(The following editorial appeared on the St. Petersburg Times website on June 6, 2010.)
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — It turns out that you can fight CSX railroad — with a little help from your friends. CSX, which owns tracks crisscrossing Pinellas County, has a reputation for being difficult for local governments and neighborhoods to work with. Clearwater Mayor Frank Hibbard ran smack into that reputation for recalcitrance when he tried to get the company to change its plans for repairing railroad crossings downtown.
The project involves replacing rotten wooden ties where the tracks cross four-lane Court Street and four-lane Chestnut Street near East Avenue. One-way Court Street is the main westbound artery to Clearwater Beach. One-way Chestnut is the main artery off the beach. Both streets often are heavily congested, especially on weekends when clogged with beachgoers.
Hibbard was upset when he found out that later this month CSX planned to close those two streets completely, first one, then the other, for the repairs to the tracks, rather than closing only two lanes at a time so traffic could continue to flow. A maddening detour would be required to reroute traffic through downtown, using narrow or already congested streets inadequate for moving so much traffic.
The mayor said he feared the impact the road closings would have on already struggling beach businesses. Those businesses have been through a lot lately. They’ve had to endure major construction to beach streets, the recession, a cold spring, and now the perceived threat posed by the BP oil spill. He was concerned that even more people would stay away from the beach if they knew road closings and detours would snarl traffic.
The city staff had been unable to persuade CSX to change its repair plan, so Hibbard tried. He got nowhere. CSX told the city that doing the work two lanes at a time would be inefficient and more expensive.
That only made Hibbard madder, because the railroad was putting its own bottom line above the survival of local businesses. So on Wednesday morning he sent out an e-mail to people he knew, including the city and beach chambers of commerce, and asked everyone to call or write CSX in Jacksonville. And he asked them to tell their friends to call or write.
Less than 36 hours later, Hibbard was on the phone with CSX chief operating officer David Brown, who said he’d work out a plan to close just two lanes at a time and added that CSX is a Florida company that wants to be a positive force in the state.
Okay, you can stop writing, Hibbard declared in a followup e-mail to his many helpers. And he diplomatically threw in a thank you to CSX for being “sensitive to the local economy.”
It should not have taken an aggressive mayor and an e-mail onslaught to make CSX realize that its initial response to the city’s plea was tone deaf. A Florida company should know the importance of tourism to the state and the struggles that tourism-related businesses are enduring now and should have considered those factors in designing its construction plans.