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ASLEEP AT THE SWITCH: TRESTLE DEM{>LITl£>N
PUfcCBEOED WITH C<>MMIS^I^N UNINEi>1tMED
T his much is known: in a closed-door
meeting on July 5, the Athens-Clarke
County Commission decided not to
pursue the purchase of historic downtown
rail trestles, clearing the way for their demo
lition. How it was allowed to happen—with
no public input—is open to interpretation.
Workers were well on their way to com
plete dismantling of the trestles before
public outcry prompted Mayor Doc Eldridge
to try to stop them. The morning of July 17,
Eldridge sent an e-maii to ACC Manager Al
Crace, asking Crace to get CSX
Transportation representative Ralph
Pressley to hold off. Eldridge took action “to
give us another opportunity to visit it" at the
Mayor and Commission’s July 18 agenda set
ting session.
“This thing is starting to take on a life of
its own,” Eldridge says.
The trestles, built in the late I9th Century
along the rail line to Winterville and beyond,
stretched over Dudley Park, the North
Oconee River and North Avenue. They were
part of a l.9 mile section of line officially
abandoned by CSX in 1998. In addition to the
collective aesthetic and historic value of the
structures, the Dudley Park trestle gained
worldwide notoriety after it was featured on
the back cover of R.E.M.’s first LP, Murmur.
According to documents obtained by
Flagpole, the ACC government has
known about CSX’s plans to abandon the
rail line since 1995. In a July 5. 2000,
memorandum to Mayor Eldridge and the
ACC Commission, Crace indicated that
he has been in contact' with Pressley
over the last five years “regarding aban
doned rights of way in Clarke County."
On June 29, 1998, Planning Director
John Stockbridge sent a letter to the
Surface Transportation Board in
Washington, D.C., officially declaring
Athens-Clarke’s interest in acquiring the
line for possible use as a bicycle/pedes
trian path or for the planned Multi-
Modal Transportation Center. Copies of
the letter were forwarded to Crace. ACC
Deputy Manager Bob Snipes and
Pressley.
Crace’s July 5 memo quotes CSX’s ^
initial asking price for the land along the 2
line—approximately 32.5 acres—at $4.7 ®
million, and says that Crace believes ®
CSX will “work in a positive fashion to o
arrange the terms for the payments >
over time and to assist in seeking any !
Rails to Trails or other federal program
money over the next 3 to 6 years to consum
mate this purchase.”
The memo says the steel bridges located
at North Avenue and Peter Street “must be
removed.” The two bridges had already been
sold to a demolition company and were in
the process of being torn down the day the
memo was written. Crace does not indicate
in the memo the condition of the bridges or
why they should not have been considered
for purchase.
The trestle connecting East Broad Street
with Dudley Park is described as being “basi
cally sound." The remaining trestle, con
necting Dudley Park with the Poplar Street
area, had “serious structural problems,"
some resulting from a fire set by “vandals,”
the memo says.
“The CSX representatives have asked the
contractor to delay removing the wooden
bridges to the end of this project to allow a
few days for ACC to consider if we would like
to purchase the bridges," Crace wrote.
A June 30, 2000 letter from Pressley,
attached to Crace’s memo, offers to sell the
trestles to the county for a total of $25,000.
“I have talked to our people in
Jacksonville and we have temporarily
stopped the demolition of the three (3)
bridges in the line," Pressley wrote. “We will
not be able to hold-up on this for very long
since the contractor has his people in the
area."
“The first I knew of the demolition of the
bridges was on June 30," says Mayor
Eldridge. Since word got ou», Eldridge says,
“1 have been getting e-mails from people lit
erally all over the world,” primarily con
cerning the Murmur trestle.
Eldridge says he was unaware of ongoing
discussions between Crace and Pressley
until he received the July 5 memo, in which
Crace listed eight issues for the Commission
to consider prior to its decision, including
the condition of the trestles, long-term main
tenance costs, costs of installing a deck for
bicycles and pedestrians, and the landmark
importance of the trestles.
No mention was made of the trestles
when the Mayor and Commission met for
their monthly work session the evening of
July 5. A hand-written notation on Crace’s
memo indicates the Commissioners decided
in an executive session that night that they
had “no interest" in the trestles, but that
they would continue to pursue the right of
way.
Executive sessions of the Mayor and
Commission are closed to the public and the
media. They are permitted under state law
for discussion of real estate transactions in
order to keep land values from being artifi
cially inflated.
The asking price for the trestles and the
right of way was already public record, how
ever, as was Athens-Clarke’s interest in
acquiring the rail line.
Eldridge says neither he nor the
Commission knew the trestles would be dis
cussed in the July 5 executive session until
Crace distributed his memo, and that the
Commissioners acted on the advice of the
Manager’s office when they decided against
saving them. Crace did not provide the
Commission with any figures regarding cost
of maintenance of the trestles or securing
them from the public before they could be
converted, Eldridge says.
Eldridge says asking CSX for more time
was a possibility at that point, but, “The
manner in which it was presented during the
executive session was, in essence, ‘They’re
already here in town demolishing the
bridges; we think it will be cost prohibitive
for us to acquire it. "
Athens resident Carl Jordan says it was
wrong for the Mayor and Commission *o
decide the issue in private, whether or not
they had notice.
"You need to distinguish between ques
tions of policy and questions of action or
implementation of policy. And if you’re dis
cussing policy in executive session, then
that’s an abuse of that privilege, and cer
tainly inappropriate.”
Jordan continues: “This community and 1
have been assured time and time again that
the county would secure this transportation
corridor. You can’t have a corridor without a
way to connect its segments."
Any “reasonable individual" would
assume the trestles were part of the right of
way, he says.
jordan is currently running for the
District 6 seat on the ACC Commission, now
occupied by Marilyn Farmer. Farmer could
not immediately be reached for comment.
A July 7 Athens Daily News article quoted
Mayor Eldridge as saying the county plans to
replace the trestles with prefabricated steel
structures “at a much lower cost."
In an e-mailed statement, Michael Hall,
president ol the Friends of Oconet^Morgan
County Trails, told Flagpole: “I’m glad to see
that ACC is actually moving forward on this
Rails-to-Trails project... The East Athens to
Winterville Rd. [trail] was part of the overall
plan 1 hope we car. one day achieve.
“ACC assessment of the trestles, which I
believe was actually a CSX assessment, is a
hard one for me to understand. I have seen
many old trestles used for Rail Trails and
many were older than these two trestles. I’m
sure they would need a lot of repair to with
stand train loads, but not pedestrian loads. I
have never seen new prefabricated pedes
trian bridges used on a rail trail, because the
old trestle^ served the need.”
Crace was away on vacation at presstime.
According to Deputy Manager Snipes, the
Manager’s office never ordered an evaluation
of the trestles for possible use as a bicycle
and pedestrian trail, nor did it do a cost
analysis on retrofitting or maintenance.
“All of our staff have plenty of things to
do everyday that are known, pressing issues
of the community," Snipes says. “So we
didn’t send people out to do something on
speculation of something that might happen.
We anticipated more notice, frankly, than we
got. In hindsight, and with unlimited
resources, that may have been something
we wish we would have done. But the fact is
that we had many other things that all of cur
staff were engaged in, and we didn’t do it."
In 1998, CSX estimated the cost to refur
nish the trestles for rail use at $380,000.
Commissioner John Barrow was inter
viewed by Flagpc'le before Eldridge’s July 17
e-mail to Crace. Barrow, an attorney, said
that even if the county bought the trestles, it
would not own the land on which they were
built, and, in addition to liability issues, the
county would be responsible for moving the
trestles or tearing them down if someone
else acquired the right of way.
Barrow said Crace’s office has kept the
Commission informed regarding the right of
way, but he pointed out that the trestles,
under federal law, are a separate issue. While
Athens-Clarke can—and did—exercise its
right to negotiate for the right of way, no
such rights exist for improvements, such as
railroad trestles, Barrow said.
“It seems to me that if the railroad had
wanted to, they could have held off on the
destruction of the trestles until after we
could have made it all part of a package
deal," Barrow said. “But they have to be the
judge of how much of an asset they want to
keep and how much of a liability they want
to maintain in the meantime."
CSX’s Pressley said on Friday, July 14 that
he could have postponed or stopped demoli
tion at any time.
“The city indicated that they didn’t want
the bridges," Pressley says. “We start doing
what we need to do, and everybody gets
up in arms all of a sudden about it,
saying we’re the bad guys. We’ve got a
business to run, and if the city had
wanted those things—1 mean they’ve
had three or four years to say ‘hey, let’s
strike a deal on them ’ And we start
taking them down, and all of a sudden
the citizens start calling and they go,
‘Oh, we better take a look at this.’"
There is evidence to suggest the
county never planned on keeping the
trestles. An unsigned, undated impact
assessment of the CSX line on city plan
ning says access to Dudley Park “would
be improved over the long run due to
the fact that some of the trestles
restricting access to the park could be
removed.” A hand-written note in the
margins reads: “Would CSX remove the
trestles?"
“I'm not aware of anything that tells
me that anyone on the government side
of things thought of the trestle as being
anything other than an obstruction to
the bike path, and that the development
of a good multi-use trail through there
would require that the trestle be
removed,” said Commissioner Barrow. “I
think that’s the assumption that everyone’s
been working under.”
“I think the staff people in the city said,
‘Hey, this is going to be a huge responsibility,
and I don’t think we want them. We can put
up replacement bridges a lot cheaper than
we can maintain the old bridges,’” says
Pressley. “They probably could have had
them for nothing it they’d wanted to nego
tiate down to nothing for them, but they
decided that they didn’t want them. That’s
all 1 know."
“I can see how folks are really upset that
we didn’t save the trestle," Barrow said, “but
the right of way, w'e’ve got that. I’m trying to
look at the glass as half full. It may be that
the glass is more full without the trestles.
We’ll never have a chance to really know
because of the way this has worked out, and
that’s a tremendous lost opportunity."
At presstime Monday, July 17. demolition
work was still proceeding and the Murmur
trestle was partially demolished.
Brad Aaron
Staff writer Geoff Carr contributed to this
article.
JULY 19, 2000 FLAGPOLE D