I Don’t Hate America!

A session in Winona last night facilitated by the federal Surface Transportation Board provided few answers to the questions concerning historical preservation of structures potentially impacted by the Dakota Minnesota and Eastern railroad’s proposed expansion into Wyoming’s coal rich Powder River Basin and rehabilitation of existing line to accommodate increased traffic and to improve safety.

(Thanks for hanging in there, I was just seeing how long I could make that lead).

Representatives from the railroad were said to be busy handling affairs concerning its sale announced earlier in the day to the Canadian Pacific railroad and were unable to attend the session. Basically this meant if a citizen wanted to learn anything besides the finer techniques of riveting or the inside baseball of grades of steel, that person would have been out of luck.

On hand to answer those types of technical questions were a half-dozen representatives from the architectural and engineering firm HDR, which had been doing work for the planning stages of the rehabilitation and expansion for DM&E and Dave Bibler from the Louis Berger firm on behalf of the STB.

General questions surrounding the project, such as how the flooding will effect the preservation, if the sale to the Canadian Pacific will impact the project, or how the project could affect the city of Winona were directed to the business card of Jafar Karim, public affairs manager for DM&E.

The event was, to say the least, sparsely attended. In the hour I was there the only attendee was a reporter from Winona Radio who decided against running a story without a soundbyte from a DM&E representative.

Several displays on easels offered bare-bones insight into items such as the following:

-The “historic components” to be preserved such as engineered grade, stone box culverts and cast iron pipe.

-Potential “mitigation measures” for the “unavoidable impacts to the historic structures” such as historic driving tours, interpretative signage, publishing of a history of the railroad historic district, museum displays and professional video of the history of the railroad.

-The elements of environmental evaluation such as safety issues, transportation, land use, water resources, recreation, air quality, noise, environmental justice and cultural resources.

Similar sessions throughout the past week have been held in Wall, Pierre and Huron S.D. and Tracy, Minn. According to Bibler, the most highly attended session was the one held in Tracy with approximately 20 citizens attending.

Questions, questions still loom. This issue isn’t going away.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 5:09 pm and is filed under DM&E, Winona, Transportation, Congress, Tim Walz, DJ D.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.