OP-ED
Opinion Editorials state the views solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the Community Journal.
By Patricia Grabow
For a train town with several at-grades and an underpass, you would think we might have a better appreciation for the significance of crossings, because in terms of planning our future, for all of our stumbles, we are still at one.
The reason I’ve often touched on our remarkable Livingston Growth Policy with its incorporations of “Smart Growth,” the handiwork of sixteen hundred citizens (a large fraction of our population), is because we’re still in a long process of where the rubber meets the road. Or for a railroad town—where the steel meets the rails.
And surprising as it might sound, it seems like one dimension of that as we move into this remarkable town’s future, might be the importance of healing further some of our relationship with the railroad, currently the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF).
The history of that relationship goes way back. In 1863 to 1868, the Bozeman Trail came through Livingston, and our first road was mapped officially in 1879. Then when Northern Pacific’s (NP) engineers came through with track in 1882 - 83, it crossed the Bozeman Trail, part of which is still visible today. One can see it by going out to the truck stop west of town and between the Egeland railroad crossing and the car sales shop across from PFL, right where the trains start really fighting to build on their momentum to tackle the pass. Sacrificing the small crossing here might help in negotiation for a smart overpass out of Northern Lights connecting with Highway 10 instead.
Livingston is not just another town along the way. We are the Northern Pacific’s baby, and thus close BNSF kin. In 1872, Northern Pacific along with Hayden Party members lobbied Congress to create the first national park in the world. The NP not only touted Livingston as its Yellowstone gateway, they named the town and various streets after company executives, and it stayed the NP until the BN and Amtrak days of the 70s.
Twenty beautiful hotels in Livingston, plus the third Livingston Depot, the major hotels of Yellowstone including Old Faithful, Canyon, and the remodel of Lake, were all built within about five years, between 1903 and 1908. The NP was there for it all, promoting Livingston and bringing tourists in up to six passenger trains a day. It was an amazing symbiotic relationship!
We were leagues beyond a whistle stop, and we could be so again.
Part of the NP’s commitment, beyond the Yellowstone connection, was that between our central location and seat at the base of the Rockies passes, we became home to the largest railroad shops between the Minneapolis/St. Paul end to the east and the Seattle/Tacoma end to the west.
The shops were central to the economy of Livingston for years. People like Warren McGee lobbied for almost ten years to fight the multi-line Burlington Northern merger around 1970 (the Santa Fe part came about fifteen years later). As feared, the shops eventually closed down, and Livingston went into a recession.
This was on top of the 1950s Interstate 90 routing that took us from waypoint to nearby point. Tourism was still our saving grace, but we then made highway contact with three points at least two miles from Livingston’s Central District. Ouch.
We limped out our recovery for years with the tourism that came, plus the Montana Rail Link jobs during the years they bought the lower-line trackage from the BNSF. But in the meantime, in the background, a remarkable organization went to important remediation work, the Park County Environmental Council. As many know, in earlier years, in their ignorance, the railroad shops had polluted the ground with solvents and unwittingly created a carcinogenic plume.
There was no dearth of heroes along the way to actually cleaning up the plume. In addition to state agents, local visionary PCEC directors like Steve Caldwell, Jim Barrett, and many others helped oversee a grounds cleanup. Given the area involved, it was a daunting task and probably felt like a mouse looking at eating an elephant: you had to just start somewhere.
Forward further along to a vote of the Livingston City Commission when I was last on it. We had made the decision to sue what had been in many ways the city’s parent who gave us much of our life, in order to clean up what had the potential to kill (probably more) people and destroy much of our land on the north side of town. We did sue, and three years later we had a cleanup that lasted almost eight years.
I think Livingston especially lucked out in a woman named Aimee Reynolds from the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. I attended every meeting regarding the plume cleanup for the eight years it was in full swing and saw this remarkable problem solver work day and night to achieve what seemed like an impossible task—and it cost Burlington Northern, who inherited the mess rather than creating it, a young fortune in addition to the $36 million settlement to clean it up, but give them credit, they did.
Which gets back to my earlier point, it is time to recognize what was done to rebuild with the BNSF in concrete ways, and for everyone’s benefit—see them as neighbor and partner again. A lot of groundwork was laid on which we can build in the future. And I mean that literally.
I’m still a bit of an urban planning geek, and I claim some credit in being a voice in recognizing that for example, we did not need to (in gross structural unwisdom) plan the destruction of Miles Park in order to give the Wellness Center a home. But that’s just part of the critical point in Livingston’s future as illustrated out in the Growth Policy. We seriously need to see the whole picture so it can benefit everyone.
There are now still something like twenty acres to the west of the Wellness Center site that are ripe for development, and owned, now after its purchase of MRL, by none other than the BNSF. They could be forgiven for, even after all that remediation, feeling hesitant to sell it, but this could be integral to Livingston’s future growth that could both contribute to Smart Growth and alleviate developers’ pressures on other farming and ag parts of town that don’t need to be in the crosshairs. You know, like the irony of that last ill-considered annexation for the Department of “Agriculture” back behind the Albertson’s area on Love’s Lane.
Ill-planned annexations like the PFL area I discussed before could choke and kill us like the dead zones around Columbus, and that’s serious. The subsequent farmland area grab out by exit 333 is only more flouting of the Smart Growth we worked hard to plan for, and especially after blunders like these, it will take more courage by our officials, some of whose seats are up again, to reinforce that spine and get serious.
Those twenty acres east of the Wellness Center, on the other hand, could be beautifully developed. The land is central and accessible, the infrastructure is in place, with a far shorter run to the treatment plant, and it is part of the city. The BNSF is likely to eventually sell the land at some point. Maybe sooner rather than later if Livingston is feeling the growth thing?
For the Growth Policy you almost couldn’t ask for a better fit.
If the BNSF feared for liabilities, there are ways to work with that, as there always have been since the earliest days of environmental reclamation. And having watched her in action, as I see it, if Aimee Reynolds and thus DEQ, declares completed reclamation tests habitable, I have full confidence it is.
If the time is not right now, it’s hard to imagine when. The land is flat, it’s well out of flood risk (unlike some annexations), and it has great views, infrastructure, park potential, and proximity to the Wellness Center. Heck, they could site the now-unlikely Suce Creek project into town instead, with much safer winter roads, and still get nice views. This could even afford the hospital a further housing resource at barely a stone’s throw or two away.
If we were smart, we’d have re-sited (or still could reconsider) that Department of Agriculture building with its sixty workers to a better place for them to grow instead, with the Wellness Center close by, instead of shoehorned into an obscure corner on the far side of the interstate, not to mention the one way road restrictions in that area, and taking down one of the more beautiful groves of trees in our community. Win-win, if we upped our IQ about it.
Then there’s the possibility that we could put the BNSF shops back to work in a non-polluting way, as I’ve touched on in past guest opinions for the PCCJ. And if you really get me steamed enough, maybe next time I’ll talk again about how to do what it takes to finally get serious (and I’ve been ranting about this for many years before I decided to toss a hat back into the city commission ring) about our overpass. It is an understatement that we do not seriously need another study of north side access. We’ve spent over a quarter of a million dollars on that already. It should not sound that crazy to finally listen to what the citizens on the north side of town have been saying.
Well, we’ve got three seats on the city commission open again this November, and at last count nine declared candidates. May (even if for at least another three months) people start getting that old-time railroad crossing religion all over again and finally realize that we can simply just get ‘er done.