City agrees to pact with train company
Passenger rail line and city officials come to non-binding agreement
WOONSOCKET – The fledgling Boston Surface Rail Company and the city have signed a preliminary agreement to form a federal grant-sharing agency, but some members of the City Council are complaining they were improperly excluded from having a say in the deal by members of Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt’s administration.
Council Vice President Jon Brien said recently he intends to introduce a resolution at the council’s first meeting in January to rectify the situation.
“It shows an ongoing pattern on behalf of this administration, the City Council is treated as an impediment that’s to be disregarded,” Brien said during a meeting recently. “It’s no way to run the city.”
At issue is a memorandum of understanding that would establish a financial oversight committee that would allow the city to receive up to 10 percent of federal “formula” grants awarded to BSRC, headquartered in One Depot Square. BSRC proposes establishing commuter rail service from Providence to southern New Hampshire and had already reached similar agreements with officials in Worcester and Lowell, Mass., and Nashua, N.H.
Woonsocket’s agreement actually did have one signatory from the seven-member council – Councilman Christopher Beauchamp. City Solicitor John DeSimone and Asst. City Solicitor Peter Wasylyk also signed the pact earlier this month.
Speaking during a meeting on Dec. 18, Beauchamp said it was “ludicrous” of Brien to suggest that the administration had left the council out of the information loop on the status of the agreement. He said the administration had provided copies of the proposed agreement to every member of the council beforehand and the solicitor made a determination that full council approval was unnecessary because the MOU is non-binding.
However, Beauchamp said if anything more substantial develops to solidify the need for a financial oversight committee, the council would have to revisit the concept and the full panel would have to decide whether to move forward at that time.
“This is just the first step,” Beauchamp said. “What is there now is just an understanding that we’re going to have a further conversation. That’s what it is.”
BSRC founder and president Vin Bono said Woonsocket wasn’t alone among the four cities that approved virtually identical MOUs in recent months to do so without the involvement of its legislative authorities.
“I can say that for our part it didn’t seem out of place since Worcester also didn’t go before its council,” Bono said. “We had sent drafts of the MOU to Councilors Beauchamp, (Melissa) Murray and (James) Cournoyer over the last few months and both the city solicitor and his assistant said that we didn’t need to go before the council, which I would have been happy to do since the council has been very supportive of the project.”
Bono said the BSRC’s lawyers also opined that approval of the MOU was harmonious with the City Charter because it’s a non-binding agreement that the city can opt out of with no strings attached at any time. Echoing Beauchamp, Bono said full council approval could be needed in the future if his vision of resurrecting the city as a hub for commuter rail in the region moves closer to reality.
“I can’t speak to the interactions between the mayor and the council in general but at least in our case I don’t think the mayor had any intentions of circumventing the council’s authority in any way or keeping them out of the loop,” Bono said.
Founded in 2013 as the “Jet Blue” of commuter rail, Bono initially conceived of the BSRC as as a $3 million, privately-financed project with a handful of rail cars serving a Worcester-Woonsocket-Providence loop, primarily as an alternative to Route 146, a stretch of road that’s plagued by bottlenecks, potholes and hairpin ramps designed for the vehicles of yesteryear.
But in July Bono announced that he’d expanded the footprint to take advantage of certain federal railroad subsidies and better leverage private capital that various investors are prepared to pour into the project. Startup costs are now closer to $65 million.
The MOU is associated with the Federal Transportation Administration’s Urbanized Area Formula Grants program, which could potentially bring in up to $10 million a year to underwrite the operations of BSRC. As a freestanding, private company, however, the BSRC would be ineligible to compete for the money – it must form financial oversight committees that include officials of various communities that would receive commuter rail service from BSRC to receive the grants.
In return for serving as conduits for the grants, Bono proposes allowing the communities to keep up to 10 percent of the proceeds, a figure that could boil down to about $250,000 a year for the city. The money must be used for infrastructure improvements associated with the railroad, but Bono said there is plenty of wiggle room for recipients to develop projects of broad public benefit.
If all goes according to plan, it could be a year or more before BSRC begins running its first cars, but Bono says he’s making steady progress.
As the new year looms, Bono said he is getting ready to meet with officials from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation to negotiate the use of tracks it controls in the Central Massachusetts area. Also, he said, he is scheduled to meet with Genessee & Wyoming, which controls much of the track BSRC would use in this region, to discuss Positive Train Control, or PTC.
An automatic braking system for trains, PTC was in the news again on Dec. 19 after a deadly passenger train derailment outside Seattle. Under federal law, Bono says BSRC wouldn’t have to be equipped with costly PTC until it’s running at least a dozen trains a day, but Genesee & Wyoming may want it sooner.
Bono said federal grants are available to assist rail companies acquire PTC technology, so “it’s possible for us to get it sooner rather than later.”