The fate of a proposed freight train line with a route that would cut through southern Lake and Porter counties is in the hands of the three-person Surface Transportation Board.
The federal agency will determine whether Great Lakes Basin Transportation's proposal for a 278-mile rail line from Milton, Wis., to LaPorte will move forward as proposed, be completed on an alternate route, or not constructed at all.
The agency's Office of Environmental Analysis will review more than 3,500 comments and documents submitted over the past few months and collected at meetings along the route. That office will put together an environmental impact statement on the proposed freight line, a project officials have said would take two to three years.
GLBT, led by founder and managing partner Frank Patton and company president Jim Wilson, is proposing the line as a bypass around Chicago's congested rail hub for up to 110 trains a day. Patton has said the $8 billion project would be privately funded.
Victoria Rutson, director of the OEA, said in May that Patton's proposal "is the biggest project we've ever had," with the next biggest being the 262-mile Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Railroad in the late 1990s. The environmental review for that rail line took four years. After a couple rounds of lawsuits, Rutson said, the railroad was eventually sold to Canadian Pacific Railway and the project ended.
GLBT's proposal has generated a wide swath of opposition across all three states where the freight trains would traverse, raising concerns about proximity to schools, loss of farmland, safety, drainage, and jeopardizing natural, cultural and historic sites.
Several people have proposed alternative routes using underused or abandoned rail lines, and the STB has set an Aug. 29 deadline for GLBT to submit an alternative of its own.
STB members are appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate for five-year terms, according to the agency's website. The current members are Chairman Daniel Elliott, a Democrat from Ohio; Vice Chair Deb Miller, a Democrat from Kansas; and Anne Begeman, a Republican from Virginia.
Elliott, in his second term on the board, is an attorney who previously served as associate general counsel for the United Transportation Union and also worked in private practice in Cleveland and Washington, D.C.
Miller is in her first term and previously was a senior consultant with Cambridge Systematics Inc., a firm specializing in transportation planning and police, primarily for public-sector clients.
Begeman, also in her first term, previously served as Republican staff director for the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, and on the staffs of two senators.
The STB, according to its Fiscal Year 2015 annual report, "is charged with advancing the national transportation policy goals enacted by Congress and promoting an efficient, competitive, safe and cost-effective rail network."
The board's primary focus is freight railroads, and it accomplishes its goals "by enabling railroads to earn adequate revenues that foster reinvestment in their systems, attract outside capital, and provide reliable service, while at the same time working to ensure that effective competition exists between railroads, and that reasonable rates exist where there is a lack of effective competition," according to the annual report.