Rail spur may run near Safford Airport
Written by jrood
At its May 24 meeting, the Safford, Ariz., City Council unanimously voted to instruct city staff to negotiate selling city land to the Arizona Eastern Railway so it can build a rail spur to the Safford copper mine, the Eastern Arizona Courier reports.
According to City Manager
David Kincaid, AZER has made a commitment to Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold
Inc. to build a railroad spur to bring sulfur to the Safford mine. He said the
proposed spur would branch off of an existing rail west of the San Simon Wash
and follow the wash north across the river. It would then traverse a big mesa,
private property and city of Safford property before it entered Freeport’s
property at the northwest corner of the mine site.
The piece of property
Safford owns that the spur would go through is just east of the Safford
Regional Airport.
Kincaid said the city would
have to go through an appraisal and auction to be able to sell the land to
AZER, and he recommended beginning the process because the spur would open up
new business and traffic for the area around the airport.
"In the transportation
world today, multi-mode is the buzzword, and if you can do multi-mode, you’re a
leg up on people that can’t do it. . ." Kincaid said. "Rail and air
in a single location certainly makes for a multimode situation."
Kincaid said the spur would
also open up the area around the airport to be utilized for industrial
commercial business.
AZER offered to pay the
city $5,000 for a one-year option to purchase a 100-foot-wide right-of-way
strip through the city’s land just east of the airport. The track would be
aligned so it would avoid the flight path protection zone, and if the railroad
decides to exercise its purchase option, it has offered to pay the city $5,000
per acre with the total land area to be determined by a survey.
