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Lakeland Commission Draws Battle Lines On CSX Hub

Posted Aug 20, 2007 by Billy Townsend

Updated Aug 22, 2007 at 08:55 AM

LAKELAND - A massive rail hub planned for Winter Haven is a mortal threat to downtown Lakeland’s hard-earned quality of life, Lakeland city commissioners said Monday.

“Some of us have worked a lifetime” improving the downtown, Lakeland Mayor Buddy Fletcher said. “This will destroy what we have spent a lifetime – 20 or 30 years – building.”

Fletcher and others called for the city to more aggressively plead its case to the highest levels of Florida government. They echoed calls of city business and civic leaders, who have long feared the disruption caused by increased train traffic through downtown.

Despite the grim talk, commissioners took no formal action, and just how they plan to the address the hub remains unclear.

“We’ve got to attack this at the top level,” Fletcher said, adding, “I don’t believe [Gov. Charlie Crist] will let this happen to us.”

The hub is the key to a half-billion-dollar deal put together last year by then-Gov. Jeb Bush’s administration that would reorganize freight rail traffic throughout the state and bring commuter rail to the Orlando area. CSX has repeatedly said it cannot do the Orlando commuter rail deal without relocating operations at Orlando’s Taft hub to Winter Haven.

But the realignment is just a start. Jacksonville-based CSX calls the Winter Haven project an “integrated logistics center,” a statewide rail-to-truck distribution center unlike anything in the Southeast. It would handle vehicles and shipping containers routed primarily from the nation’s West Coast ports.

At the Winter Haven hub, the containers would be transferred from trains to hundreds of waiting trucks. CSX has projected that the hub will produce up to 1,150 trips a day on State Road 60. That’s before the inclusion of the surrounding distribution center, which covers a much larger area than the train hub.

CSX says the hub will employ 200 people, though a second phase distribution center, if built, could bring up to 1,800 warehouse-type jobs. Beyond that, Winter Haven sees it as an economic dynamo that will help ensure the city’s long-term financial future.

CSX says the project has the potential to take cars and trucks off highways, both through the Orlando commuter rail deal and generally through providing more freight transport via rail. It acknowledges those benefits will come outside Polk, which is not included in the Orlando passenger rail line and will see significant truck and train traffic increases. Much, if not all, of that new train traffic will run through downtown Lakeland. Estimates of just how many new trains would come, and how long they will be, have varied widely. The minimum prediction has been four new trains, each stretching between 7,000 and 10,000 feet.

And as several Lakeland officials pointed out Monday, there’s no limit on how many trains will be routed as business at the hub grows over the years and decades to come.

Lakeland commissioners later pleaded their case to U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, who was in town for a local government town hall meeting. The federal government is helping fund some of the commuter rail project in Orlando, but the rail realignment deal with CSX is all state money.

Nevertheless, Nelson said he would look into the city’s concerns. And he seemed surprised to learn that the new train traffic would bisect downtown Lakeland, which he praised as a “minor miracle” of redevelopment.

“You would hate to have [the train traffic] start to mess it up,” Nelson said.

Newschannel 8’s Natalie Shepherd has more details.http://tbo.com/video/xml/MGBOEGCGL5F.html