(The following story by Jeffrey Pieters appeared on the Post-Bulletin website on September 7.)
ROCHESTER, Minn. — Nine years of occasional negotiation — laced with more frequent bouts of public sparring — have given Rochester-area officials this picture of Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern Railroad head Kevin Schieffer: concerned only with the success of his railroad, regardless of how it might affect the people who live and work along its path.
You might agree or disagree with the assessment, but the more serious question right now is this: Why would DM&E’s buyer, Canadian Pacific Railway, be any different?
There’s simply no way to know for sure. Local officials seem to have chosen to believe this buyer is better until circumstances show otherwise.
Olmsted County Commissioner Ken Brown listened to CP officials answer questions in a telephone conference on Wednesday morning.
“They said all the right things about working with communities,” Brown said. “The comments were very positive. That’s about all you can go with at this point in time.”
Yet, these kinds of relationships all tend to start beautifully.
“Schieffer said some of the same things in 1998,” Brown said.
It wasn’t long, though, before the Rochester-Schieffer relationship started to grate, and it only worsened with each passing year.
Things had gotten to the point, Brown said, where almost any new owner would be, from Rochester’s perspective, an improvement.
In Canadian Pacific, the railroad has an owner who’s verbally committed to being a good corporate citizen.
“We have a process that involves listening and engaging the community,” said Fred Green, CP’s president and chief executive officer. “It is my commitment to you, our commitment as a company, to the communities that we will come out and we will listen. You can never guarantee that by listening you will end up with everybody being happy, but I can assure you there’s no intention to ignore the communities, either who have supported or who have expressed concern about it, without a very rigorous listening process.”
The railroad boasts the best safety record of any U.S. Class 1 railroad, Green said.
Unlike DM&E, it’s publicly traded and shareholder owned, and thus liable to be more open about its inner workings than DM&E has been.
At the same time, its management is committed to generating healthy profits — “clearly double digits, and north of 15 percent,” said Mike Lambert, CP’s executive vice president, in the same Wednesday morning conference call.
If Canadian Pacific does wind up being a friendlier railroad to Rochester, history, perhaps, should note Schieffer’s role in selecting them, at the end of what he described as an “exceedingly competitive process” involving some 20 bidders.
DM&E assessed the bids in terms of the money offered, but also for how the railroad believed each bidder would treat employees, customers and the communities along the line, Schieffer said.
“CP is in the winner’s circle because I think they’re the best on all fronts,” he said. “It’s a good organization. We had a lot of options, and I think we picked the right one.”