(The following story by Ray Gronberg appeared on the Herald-Sun website on August 1, 2010.)
DURHAM, N.C. — Aides to U.S. Rep. David Price, D-N.C., have warned Durham officials that they need to find a way soon to use a $2 million budget earmark intended to help finance the preservation of a rail corridor.
House members recently passed a bill that would rescind some $713 million in old, unspent earmarks for transportation, a move that though it didn’t affect the money reserved for Durham in 2005 showed that it’s increasingly risky for projects like the city’s to remain in stasis.
“Although we seem to be in the clear for now, there is no guarantee these funds will remain available for use indefinitely,” Price aide Kate Roetzer said Wednesday in an e-mail to city and N.C. Department of Transportation officials.
Roetzer, the 4th District congressman’s legislative assistant, added that she would “strongly encourage” officials here “to find a way to obligate these funds for acquisition of some rail corridor in the near term.”
The 2005 earmark was supposed to become part of the financing for the purchase from the Norfolk Southern Corp. of the so-called “Duke Beltline,” a stretch of track that circles downtown Durham.
The beltline loops north from the N.C. Railroad’s main line, linking up to it at points near the downtown Amtrak station and Fayetteville Street’s crossing of the Durham Freeway. It reaches as far north as the Markham Avenue area.
The loop was built by the Duke family to bring in supplies for Durham’s tobacco factories and enable them to ship finished goods, city Transportation Director Mark Ahrendsen said.
Officials had figured on combining the federal money with matching $1.5 million allocations from the city, the county and DOT, and using the resulting sum to buy the loop and a spur off its east side that runs north into Person County.
They wanted to make sure both corridors remain available for rail use decades into the future, and think it could also serve in the short run as a walking path like the American Tobacco Trail.
The project began when officials noticed that the beltline and the spur had fallen into disuse, Ahrendsen.
But Norfolk Southern never officially abandoned them, and soon after the federal money was available the railroad made it clear it wanted to hang onto the spur and part of the beltline.
The company has at least one client on the beltline, a cement plant near the intersection of Avondale Drive and East Geer Street.
With the company unwilling to deal, and DOT more interested in the spur, the whole deal went on ice. The earmark and the city’s $1.5 million — money available from a recent bond issue — weren’t enough by themselves to finance Norfolk Southern’s asking price for the part of the beltline the company didn’t need.
Recently, however, the company has signaled it’s willing to renew discussions about the beltline. DOT officials are now trying to put together a meeting.
“We want to make sure we’ve at least explored and determined whether or not [a purchase is] a possibility,” Ahrendsen said. “It it’s a possibility, we’d like to pursue it while that earmark is still available. And if it’s not a possibility, we might consider other uses for the funds.”
Legally, the federal earmark is ticketed for rail-corridor acquisition in general, not specifically for the beltline. So it’s possible officials could use it for other land needed for the area’s transit network, Ahrendsen said.
The beltline itself hasn’t figured in the area’s transit plans to date, but the most recent versions have called for “circulator” routes in downtown Durham that would feed into a regional system.
Officials are getting a head start on that later this month with the launch of a new bus route connecting downtown with Duke University. But it’s possible some sort of rail service would follow someday.
Corridor preservation is a key issue for rail advocates because it’s at the very least difficult and expensive to acquire new right of way in urban areas, and in many places impossible. So they see the preservation of existing corridors as critical.
Budget problems, however, have prodded both federal and city officials to comb through reserves, on the hunt for money they can free up from projects that seem unlikely to be carried out.