Bellingham Comments from Digital Recorder - EISs for the Proposed ...

GATEWAY PACIFIC TERMINAL EIS SCOPING HEARING VOL. II
COURT REPORTER: BETH DRUMMOND PROCEEDING DATE: October 27, 2012
Page 83
1 I'm speaking as a representative for people who
2 live in an area that stands to see no economic benefit of
3 this proposal, and stands to lose potentially a lot.
4 In Skagit County, we're a collection of small
5 communities, many of which are transected by the railroad
6 tracks. We don't have the existing railroad grade
7 separations that would be needed to mitigate the traffic
8 congestion problems that an additional 18 trains a day that
9 would cause something alluded to by the previous speaker.
10 And we belong to over 100 communities from here
11 to Eastern Montana and Wyoming, which stand to be divided
12 into right-side and wrong-side-of-the-track communities.
13 These would be divided depending on where you live, compared
14 to where the schools, hospitals, workplace and business
15 places that you frequent are.
16 I respectfully ask that you include in your
17 analysis what it would cost, what it would take, to build
18 the infrastructure -- which none of these communities
19 currently have -- that would be needed to maintain our local
20 economies and qualities of life, and where that money would
21 come from.
22 A single overpass, I'm told, can cost 10 to 50 --
23 that's $50 million -- the vast majority of which would land
24 on tax taxpayers' shoulders.
25 One of our citizens recently asked a terminal