Editorial: Why help DM&E railroad Rochester?

09/25/2006

An unfair fight, even without $2.3 billion in federal support.

Published: September 24, 2006

The Owatonna intersection has given DM&E president Kevin Schieffer more reason to argue that most of his trains will be diverted before reaching Rochester. Predictions of 34 trains passing Mayo every day are obsolete, he says; the number may be about the same as now, but it all depends on unknowable market factors.

He downplays harm to Rochester, stresses benefits to grain farmers and utility customers, and says every other community on the route is supportive. This refers to the 50-plus that signed agreements with DM&E on how their segment will be built. No doubt many understood the futility of fighting a railroad.

On safety, Schieffer says DM&E’s unusually high accident rates result from the antiquated track he’s replacing, and he resists the suggestion that raising the speed of hazardous cargo through Rochester increases the catastrophic potential of derailment. To protect Mayo from an exploding propane or ammonia tanker, he says, you’d had to route all of them around the city, starting today. Not a bad idea.

Above all, Schieffer says, energy prices and other economic factors have made shippers and investors so hungry for new rail capacity that his project “makes too much sense not to build.” Yet he wants to borrow $2.3 billion from the Federal Railroad Administration, replacing capital he says was lined up until regulatory delays drove it away.

Until last summer the FRA had a total lending fund of $3.5 billion to help smallish railroads do useful upgrades they couldn’t afford up front. Then, after years of effort by South Dakota’s Republican Sen. John Thune, the fund was expanded tenfold, and applicants no longer had to prove they had tried to raise private funds but failed.

The FRA changes are opposed by the White House, and they were made in circumstances that raised many eyebrows: inserted quietly into a massive transportation bill at the behest of a legislator (Thune) who made $200,000 as a DM&E lobbyist during a gap in congressional service.

Like its finances, DM&E’s loan application is closed to public view, and so are the FRA deliberations. The agency has said it will take written public comments on the loan through Oct. 10.

We think the FRA should hear in great numbers from Minnesotans who object to DM&E’s plans for Rochester, or the closed-door loan that would enable it. So should Minnesota’s representatives in Congress. There’s not much under the law that people can do to rein in a railroad, but politics is a different arena, where public opinion might actually matter.