(The following story by Lindsay Peterson appeared on The Tampa Tribune website on March 2.)
TAMPA, Fla. — For more than two years, the state Department of Transportation has been fashioning a deal with CSX Transportation to buy its railroad tracks in the Orlando area and help the company expand its freight operations into Polk County.
One detail requires the Legislature’s approval. It concerns liability insurance for the commuter rail system at the center of the multimillion-dollar package. But many lawmakers have begun to question the entire deal, saying it was negotiated largely in secret and needs to be debated in public before it’s settled.
They aren’t likely to stop the deal, says one lawmaker who has been asking questions, Rep. Ed Homan, R-Temple Terrace. But they could force revisions. At the least, they’ll question why the state is proposing to give CSX, a private company, so much tax money.
The deal would have the state buy 61 miles of CSX tracks in the Orlando area for commuter rail and pay for expansions on a parallel CSX line that runs from Jacksonville to Winter Haven, where the company plans to build a major hub.
When the state announced a tentative agreement with CSX in August 2006, it focused only on the Orlando commuter rail project, which will cost an additional $600 million in federal and local tax money. There was no mention of the additional freight trains that would run through Polk County, including Lakeland’s redeveloped downtown.
Lawmakers from Polk and other parts of Florida who began researching the deal learned that the money was set aside through a 2005 bill that didn’t mention CSX. After that, the track purchase and improvement plans went through the Legislature as part of the DOT’s five-year work program, though many lawmakers say they never saw them because they were buried among hundreds of pages of transportation projects.
“One of my biggest frustrations in this is that this deal had been put together over a long period of time but was done in large part in secrecy,” state Sen. Paula Dockery, R-Lakeland, said at a public meeting in December.
Scrutiny especially is needed in deals such as this, when a chunk of money goes “to benefit one part of the state and has a devastating effect on another part of the state,” she said.
Technically, the $491 million doesn’t need the Legislature’s approval because the five-year plan has been approved. But one piece of the deal does – the liability agreement, which was the last piece to be negotiated. It has drawn criticism.
The agreement would require the state to insure itself against all accidents on the commuter line, even one caused by a CSX employee; CSX will use the commuter tracks to haul freight during off-peak commuter hours.
The agreement sounds as if it was written by CSX, Homan said at a committee meeting this month. “There will be changes,” he predicted.