October 18, 2011 in City

Fairchild tracks removal to cost county more

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Spokane County’s duty to remove railroad tracks from Fairchild Air Force Base will cost almost $252,000 more than expected.

Assistant County Engineer Chad Coles told commissioners today that the soil under the tracks is contaminated with creosote and must be hauled off to a special landfill.

Additional excavation, testing and disposal at Waste Management’s nearby Graham Road Recycling & Disposal Facility will increase the project cost by more than half, to $751,777, from $457,215.

Fairchild officials helped the county get a $500,000 grant to do the work, and Coles wasn’t optimistic about getting more federal money. He said his preliminary inquiries indicated “there’s no room at the inn.”

Nevertheless, commissioners directed him to try again. If the effort fails, the money will have to come from the county’s general fund reserves. Department heads already are pleading for relief from budget cuts they’ve been told to expect.

Commissioners questioned the need to spend $30,000 on landscaping the ground where the track was located at the front edge of the air base.

“We agreed to do that, but that’s when we had money to do it,” Coles said.

The county’s obligation to remove the abandoned track springs from commissioners’ decision in 2004 to take over the former Burlington Northern spur line to save up to 400 rail-dependent jobs.

The Air Force wanted the rail line removed from the base for security reasons, and Burlington Northern planned to abandon it. Instead, the county realigned the spur in a $6.7 million project that was almost completely paid with state money.

Eight comments on this story so far. Add yours!

• 

  Hunterman on October 18 at 8:05 p.m.

  It’s Burlington Northern’s tracks. Why aren’t they paying to remove their own tracks? Seriously, why are we being forced to pay for it?

• 

  zelda on October 18 at 8:50 p.m.

  Hunterman — Uh, oh. You didn’t get the PowerPoint. I hate to assign homework, but here it is:
  http://www.spokanecounty.org/data/geigerspur/geigerspurupdate9-19.ppt

  It’s another one of the County Commissioners freakishly interesting economic development schemes and did I forget to mention that it’s on the West Plains? This feels like those scenes in “Young Frankenstein” where the horses would whinny and go crazy every time someone said the name “Frau Blucher.”

  So, out there on the West Plains [neigh, stomp, kick] this is what was supposed to happen according to the plan. Somewhere in the presentation it says that BNSF donated the this part of the rail line and the commishs decided it was a way to create jobs by making it all into a massive transportation/freight/spaceport hub which no doubt involves lots of paving and gravel. Meanwhile, I will try to find the PowerPoint for Raceway Park. If organized crime isn’t involved in this it must be because they judged it to be too obvious.

  Immediate:
  Retain 400 jobs and 5 rail-dependent
  Manufacturers

  Planned: Create 5000 – 7000 new jobs in Spokane
  County; advanced international freight logistics hub
  (air/rail/truck/logistics/telecom)

  That’s one way to cut government staff — cook up cost-overruns that can only be remedied by laying off “unnecessary” employees in other departments.

• 

  RedCedar on October 18 at 8:54 p.m.

  It’s not really clear here what the whole deal was. I would be interested in knowing whether the taxpayers got their money’s worth when they paid $6.7 million to move the tracks. Were there really 400 rail-dependent jobs? That seems like a pretty large figure to me these days, given that there are very few industries left that make use of rail transport at all, much less are dependent on it. How many rail-dependent jobs are there today that are served by that spur? There are no doubt some jobs in the area, but how many are rail-dependent? I’d be rather surprised if there were any. In all but a very few rare cases, when the public spends a lot of money to “save jobs”, the jobs either end up going away anyway or it turns out they would have been saved without the public expenditure.

  As for the immediate problem, it seems to me this is a prime example of environmental good intentions run amok. Of course there’s creosote in the dirt under old railroad tracks. Of course it’s bad to eat or drink creosote. But is the amount in the dirt under the tracks really ever going to hurt anyone? How many people eat railroad track dirt? Will that creosote ever make its way into any drinking water supply out there in the desert in an amount that could imaginably hurt anyone? If a half million dollars could be saved by leaving the dirty dirt under the tracks rather than hauling it off to the dirty dirt dump, that’s real money in my book.

• 

  catfuzz on October 18 at 10:20 p.m.

  I’m not really sure how some old railroad tracks sitting on an air force base is a security threat.

• 

  zelda on October 18 at 10:28 p.m.

  From what I remember reading over the years, it seems that virtually all of the West Plains is contaminated to some degree. There’s rocket fuel seepage, runway weed killer — you name it. Environmental clean-up is all well and good but never underestimate bureaucrats’ and developers’ ability to game the system. There’s the Law of Unintended Consequences and the Law of Intended Consequences, which appears to be fully operational on the West Plains.

  A bankrupt racetrack run by a fugitive from justice with the name of Orville Moe? A screenwriter in Hollywood couldn’t make up stuff that good. But I digress.

  And how about a cop who beat a mentally ill janitor to death with his lovingly polished LAPD billyclub because he thought the guy would massacre him with a 2-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi. Oops, there I go again.

• 

  misjustice on October 18 at 11:15 p.m.

  And then got a deevorce; giving the wife all assets, including 1/2 of his retirement funds effectively shielding at least 1/2 of his retirement booty from a civil lawsuit. Oh, and still lives in the house despite the deevorce, that never sold and has been taken off the market, valued at over $675,000.00 while still collecting his over $80,000.00 per year salary.

  Yah mean like that kind of screenwriter material stuff?

• 

  zelda on October 19 at 12:08 a.m.

  We’re getting OT here but what the heck. Thompson lives in a $675K house? All this time when I saw these garage mahals and starters castles going up around town and assumed they were bought by doctors, successful small business owners , executives and well-paid, well-educated professionals.

  But then the housing bubble inflated and after reading about the ginormous salaries and pensions deals concocted in California, I have to wonder how many of these McMansions are occupied by retired LAPD cops and firemen.

  I just saw a TV crime show about a retired Riverside cop who moved to Spokane after being suspected of murdering his wife. He committed suicide in Spokane. Another retired CA cop moved to Cascade, Idaho, as police chief, embellized city money, moved back to Riverside and was convicted of murdering his wife. And a few years ago we had a retired CA fire chief who burned down the Inland Asphalt building at 14th & Havava. And then there was the Todd Chism case (yes, he was exonerated), but did you see the faux chateau he lives in? All I can say is that it’s very, very lucrative to be a cop or firefighter, esp. from LA or Riverside Counties. Moving to Spokane and getting re-hired into the same job — you definitely get your bang for the buck and the double-dip, too.

  So there’s something wrong with this picture considering that between my husband and me there are legitimate college degrees up the ying-yang, there’s master’s degrees in computer science, engineering and math from Stanford and Wash. Univ. at St. Louis achieved on full-ride academic scholarships, and by LAPD-to-Spokane standards, we’re living in a dump. Go figure.

• 

  Lewis on October 19 at 11:58 p.m.

  The air force base doesn’t have equipment to remove a railroad track? What a bunch of bone heads make us pay for something they think is a security risk, if they think it is a risk then let them remove them.