Wisconsin temporarily halts work on train project

Written by jrood

The Wisconsin Department of Transportation has told contractors on the high-speed rail line between Madison and Milwaukee to stop work on the federally funded project "for a few days," in the wake of rail opponent Scott Walker's victory in the governor's race, Transportation Secretary Frank Busalacchi said Nov. 4, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

But contractors
immediately started talking about laying off employees, and Milwaukee Mayor Tom
Barrett hinted the city could consider legal action if a permanent shutdown of
the line shortens the life of a Spanish-owned train manufacturing plant on the city’s
north side.

"At the governor’s
request, I have asked contractors and consultants working on the high-speed
rail project to temporarily interrupt their work for a few days,"
Busalacchi said in a written statement, referring to outgoing Democratic Gov.
Jim Doyle. "In light of the election results, our agency will be taking a
few days to assess the real-world consequences, including the immediate impacts
to people and their livelihoods, if this project were to be stopped."

The move follows the election
of Walker, the Milwaukee County executive, as governor. During the campaign,
Walker, a Republican, repeatedly vowed to kill the planned
$810-million train
line
. He will take office
Jan. 3.

Even with the federal
government picking up the line’s full construction cost, Walker has said he
doesn’t want state taxpayers to pay operating costs, projected at $7.5 million
a year, starting in 2013. A state transportation official has said state
taxpayers’ share could be as little as $750,000 a year, if federal aid covers
90 percent of operating costs, as it does for Amtrak’s existing
Milwaukee-to-Chicago Hiawatha line.

Speaking to reporters at
the Capitol on Thursday, Walker said he hadn’t received confirmation of the
administration’s move.

"Certainly, for us,
we’ve been pursuing legal options between now and Jan. 3 that would allow us to
try and slow down if not stop the train. Certainly there’s some optimism if
that turns out to be true," Walker said.

Contractors confirmed
they had been told to stop work, and some worried they might have to lay off
employees if the job grinds to a permanent halt. Construction employment on the
line was
projected to peak at 4,732 jobs in 2012, with 55 permanent jobs to
operate and maintain trains, stations and tracks.

"They just said,
‘We’re going to stop it for now and we’ll see how it goes,’" said
Abdulhamid Ali, president of DAAR Engineering, which has a $2.8-million
construction management contract for the railway. Ali said he was told to stop
the work in a one-sentence e-mail from the state Transportation Department.

DAAR "will be laying
off at least two people with families" immediately, another company
spokesman said.

Pat Goss, executive
director of the Wisconsin Transportation Builders Association, said state
transportation officials also told contractor Edward Kraemer & Sons to halt
work on building a five-mile stretch of track in Jefferson County.

At Talgo, the Spanish
train company, the announcement won’t mean immediate layoffs, but it casts a
pall over the future of the plant on the former Tower Automotive property, said
Nora Friend, a Talgo vice president. Talgo has contracts to build two trains
for the Hiawatha and two trains for Oregon. It was hoping to build trains for
the Milwaukee-to-Madison line as well but was told the state has put the
request for proposals for those trains on hold, Friend said.

The company has already
hired about 40 people for its current contracts and plans to have a total of
125 on board by next year, Friend and Barrett said. If it had won contracts to
build trains for the Milwaukee-to-Madison line and for other states, it would
have kept the plant in operation beyond 2012 and expanded, they said.

Barrett said the city had
invested more than $3 million in buying and renovating the part of the Tower
property that Talgo is using, in the belief "this would provide employment
for many years." The mayor, who lost to Walker in Tuesday’s election, said
he would be consulting with City Attorney Grant Langley about the city’s
options if the project were halted. But he stopped short of directly
threatening a lawsuit.

A source with knowledge
of the decision-making process said the state made the final call to suspend
the decision, but that federal rail officials had let them know they were not
eager to get into a protracted dispute with Walker. The reluctance came from
bureaucrats in the Federal Railroad Administration and not the White House, the
source said.

Plans call for the rail
line to operate as an extension of the Hiawatha, and eventually to be extended
to the Twin Cities, as part of a larger Midwestern network of fast, frequent
trains.

At the same time Walker
won the governor’s office, voters handed his fellow Republicans control of both
houses of the Legislature. Many of them have been critical of the rail plan,
and state Rep. Robin Vos (R-Racine), the Legislature’s most vocal opponent of
passenger rail, is poised to become Assembly co-chairman of the powerful Joint
Finance Committee.

But the weekend before
the election, state and federal officials
quietly signed a
deal
to commit the state
to spend all of the $810 million in federal stimulus money allocated for the
project. Transportation officials did not announce the weekend deal but
confirmed it after the Journal Sentinel learned of it.

Walker blasted that deal,
and Barrett said the state should have been more transparent in its dealings.
The mayor said he supported a temporary delay in the work to allow more public
discussion of the impact of a permanent halt.

It is not clear how difficult
it would be for Walker to legally extract the state from its commitment. He has
said he would urge Congress to let Wisconsin keep the money and spend it on
roads and bridges, and he reiterated that stand Thursday.

"The whole reason we
made a point of raising our concerns about this is I don’t want the taxpayers
of this state to be stuck with a bill of $7½ (million) to $10 million a year
when we have roads and bridges that need to be fixed," Walker said.

Without an act of
Congress, however, federal rules would require the state to repay the federal
government for any money already spent on the project and give up all the
unspent money if the rail line doesn’t go forward. Doyle and his fellow
Democrat, Barrett, have said Walker was misleading voters by suggesting
Wisconsin could keep the federal money, instead of seeing it redistributed to
other states’ rail projects.

Barrett repeated those
comments Thursday. He said he saw no chance of the money being spent on
Wisconsin roads if the train line is halted, and the best alternative to
sending it to other states would be to use it to reduce the federal deficit.

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