Newsmaker of the Week: As several efforts for major highway infrastructure improvements are picking up speed in the Baton Rouge area, plans to enhance passenger rail service between the city and New Orleans were stopped in their tracks Thursday.
Baton Rouge Area Foundation Vice President John Spain confirmed to Daily Report that the city won’t be seeking a federal grant for the project.
A passenger rail between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is expected to cost some $260 million, most of which will likely have to come from federal funding, officials say.
Although the Federal Railroad Administration in July announced $318 million in grant funding through its CRISI program for 2018, Louisiana currently doesn’t have money available to meet a 50% match to make the effort worthwhile, says Louisiana DOTD Multimodal Commerce Commissioner Tommy Clark.
Elusive funding isn’t the only thing standing in the way of passenger rail plans. There are also operational issues to be worked out. The state doesn’t own the existing railroads on which the passenger service would run, so it has to negotiate with railroad companies—mainly Kansas City Southern, which owns the majority of the line.
This blow to the inter-city rail service plans comes just a few months after Mayor Sharon Weston Broome announced she wasn’t interested in pursuing a tram project between LSU and downtown.
Broome has instead been pushing for support for MoveBR, a 30-year, half-cent sales tax proposal that, if approved by voters in December, will be used to improve specific road projects throughout the parish. At the same time, a five-parish Capital Area Road and Bridge District has been tasked with finding a way to finance and build a new bridge across the Mississippi River.
Not applying for the federal grant for the railway to New Orleans gives the state more time to identify funds and apply next year, says Spain, who has long supported the passenger rail proposal.
But it’s uncertain whether the federal grants, through the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) program, will be available in 2019, Clark says.
With the region ramping up efforts to better roads, its seems less and less likely a passenger rail system will be built any time soon.
