I see the Journal Star has yet another editorial about the Kellar Branch today. In today’s installment, they reveal that the city, as the owner of the line, can (are you ready for this?) charge the carrier on the line a fee for using the rail road. Wow, really? You mean they can actually make money on this asset they own? Well, I declare.
You gotta love the Journal Star Editorial Board. They’re nothing if not masters of the obvious. I especially like how they act like charging a fee is something punitive that will really teach those rascally rail carriers a lesson. Perhaps they’ve forgotten that a couple years ago, Pioneer offered to lease the line so they could service Carver Lumber plus potential shippers that would be coming online. I’m sure CIRY would welcome a contract that allows them to lease the line from the city, too.
So, I hope the city listens to the Journal Star this time. By all means, lease the line to the rail carrier for a fee. That’s kind of what the citizens expect the city to do with an asset: make some money off it; use it to attract good-paying jobs. The dumbest thing they could ever do is tear it out and give the land to the Park District for free.
For more excellent posts on the Kellar Branch, see Billy Dennis’s and PeoriaIllinoisan’s sites.
C.J., you neglected to add that CIRY refused to accept the agreement that called for them to pay a fee to the city. It’s likely they will refuse to pay for good. It’s also likely that the STB might very well tell the city that they CANNOT charge the fee.
Let’s not put the caboose before the locomotive here.
The STB isn’t going to tell the city they can’t charge a fee. They might set a limit on how high the fee can go, however.
I haven’t seen the latest contract proposal from the city to CIRY. There are any number of reasons why CIRY might have rejected the offer. It could be that the city’s offer included a requirement that CIRY abandon the middle part of the Kellar line and CIRY didn’t want to agree to that. Price may or may not be a point of disagreement.
Any lease agreement should be based on a small percentage of revenue generated from cars handled on the line. Not the $175.00 per car deterrent, I mean, surcharge, from 1984-1986. Who knows what businesses might be there were it not for that fiasco!
Revenue based on traffic levels gives the City an incentive to help lure more business to the line.
CIRY is waiting until the STB imposes what they believe would be a more reasonable agreement.
BTW after a lot of research on other rails with trails, it has been determined that for the average RWT the minimum cost of upkeep is $4,200 per mile annually. Most of them run from $17,500 to $50,000 per year to maintain. And who is going to pay for this maintenance of a trail, YOU, the taxpayer. Whether you use the trail or not.
too bad the Propaganda Journal doesn’t discover that all those taxpayer-financed highways they advocate could be “making money” too, how about charging a fee for every truck that goes through Peoria? A while they are at it, how about a fee for every bicycle that goes up the Rock Island Trail?? Taxpayer-owned asset, isn’t it? Seems to me those Rabid Trail Advocate deadbeats should be contributing something, not getting using to use an asset for free like good old CIRY (I’m sorry, its nasty old CIRY now, isn’t it). Funny how CIRY was the best operator when the trail nuts thought they weren’t going to operate the railroad, and now that they are, CIRY is suddenly the bad guy. WHEN will the City have a belly full of this idiocy, decide to “tear the bandage off”, sell the Kellar Branch to Pioneer, and be done with it once and for all? Then maybe the City could start to address real issues instead of continuing to waste time and money on the demands of nut cases.