WASHINGTON — The location of one of four in-person public meetings to comment on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Canadian Pacific-Kansas City Southern merger has been changed, the Surface Transportation Board has announced.
The meeting set for Sept. 15, 2022, at 6 p.m. CDT will now be held at the Downtown Event Centre, 700 Crockett St., Beaumont, Texas.
The other meetings remain unchanged: Sept. 12 in Itasca, Ill.; Sept. 13 in Davenport, Iowa; and Sept. 14 in Excelsior Springs, Mo. Details on those meetings, as well as three planned online meetings, and the form to submit comments online, are available at this web page.
The draft report, released earlier this month, determined there would be few negative environmental impacts from the merger [see “STB draft review finds little environmental impact …,” Trains News Wire, Aug. 5, 2022]. The full Draft Environmental Impact Statement is available here.
The one at Itasca should be a doozy. Hopefully, someone will inform local appointed and elected officials, if they don’t already know, that the railroad through town is owned by Metra but dispatched by CP. They may ask how that happened; That the commuter railroad owns and is responsible for all engineering functions but a foreign national freight railroad controls train operations. Perhaps they’ll demand the train dispatching be conveyed to where it belongs, at Metra’s dispatching center.
That will be me selling bottled water, popcorn and tshirts outside each one. 🙂