(The Associated Press circulated the following article on March 6.)
GILLETTE, Wyo. — A landowner said in a District Court hearing that he and other landowners put off dealing with a railroad’s land acquisition efforts until the company could prove that a rail expansion project had a chance of moving forward.
The Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Railroad is suing Lenard Seeley, Jerry Dilts and their relatives for permission to survey their land in Campbell, Crook and Weston counties in Wyoming’s northeastern corner.
The railroad wants to look at the land while it plans a $6 billion expansion that would allow more coal to be shipped from the Powder River Basin to the Midwest. The surveys could be a first step toward using eminent domain to seize land for the project.
Elisabeth Hollmann, a Hot Springs, S.D.-based landowner liaison for the project, told District Court Judge Michael Deegan on Monday that she notified landowners about the project as early as 1998. The land acquisition efforts stalled after that, however.
They remained stalled in March 2005, when Seeley bought land the DM&E is now eyeing for the expansion. Seeley said the project had appeared to be a “dead issue” at the time.
Last year, the federal Surface Transportation Board approved the project and Hollmann said she sent notification letters to landowners in June. Seeley, however, turned down Hollmann’s requests for the railroad to survey his land.
He said he wanted a statement of the railroad’s financial situation.
“If they didn’t have any funding to go forward with it, I didn’t want to be bothered with it,” he said. “I didn’t want to have to deal with it, but I was forced to.”
Seeley wasn’t alone in his worries. Last week, the Federal Railroad Administration denied a $2.3 billion loan request for the proposed expansion. Federal Railroad Administrator Joseph H. Boardman said in his decision that the risk remained too high that the railroad might not be able to repay such a loan.
Randy Henke, DM&E’s vice president of Powder River Basin design and construction, told the court that the railroad still planned to build the project. He said the federal loan was one of many financing options the railroad was considering.
Hollmann said the railroad’s hope for getting financing created urgency. She said construction could have begun this spring had DM&E secured the loan.
She sent a final set of letters to landowners in October. The letters gave landowners two weeks to decide whether they wanted to provide access or address the issue in court.
But Tad Daly, the landowners’ lawyer, said Hollmann had not given Seeley, Dilts and others enough details about the surveys. Daly asked Henke whether landowners had been told they would be giving access for geotechnical surveys that involved backhoes and drilling rigs.
“I don’t know how to answer that question,” Henke said.
When Daly asked Dilts and Seeley about whether the railroad had told them about a laundry list of possible surveys, both men said they were unsure what the railroad wanted to do.