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Recycling Railroads

“We’ve really been pushing for the last six years or so,” says Pam Beal to the gathered audience, referring to North Buffalo’s planned rail-trail. “And we feel a bit like Sisyphus—we keep rolling the rock up and it keeps coming back down.”

It’s easy to understand Beal’s frustration, especially when you realize that this deal has been in the works much longer than the six years she’s talking about. “I’ve been attending these meetings for 30 years,” one woman complains while introducing herself at last Wednesday’s (March 29) meeting of the North Buffalo Good Neighbor Planning Alliance (GNPA).

But now a sense of urgency has taken over the project to convert a wide, 2.5-mile-long swath of undeveloped former railroad property into a public bike trail, complete with pocket parks. That urgency is fueled by two things—federal funding and outside development pressures.

Five years ago, the city applied for and received $1.2 million in federal Congestion Mitigation Air Quality funding for the specific purpose of converting that former rail right-of-way into a trail that would benefit North Buffalo and link it to the rest of the region. The problem now is that none of the land belongs to the city. CSX Railroad Co. sold the land to the NFTA years ago. Though the NFTA retains rights-of-way access to all of the property, only a third of the land is still in its possession. It sold the other two thirds to developers in the past several years.

Recently Dave Gordon, owner of the 23-acre plot between Starin and Colvin Avenues, put it up for sale as a residential development, with the possibility of building up to 100 single-family homes and 23 two-family houses. Gordon, who purchased the land from the NFTA for $100,000, is offering the land for $2.5 million. At the same time, Natale Builders of Clarence has proposed a $40 million plan to build a mix of single-family homes, senior apartments and townhouses on the NFTA-owned land that stretches east to the LaSalle Metro station.

Now the GNPA is trying to find out how it can make up for lost time. How can they stop development on the NFTA-owned portion? How can they retain a decent right-of-way through Gordon’s land for the bike trail? “The bike trail’s a done deal,” says Beal. “There’s no question it will happen.”

The questions remaining are how soon, and where?

Many of those in attendance were frustrated with the NFTA, first for doing nothing with the land for years and then for selling it to developers, fully aware of the plans for a rail-trail. That’s a reason why the North Buffalo GNPA thinks that whatever it accomplishes with this rail-trail could become a model for other GNPAs and other Council districts. “You’ll find this in just about every Council district,” said one participant. “Abandoned land, abandoned railroads that have been given to the NFTA. I think it would be wonderful if we could turn all of these into connecting parks and parklands.”

The first order of business for the GNPA is to explore gaining control over the use of the NFTA’s 30-acre parcel. Several ways of achieving this were discussed, including the city taking title to the land—an unlikely occurrence given the city’s fiscal troubles—or the city re-zoning the entire strip and specifying what it can be used for. While a re-zoning plan is drawn up, the city could declare a moratorium on all development in the area.

Other topics discussed included environmental considerations, infrastructure costs of developing the land and the planned connection of the path to the Tonawanda bike path system by a northern spur of railroad right-of-way near Shoshone Park.

Councilmembers Bonnie Russell and Mike LoCurto of the University District and North District, respectively, were both present at Wednesday’s meeting, and both vowed their support and due diligence to the matter. At this point, the North Buffalo GNPA seems well on their way to finally bringing the North Buffalo rail-trail to fruition.

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