(The following editorial appeared on the Palm Beach Post website on March 1, 2009.)
PALM BEACH, Fla. — When it comes to commuter rail service in Florida, what’s in a name?
About $1 billion.
For SunRail, a proposed Orlando-area train service, the Legislature is prepared to commit to a $1.2 billion deal. For Tri-Rail, the existing South Florida commuter service, the Legislature can’t come up with $50 million a year.
All that stands in the way of SunRail, which would run from Poinciana through downtown Orlando to DeLand, is legislative approval of a liability issue (Senate Bill 1212). Last session, trial lawyers blocked the deal. This year, the item they objected to – which would have blocked payouts of large settlements – has been removed. What remains is modeled closely on the state’s contract with the CSX Railway to cover liability on Tri-Rail tracks. Without trial lawyer opposition and with the backing of Orlando-area legislators and Gov. Crist, SunRail has a better chance of passing.
The money is not part of the vote because the Florida Department of Transportation has signed a contract committing the state to a complicated but overpriced buyout of CSX tracks. FDOT agreed to pay $150 million outright to CSX. But the total buyout adds up to $640 million, including $198 million to improve and remove bottlenecks on a CSX freight line and $209 million to elevate five state roadways over CSX tracks. Another $615 million, half of it from Washington, would pay for trains, stations and a second track.
The state paid CSX $264 million in 1988 for the Tri-Rail tracks. The state used $333 million in federal grants to double-track the corridor, which improves service and helps to explain Tri-Rail’s recent ridership gains.
But Tri-Rail’s partners, Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, say they can’t keep paying $4 million a year toward operations. The state, which matches the amount, says it doesn’t want to pay either. If the counties revert to the minimum amount they are obligated to pay, $1.5 million a year, Tri-Rail would have to cut 60 percent of its trains and shut down on weekends and holidays. And, oh, the federal government could sue to get back its $333”million, because the deal called for Tri-Rail to run 48 trains a day.
SunRail boosters in Orlando should know that paying for Tri-Rail has become a perennial crisis. To fix that, Tri-Rail wants a $2-per-day increase in the rental car tax that would raise $50”million. While Orlando-area legislators support the tax, it has emerged from the Legislature just once, in 2006, when Gov. Jeb Bush vetoed it. If it doesn’t pass this year, Tri-Rail is basically dead.
Legislators need to make sure that Tri-Rail has a permanent source of operating money before starting a new rail service with no clear plans on where money will come from to operate it. State Sen. Paula Dockery, R-Lakeland, objects to the SunRail deal because, she says, it would mean far more freight traffic through Lakeland. She says the cost, at $10.5 million per mile, is the highest of any rail deal in U.S. history.
Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer argues that the deal divides up the payments to assure that CSX spends the money to improve freight service in Florida, rather than upgrading tracks in other states. The $209 million, he argues, goes to road projects that would have been done anyway and shouldn’t be counted in the deal’s cost.
With the retreat of the trial lawyers, only Sen. Dockery stands in SunRail’s way. But this area’s legislators should extract a price for their support. If an overpriced rail line is worth building in Orlando, an existing rail line is worth saving in South Florida.