Most anyone who’s ever signed a property lease recognizes there is no doubt as to which party holds sway in the landlord-tenant relationship. The tenant usually is the junior, if not subservient, partner.
That common knowledge makes all the more perplexing the manner in which the State of Georgia is handling the renewal of a lease for an important stretch of railroad built and owned by the state since before the Civil War.
The matter is included in Georgia Senate Resolution 228 which authorizes the State Properties Commission to negotiate a 50-year lease with CSX Transportation for the 133 miles of Class 1 rail line between Atlanta and Chattanooga.
Buried in 34 pages of real estate minutiae involving multiple properties around the state is the tidbit that CSX has offered to lease the rail line for a base payment of $12.1 million a year, with that amount increasing by 2.5 percent annually.
What’s missing from SR 228 should be a matter of considerable concern to gridlock-gripped Georgia. And that is a requirement that CSX must be amenable to allowing rail passenger service at some future date. Any proposed deal between Georgia and the tenant of its railroad should be a non-starter without that simple, yet important, provision.
Maintaining the option to begin future commuter rail operations, or even longer-haul passenger service one day over the line once known as “The State Road,” should be demanded and gained by landlord Georgia as part of any lease.
Anyone driving on Interstate 75 at rush-hour can easily see why. The CSX-leased line, formally known as the Western & Atlantic Railroad, passes through many of the same towns as the highway.
With the state slowly moving toward a process that could lead to enhanced transit options across Georgia, and hopefully even state involvement in funding same, now is not the time to close off valuable options such as future commuter rail use of The State Road.
For its part, the State Properties Commission assured lawmakers this month that a provision to permit possible future passenger rail service would indeed be included in the final lease. That’s well and good, until Georgians get to the part that the commission doesn’t want to hamstring itself by, well, actually stipulating that such language definitely be included in the final contract.
Not surprisingly, and with good reason, transit advocates see considerable risk in allowing that much wiggle-room. So do we.
That much latitude in a negotiating portfolio makes light of the fact that Georgia owns the rail line in the first place. The state’s public posture thus far is akin to government agencies that have gone hat-in-hand elsewhere to beg freight railroads to allow the intrusion of commuter trains onto privately owned tracks. The freight railroads usually protest mightily — until the public sector ponies up enough cash to make it worth their while.
That sort of negotiating should not happen in Georgia, given the parties here are on the flip-side of the landlord-tenant divide.
More than 200 years ago, the oft-quoted conservative economic prophet Adam Smith, gave what should prove profitable counsel to the Georgia General Assembly and the State Properties Commission. Smith wrote that, “rent, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances of the land.” Smith went on to define rent payments as “… evidently the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more.”
As Georgia this year considers multiple pieces of legislation that would once more study transportation and transit, it should not forget Smith’s sage advice. Recognizing the importance of the CSX-rented rail line is especially important now that the state is edging closer to figuring out a way to bring its own money to the table as part of funding transit.
We commend the state’s move toward recognizing that it has a role in helping pay for transit as a method of easing commuter congestion and lowering the real cost of immobility that’s levied against both individuals and freight operators that are too-often unprofitably trapped on our often-clogged roads.
As various entities state, regional and local begin to study how to take mobility improvements to their next logical phase, Georgia cannot afford to leave the option of commuter operations on its own railroad off the table. Not when the possibility exists to provide a new link between Atlanta, Vinings, Smyrna, Marietta, Kennesaw and points North. Those popular bedroom communities could, one day, be linked by the type of commuter rail lines that many other regions of Atlanta’s caliber have embraced across the country.
Commuters in the conservative Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex can ride the WiFi-equipped Trinity Rail Express which zips between those cities at speeds up to 79 mph. Even Nashville operates its Music City Star commuter train each weekday. Many other U.S. cities are members of the same club.
Creating commuter service over existing rail lines is not inexpensive, but it is generally much cheaper than building new systems from scratch – a point that should prove attractive at the fiscally stringent Gold Dome.
State Rep. Ed Setzler, R-Acworth, has previously championed passenger use of the state-owned rail line. A few years ago, he estimated startup costs for a 30-mile service between Atlanta and Acworth could be “considerably less than $100 million.” It’s comparing apples and oranges, but by comparison, the 2.7-mile Atlanta Streetcar loop cost about $98 million to build.
If Georgia’s public leaders truly want to make good on promises of embracing expanded transit options increasingly sought by both business leaders and commuters, then they should not allow a new lease of their own railroad to not include a firm option to permit future use by commuter trains.
