Rail authority seeks to keep its revenues

Members of the PCC Rail Authority plan to lobby the legislature this year to keep funding from the eastern Washington shortline rail system in the system.

Joe Poire, director of the Port of Whitman County, said the rail authority decided at its Sept. 15 meeting in Davenport to craft legislation to have revenue gleaned from the state-owned lines put into railroad improvements.

Currently, the approximately $15,000 the state reaps from operating leases on the line goes into the general transportation fund, according to Andrew Wood, deputy director of the state’s freight systems office.

“It just makes sense that money from the rail goes back into the rail,” said Poire.

More than $27 million in state money has been put into the railroad for purchase and maintenance since 2004.

That money has been all but exhausted, however, leaving no funding for repairs or disasters that may strike the rails.

A fire last year wiped out a section of the northern CW branch which runs from Cheney to Coulee City. Another stretch of that line was washed out in a flood earlier this year.

Repairs to both damaged sections were funded out of the pot of state money at the rail authority’s direction.

The worry, said Poire, is that future damages may not be fixed because of the lack of funding.

The port represents Whitman County’s interests on the four-county rail authority. Spokane, Douglas and Grant counties also sit on the board that governs the 300-mile state-owned network of railroads.

Port Commissioner John Love was named president of the authority at the meeting.

Additional revenue that authority officials want to capture is any from scrapped steel from the railroad between Colfax and Pullman on the PV Hooper branch.

Rail service on that stretch of the network was unofficially pronounced dead earlier this month when the last of the long-stored rail cars were removed.

Storage of cars on the stretch had been the only activity since a trestle over the South Palouse River was burned out in August 2006.

With service stopped, state and local officials have speculated the rails could be taken up and sold for scrap. The bed of the railroad would either be put into a trail under the rail-banking program or would be turned over to adjacent landowners.

“We have not taken anything off the table,” said Wood.

Poire and Love both worried the state would put money from the sale of the salvaged rail material into the general transportation fund, like it is done with operating revenues.