Eliminate STB, use common sense

It is time - way past time - for the Surface Transportation Board to be eliminated. The President and Congress can do it. The Department of Transportation should be charged with creating new rules, new oversite and a new system for approval of transportation mergers and acquisitions. The present STB was created when the American rail system was failing. Their function was to approve mergers and acquisitions to bail out railroads at taxpayer expense. It worked. Our railroads got healthy and prosperous. And, now, 50 some years later, it is still going on. It is like bailing out our lending institutions each year for the next 50. The STB in its rubber stamp incarnation gave approval for the CN to buy the EJ&E. The CN was not honest with the towns, the public or the STB. This Canadian company learned Illinois pay to play politics and bribed - called promised mitigation and jobs - ten towns to drop their opposition. They then told the remaining towns who had the backbone to stand up that all the money for mitigation is used up.

The STB was informed it was going on and did nothing. The STB's environmental study was shallow and incomplete. They did not conduct a real economic study because there was no specific law requiring it. They didn't look at rail lines further west that would have benefited American companies over a Canadian one. It wasn't required. Then, in their final recommendations, the STB put in enough "ought to"s, "should"s and "recommends"s to drive one of those 2-mile long CN trains through sideways.

Other than a couple of specific requirements, mitigation, train length and frequency, and safety and noise was left up to the CN's conscience (a true oxymoron). We need the courts to put this purchase on hold until transportation legislation moves into the 21st Century. Then, with new laws and, hopefully with the demise of the STB, a whole new equitable system of evaluating mergers and acquisitions can be put in place.

James Johnson

Trustee, Lake Zurich