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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