Comment EI-24551
Received or sent (printed as 7/11/2016)
I oppose the building of the Great Lakes Basin Transportation railroad. Three generations of our family own 8 parcels of land, all of them impacted by this railroad at mile markers 149-151. There are 2 parcels directly bisected by the proposed railroad and 6 parcels all within 1/2 mile or less from the GLB route, for a total of approximately 700 acres. The farmland owned by our family has been appraised as excellent farmland with a high productivity indices ranging from 135-143/tillable acre. Corn production averages >200 bushels/acre. In the bisected parcels there is a major waterway and tiling throughout the land to facilitate drainage, maximize production, and lessen soil erosion which will be destroyed with the building of this railroad. Air pollution of diesel exhaust will negatively affect grain quality and production. Values of our land will be significantly reduced, as will the income from our farmland for decades to come. There will be a railroad crossing for our farm equipment to navigate on north/south Earlville Rd and a few hundred yards away another crossing to get across a bisected parcel of our land. As the railroad goes through our 2nd parcel of land it leaves an uneconomical remnant of land. Twenty thousand dollars/ acre as proposed by the GLBT to purchase our land does not come close to the losses we will see over decades from having a railroad go through our land or within such close proximity. There will be contamination of soil, water, and air just with the railroad operating 110 trains per day going up to 70 miles/hour. Vibration from this many trains going this fast will certainly be harmful to our computerized grain drying system we have as well as the concrete foundations of our storage bins. There is great concern with the probability, not possibility, but probability that there will be a derailment, spill, or explosion and the risks associated with that to the people, land, aquifers, animals, and the environment. Certainly the easy way for the GLB railroad is to go west with less population density. But lets go the environmental way. We can be engineering visionaries. We can find a solution using existing railroad routes where the environment and population have already been impacted for decades. Why take excellent farmland to repeat the same process, and have the same destruction.
Submitted by: Susan Savage · James R Savage Farms, Inc. · Geneva, IL
The Board publishes this comment in its environmental-comment table for this proceeding. It is quoted here as printed; nothing is inferred from it, and it states the commenter's own position in their own words, not this record's.
Permanent address docketyard.org/d/FD-35952/comment/EI-24551 · back to the docket sheet