Ethanol by Rail Fuels Concerns

A handful of eastern Travis County residents last week aired their concerns about ethanol potentially being delivered to Austin along rail lines running near their homes and expressed frustration with what they described as poor communication from Capital Metro about the project.

The question isn't whether ethanol, the corn-derived auto fuel, will be delivered to the Flint Hills storage facility on Johnny Morris Road, in a thinly populated area – it's already going there, sent by truck, Capital Metro Freight Rail Manager Charlie DeWeese told the 26 people who attended the Aug. 11 public hearing at the nearby Gus Garcia Middle School.

The owners of the Flint Hills facility have requested rail service, and Cap Metro owns the adjacent tracks (a line it hopes to someday use for commuter rail service to Elgin). DeWeese said the rail option would be safer and cleaner. He said federal rail stats show rail transport to be "almost 10 times safer" than truck, and the switch to rail would replace 45 to 50 tanker trucks on area highways each weekday with only four to five rail shipments a month, with 75% less greenhouse gas emissions.

More importantly, DeWeese said, Cap Metro has no choice – the federal common carrier law requires railway owners to serve any shipper making a "reasonable request" for delivery.

The Cap Metro board of directors held the hearing at the request of Travis County Pre­cinct 1 Commissioner Ron Davis, who two decades ago, as a community activist, was a leader in the fight to expel another fuel storage tank farm from East Austin residential areas. Davis and others didn't necessarily question Cap Metro's obligations but wanted to know about evacuation plans in the event of a derailment and questioned why area residents hadn't heard about the proposal to switch to rail earlier; some residents said turnout at the meeting might have been higher if it had been better publicized.

"I'm not here to support or be against this project, because I don't really know enough about it," said Phil Tate, city manager of Manor, through which the rail line runs. "I guess my biggest disappointment is that this is the first time we've known about the project. We did not, as a member city of Capital Metro, know what was going on." Tate noted that the half-mile evacuation zone around the line "would mean the whole city of downtown Manor. I can't speak for our fire department, but we have four poorly paid firefighters, and if an accident happens, I'm not sure they're capable of handling it."

Austin Mayor Pro Tem and Cap Metro board Chair Mike Martinez replied, "The actual public process hasn't even begun," and the only governmental body making a decision will be Travis County, when it approves a site application. Of course, given the limited powers of county government, the commissioners may not have the power to reject it if it meets legal requirements. When the time comes for the county to consider the site plan, Davis told the Chronicle, "We'll look at all the bits and pieces" in hopes of "mitigating" its impacts.