PRINCETON, Minn. — While some political candidates prior to Tuesday’s election were either against or were not taking a stand on the Northstar commuter rail proposal, you didn’t have to guess what two administrators from Anoka thought about it Friday when they stopped in Princeton, the Princeton Union-Eagle reported.
Anoka County Commissioner Paul McCarron and Anoka County public information specialist Jeff Dehler were pushing for the Legislature to approve it next time it meets.
If approved and implemented, you would be able to get onto a modern train car at either Rice just west of St. Cloud or in Minneapolis during the day or evening and ride the other direction.
Approving it would mean purchasing four locomotives and four double-decker passenger cars for each locomotive, building the depots, building the park-and-ride facilities and constructing the additional needed roads to the depots. The system would use the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe railroad tracks already in place along Highway 10.
The capital cost would be $302 million, said McCarron and Dehler. McCarron and Dehler fielded a question as to why there had to be so much money spent promoting the 82-mile commuter rail proposal.
McCarron had a quick answer: “You’re darned right, it’s a shame. If people would just listen we wouldn’t have to spend as much time promoting. What we’re trying to promote is cost avoidance.”
McCarron and Dehler explained that their promotion of the Northstar proposal is not a push to cancel more highway building but just to deal with the increasing automobile traffic in the corridor.
More roads will have to be built anyway but by having a commuter rail like this, it will mean reducing the amount of pressure to increase the amount built, McCarron said.
(People should not confuse Northstar commuter rail with the light rail being built between Minneapolis and the airport and Mall of America. That is a separate project but is designed so if the Northstar project is approved, you could get off the Northstar railroad cars in Minneapolis and hop onto a light rail car or vice versa.)
The cost of the Northstar project would come from general taxation to repay the loans that would be done at a government interest rate of 3.2 percent or less, said McCarron.
If approved soon, it could be built and be operating in 2006, he continued. The literature that McCarron and Dehler left on the project had a list of reported myths about the proposed Northstar commuter rail and answers. McCarron offered one oral rebuttal of a reported myth.
“Some say no one in Minnesota will get out of their car [to commute],” McCarron said.
Long Island (New York) has the oldest such commuter rail setup and it has more riders today than the commuter rail lines in Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, San Diego and Seattle, said McCarron, noting there are 18 places in the country that have commuter rail.
The fact that people are willing to take mass transit along the corridor between Elk River and downtown Minneapolis is proven by the high ridership on the buses put onto that route, according to McCarron. By the time the buses heading from Elk River to Minneapolis had arrived in Coon Rapids, they were so full that two more buses had to be added to continue the route, McCarron noted.
And more than just the people favoring it, there are some powerful groups and individuals who see the value of commuter rail, according to McCarron. He named those as President Bush, who has it in a federal budget for assisting, the state’s congressional delegation, the federal transit authority, the Minnesota Senate during last session, and the governor.
The proposal stalled in the House where a final vote on the bill never materialized.
Kathy Tinglestad, R-Andover, in her bill in the House, was asking for $123 million from the state, $151 million in federal funds and $28 million from local units of government. The counties included in that are Benton, Sherburne, Anoka and Hennepin and Stearns said it would be joining following the Nov. 5 election, McCarron said. McCarron noted that when he began looking at the transportation issue in the corridor in 1997, he hadn’t yet settled on a proposal for dealing with them, until he continued studying everything. McCarron and Dehler also came armed with a poll released Oct. 17 that concluded the Northstar proposal remains strong in the corridor it would serve, as well as strongly supported in communities beyond.
The Northstar Corridor Development Authority (NCDA), which released the poll, said it shows 77 percent of corridor residents believing Northstar commuter rail is a “good idea.”
The NCDA also said the poll shows 82 percent saying they would use Northstar for popular destinations such as the airport, entertainment, shopping or commuting to work.
The poll was conducted Sept. 23 to Oct. 2 by Decision Resources Ltd. of Minneapolis. It included telephone surveys of 450 randomly selected residents of central and east central Minnesota.
McCarron also pointed to other conclusions the poll drew from respondents in the corridor:
— 71 percent of residents believe congestion has gotten worse in the areas they travel frequently.
— 53 percent believe their area’s transportation needs are not being adequately served, an increase from the 36 percent in a similar poll 16 months earlier.
— 67 percent believe the transportation system will not be sufficient to meet their needs in the next decade.
— 67 percent look to state government, rather than federal or local government, to solve transportation problems.
Responses to the poll from people in communities such as Milaca, Buffalo, Sauk Centre and Ham Lake showed that 74 percent of residents there believe Northstar is a good idea. Also, 79 percent indicated they would use Northstar commuter rail for one or more popular destinations.
Bill Morris, president of the polling company, said Northstar enjoys a level and depth of public support that is “higher than almost any other project we have measured [in 20 years]. It truly has captured the public’s attention and support.”
On the subject of government subsidies, McCarron said that supporters don’t pretend such subsidies wouldn’t happen, but that it should be noted that highways are subsidized.
On the cost of operation, Dehler noted it would cost $16 million annually to maintain and operate and that an estimate shows a third of that cost would come from fares, a third from the state and a third from the federal government.
Cost of the fare one way would be $4, according to McCarron.
“We’re trying to address a current transportation problem that is only going to get worse,” said Dehler. The NCDA states in literature that Northstar would have many benefits, including a more stable and diverse economy, increased economic development and an increased tax base.
The NCDA claims $1.2 billion in new development would result along the corridor, creating $88 million in revenue from the increased tax base. That would be an “excellent return on the annual $5 million state portion of the Northstar operating cost,” said the NCDA. Stations being planned for the Northstar corridor are in Coon Rapids, Anoka and Elk River.
The NCDA compares the cost of upgrading existing roads or building new ones to the cost of Northstar. The road cost would be $10 to $50 million per mile while Northstar would cost $3.7 million per mile, it says. McCarron added that it is the only nonhighway proposal for dealing with the transportation problems that recognizes the needs in outstate Minnesota.
“You can’t just talk about [helping] Minneapolis and St. Paul and say ‘What a good boy am I,’ ” McCarron said. McCarron and Dehler were asked whether or not they think the Northstar proposal will be approved. Both answered yes.
McCarron acknowledged that the original proposal needed fine tuning, such as the realization that putting a station at Clear Lake wouldn’t work with the street pattern that exists there, so for now that has been pulled.
McCarron also pulled one more argument out that might sit well with people in the rural area who don’t like seeing so much density in housing creeping outstate.
With Northstar the density of housing would increase along the corridor and that would alleviate some of the pressure that is pushing the sprawl farther out, McCarron said.