SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A Friday meeting in Omaha between top city and Union Pacific railroad officials appears to have ended a recent stalemate over development of the downtown railyards, the Sacramento Bee reports.
Union Pacific, owner of the largely unused 240-acre railyard near Old Sacramento, in recent weeks had balked behind the scenes at city plans for a major intermodal transportation complex on the lower portion of that site.
They agreed to move forward again, after an hourlong meeting at UP’s real estate division headquarters among Mayor Heather Fargo, City Manager Bob Thomas, UP Chief Financial Officer Jim Young and other railroad officials.
Fargo and Thomas requested the Nebraska meeting so that top officials could meet, get a sense of the people with whom they are dealing, and judge each other’s commitment to developing the lower railyards.
UP officials in Sacramento privately told the city several weeks ago that the company was considering backing away from efforts to build a modern complex for trains, buses and light rail.
The railroad company had expressed frustration with what it felt was the slow and seemingly open-ended nature of the city’s development process.
“It appeared three weeks ago it was not going anywhere; it could be settled,” said UP spokesman in Omaha, John Bromley. “(UP financial executive Young) was going to end the project.”
However, after Friday’s meeting, Bromley said, UP is willing to “re-engage the project. The good news is everybody is talking again. We are back to the table.”
Sacramento UP official Mike Casey said Omaha officials had wanted to make a point to Fargo and Thomas that the development process is expensive, so “we wanted to make sure we have the commitment and leadership from the city to move this thing forward.”
UP officials want to move the passenger and rail lines several hundred feet north of the existing depot at Fifth and I streets and create a concourse there to serve passengers. That would improve UP’s freight hauling business, give Amtrak modern passenger facilities and open the lower portion of the railyard closest to downtown for development.
In opposition, a vocal group of preservationists and depot advocates insist the rail lines remain next to the current depot, and that the depot remain as the central train station.
“There were no formal agreements” at the meeting, mayoral spokesman Chuck Dalldorf said.
Fargo said she told UP that the city is serious about making a transportation project work at the railyards, and doing it in a reasonable time frame, but pointed out that means continued public discussions and, ultimately, compromises from everyone.
“This (intermodal complex) is really a great opportunity for the city,” Fargo said after the meeting. “We want to come up with something both the community and UP are excited about going forward on.”
The questions of track alignments and the role of the old depot have been debated, often angrily, for more than a year.
Earlier this year, Fargo stepped in and negotiated an agreement on basic principles among UP and preservationists.
Those principles state that UP’s track alignment proposal would be considered the “preferred” alignment during environmental studies, but that those studies also would analyze other track alignments.
Fargo said she told UP she will reconvene a group of stakeholders on both sides of the issue to determine more precisely what potential track alignments will be studied in the expected upcoming environmental analysis.