Robert M. Brantley | A Real Person Fighting for Real Change.

News-Leader - Railroaded: Gift really an unfair trade

By admin, Section From The Wires
Posted on Mon Oct 01, 2007 at 02:46:36 PM EST

City allowed closure to gain BNSF's downtown land.

by Sarah Overstreet, Springfield News-Leader

In a flurry of trumpets last week, the city of Springfield finally announced what it had in mind for a long time:
The BNSF Railway is giving us what they're calling the "West Meadows" section of what they own, to become part of Jordan Valley Park.

Huzzah! Huzzah!

City officials acknowledged several years ago that this would happen:

The city would let BNSF close down the traffic crossing on Broadway Avenue near Division Street in exchange for the 16-acre West Meadows. The West Meadows land downtown, which the railroad didn't need anymore, was a trade for the city allowing the BNSF to close the Broadway crossing, the citizen access that got in the way of free access to their switching yards. No more having to deal with any pesky drivers who wanted to have a vital north-south route to get to where they needed to go.

"That's always been part of the 20/20 plan," former City Manager Tom Finnie said in 2005.

At one time, in a shameless display of greed for what they wanted, BNSF called the crossing "one of most most dangerous in the town."

Federal Railroad Administration statistics proved that wrong. Of 49 other city and county crossings, there have been 14 fatalities since 1975. Not one was at the Broadway crossing. Also during that span, there were only two injuries at the crossing.

Ironically, city officials say they will replace street-level crossings with bridges at some of the more threatening crossings -- near U.S. 65 at Division Street, Chestnut Expressway and Cherry Street.

But, the West Meadows/Broadway Ave. crossing deal is finally and officially accomplished without a bridge. Kill the fatted calf.

A vital north-south traffic route is dead, and the 1910-built-train viaduct on nearby Grant Avenue, the street forced to carry all the through traffic now, is crumbling and keeps embedding nearsighted truck drivers within it. Meanwhile, really nice subdivisions north of Norton Road on the north side are spreading like wild sunflowers, and one of the straight shots from Midtown or the south side to these new neighborhoods is roadblocked at Broadway.

But hey, what do we care if growing north-side communities Woodland Heights and Grant Beach are cut off from each other and inconvenienced? If you had a big set of scales, how would they tip in importance to Springfield and nearby communities: More park or more life for residents? Most of these people didn't mind sitting behind the crossbars, although since the closing, BNSF has increased the train traffic across the crossing.

When first discussing the closing, BNSF offered residents in the Grant Beach and Woodland Heights Neighborhood Associations $70,000 for improvements to their areas, and city officials even suggested perhaps they'd want to landscape at the Grant Avenue viaduct and keep it up themselves. They couldn't find mountain goats to climb the steep grass around the viaduct, however, ascending with bulbs in their mouths to plant them and then keep the grass eaten down.

Since the railroad closed the Broadway crossing to trespassers, it did offer to landscape the former intersection (see accompanying photo).

The neighborhood groups have spent some of the bribe money: Woodland Heights, for example, used some funds to expand the gazebo in LaFayette Park and for social programs for residents. They say they hope to have "Woodland Heights" signs put up at the boundaries of the area, and members say they've been trying to get the signs OK'd for over a year. City neighborhood conservation manager Brendan Griesemer says the city planning and development department is negotiating with the Missouri Department of Transportation to contract with MoDOT to put the signs on MoDOT's rights of way. "We are shooting to try to get it to City Council by the first of the year."

Boost one area of town, help kill off another.

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