Mike Furtney denied any such talks. "There was never any discussion of realignment (of main-line tracks) or of abandonment of 900 South . . . I suspect U.P. is not interested in picking up the tab for that."
Such a realignment would "go through neighborhoods where there has never been any tracks," Furtney added, and "900 South makes the most sense." He estimated that preparing that track for reuse would cost more than $1 million, but realigning main lines around the depot would be even more expensive.
Two weeks ago Union Pacific filed a claim with the federal Surface Transportation Board, asserting its right to use the 900 South tracks. Anderson filed a federal lawsuit to halt the railroad's plan, and this week he intends to file his response with the Surface Transportation Board. How long will it take for the board to rule on the dispute?
"Forever, I hope," Anderson said.
E-mail: durbani@desnews.com