Administrator strikes back at critics

James Cordes defends county’s handling of public transportation

Lorain County Administrator James Cordes defended the county’s handling of public transportation July 31.

Lorain County Administrator James Cordes defended the county’s handling of public transportation July 31.

Cordes’ defense came in a rare response to public comment from Elyria resident Theresa Shea, who is a regular at the weekly Lorain County Commission meetings and often uses her three-minute address of the board to push them to bring more transportation options to the community.

Shea’s focus this week was on buses and trains.

“Once you, as a county, truly dedicate yourselves to (buses and trains), you will see Lorain County prosper,” she said. “The (July 28) open house at the Transportation Center helped people become excited about possibilities of old and new trains.

“You began a layer with the building and what you do with rentals and catering, but it needs to be completed with trains and buses.”

Shea connected the prevalence of crime in the community with the residents’ lack of connection with the outlying areas.

She also added that travelers’ first impressions of the county are colored by the conditions of a Greyhound bus stop in Elyria.

“The Greyhound bus stop has to have access to shelter and bathrooms,” Shea said. “It would only create terrible memories otherwise.”

Cordes’ response

Later in the meeting, Cordes used the tail end of his report to the commissioners to address some of these points.

He started with the Greyhound stop.

“Greyhound bus is a private company and I have repeatedly, over decades, tried to get Greyhound bus to live up to their responsibilities to their riders,” he said. “They don’t want to. They don’t want to pay for anything.”

Cordes said the transnational transportation company pays $100 a month to pick up and drop people off in the city.

“It costs us more than $100 a month just to clean up after the people waiting for the Greyhound bus,” he said. “And they reluctantly pay that.”

Cordes said the company has been “chased out” of parts of Elyria for 25 years and the city used to have a franchise there, but are no longer interested in franchising, doing electronic ticketing, building a shelter and they “refuse to have any courtesy for their riders here.”

The county would open bathrooms if the company would pay to have someone monitor them around the time the bus runs, but the company has refused, he said.

“The truth of the matter is, they’d plop on the side of the road,” Cordes said. “They don’t care.”

Trains

A short time later, Cordes turned his attention to trains.

The county attempted to bring Amtrak trains to the Lorain County Transportation, 40 East Ave. in Elyria, and even made the move of putting out for bids, but the project was derailed due to complications Cordes said were thrown up by Norfolk Southern, the company which owns the nearby tracks.

“It was greatly unfortunate the Norfolk Southern required us to do things that legally we could not provide,” he said. “And yes, the funding was cobbled together to complete that project.

“It took three years to cobble that money together, and they placed a barrier in front of us so significant we could not leap over it.”

Commissioner Matt Lundy then jumped in to say the failure of the project wasn’t “due to a lack of caring or any of those things.”

“Norfolk Southern can spin any tale they want,” Cordes added. “They can tell any tale they want. They can reinvent history any way they want. They can position themselves anyway they want. The fact of the matter is they kept searching for a way to prevent the project and they found it.”

Later in the meeting during Commissioner Lori Kokoski’s report, Cordes jumped back in to defend the county’s renovation of the Transportation Center.

“Let me point out that we were able to drag back 90 percent of the cost of (the center) from federal funds,” he said. “Back in the good ol’ days of pork barrel projects, if you didn’t have a project, that money went to another community that had a project.”

Pork barrel is a term referring to the practice of earmarking federal or state funds for local projects.

It is generally only used in negative contexts as these projects commonly were viewed as corrupt attempts to enrich communities.

“That building was falling down, decaying, falling over,” Cordes said about the Transportation Center. “The fields were rotted over there, overgrown, overrun with debris.”

There was an auto shop on one end of it with grease pits; it was a mess, he said.

“Quite frankly, it probably should have been torn down,” Cordes said.

He said the county was able to cobble together funds from the federal government and added parking lots and of all the funds expended, only 10 percent came from the county.

“We’ve been getting criticized because it’s not being used really as a transportation hub, but I’ll tell you, you had a fine federal project back in the 2000s or the 90s or that money went to another community that found a project like that,” he said. “And your community got nothing.”