(The following article by Tim Thornton was posted on the Roanoke Times website on October 7.)
ROANOKE, Va. — At last.
Five months to the day after Gov. Tim Kaine and Norfolk Southern Railway officials announced that an intermodal rail yard would be built somewhere near Roanoke, more than three months after Montgomery County officials announced it was coming to Elliston, and long after residents and officials fruitlessly sought details about the facility, Norfolk Southern representatives are scheduled to talk about the company’s plans in public.
Representatives of the railroad and the Virginia Department of Transportation are to discuss plans for the shipping hub at a Montgomery County Board of Supervisors’ meeting on Monday. Local officials aren’t sure how detailed the discussion will be.
“I really don’t know what to expect to hear, since to this point there has been very little dialogue,” supervisors Chairman Steve Spradlin said Thursday.
But Spradlin is sure Montgomery County residents will get a chance to tell Norfolk Southern something. The meeting’s public comment period is scheduled before Norfolk Southern’s presentation, so company representatives will be a captive audience for residents’ concerns, Spradlin said.
Supervisors will be able to ask questions of the company and VDOT representatives, the chairman said. But residents won’t.
Norfolk Southern spokesman Robin Chapman said Thursday that the company will “be outlining what our plans are in general” at the meeting.
Chapman said there would be a PowerPoint presentation, site plan drawings and studies of the facility’s impact on traffic and the environment.
It’s information people have been trying to get for a long time.
“The little information I have is what I was told in June,” Supervisor Mary Biggs said at the board’s Sept. 25 meeting.
Biggs and supervisors Gary Creed, John Muffo and Annette Perkins voted that night to oppose the project. Spradlin and Doug Marrs abstained. James Politis was absent.
Spradlin and Marrs said they thought the board’s vote should wait until Norfolk Southern revealed its plans. Others, including eastern Montgomery County resident Mike Hawes, think the board waited long enough.
Hawes, who has lobbied local and state government against the plan, said he thought the supervisors who didn’t vote against the project the first time will vote against it the next time they get a chance.
“It’s just not in the comprehensive plan,” Hawes said. “It’s not in our economic plan. If they’d come and asked, we would have said no.”
Norfolk Southern doesn’t have to ask. It has the power of eminent domain, so the company can get land for the facility even if the 10 property owners it has approached don’t want to sell. And the federal government has given railroads the power to override local land use regulations, so the county’s zoning, which doesn’t allow such a development where Norfolk Southern wants to put it, can’t bar the facility.
“I hope citizens really understand that,” Spradlin said.
The Elliston site would be part of the Heartland Corridor, which is meant to cut shipping time between Hampton Roads ports and the Midwest. The project is also supposed to reduce truck traffic by moving freight off highways and onto railroads. State officials have said it could remove 200,000 trucks from state highways. Opponents have questioned how an east-west rail line will help nearby, truck-laden Interstate 81, which runs north and south.
Congress appropriated almost $100 million for the corridor, with more than $5 million of that to be spent in Virginia. Norfolk Southern is expected to contribute $9.6 million for related projects in the commonwealth. Virginia will contribute another $22 million in state dollars.
When state and Norfolk Southern officials announced in May they planned to build an intermodal yard in the Roanoke area, Del. William Fralin, R-Roanoke, called it “the biggest economic development announcement in the last 20 years.” Robert Isner, Montgomery County’s director of economic development, has called it “a major economic development project.”
The site itself will employ only 10 to 15 people, but officials expect it to attract other businesses. A similar facility near Front Royal, while employing only 17 people itself, has attracted 24 companies employing more than 7,000 since it opened in 1989.
That potential for growth is causing concern among local residents and county officials. Creed, who represents Elliston on the county board, has said that any development related to the facility is likely to be directed to the intersection of I-81 and North Fork Road — the Ironto exit.
But that would require upgrading North Fork Road, something VDOT has indicated it doesn’t have the money to do.
Del. Dave Nutter, Creed, Spradlin, county administrator Clay Goodman and county attorney Marty McMahon met with state secretary of transportation Pierce Homer about that on Sept. 28. It was just three days after supervisors voted against the project.
“We felt a little awkward,” Spradlin said.
Spradlin and Nutter said Homer didn’t make any commitments beyond talking to Norfolk Southern. They also said Homer seemed surprised by the company’s lack of cooperation with local government.
Even as the company seems poised to reveal its plans, uncertainty remains. Though local government is powerless, Spradlin said, state government may have some leverage, since it’s putting more than $22 million into the intermodal facility and related projects. Nutter, the area’s representative in Richmond, said he plans to follow the supervisors’ lead.
“I’m not going to do anything to make this project work if the board doesn’t want it to go forward,” he said.