Warning: Costly Crossings

By LINDSAY PETERSON The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 27, 2007

State and local governments in Florida pay millions to railroad companies to inspect and repair warning signals at railroad crossings.

But they don't have to. It's the state's choice.

Florida has a "unique relationship with the railroad," said Gary Fitzpatrick, of the Florida Department of Transportation. "We pay for maintenance, … and they give us what I would say is very good service on our crossing traffic control devices."

But many states don't pay the annual fees - and some of them have better crossing safety records than Florida. The federal government requires railroads to maintain their crossings in every state, regardless of which ones pay, describing in detail how the companies should ensure that lights flash and gates go down when a train approaches.

In Florida, the fees cost taxpayers about $6 million per year, most of which goes to CSX Transportation. The companies don't report to the government agencies when they work on the crossings or what they do, so officials don't know what they're getting for the public's money.

This isn't the only questionable payment of tax money to CSX, the state's predominant railroad, based in Jacksonville. State and local governments in Florida pay the company millions each year to install crossings at public roads and for flagmen on road projects near CSX rails.

The company dictates the labor and material prices and doesn't document its costs to the agencies that pay the bills, The Tampa Tribune has reported. Governments that balk at the payments risk having a road or a road construction project shut down.

State lawmakers have called for inquiries into the flagmen costs.

"I have great concerns, especially when I see how much taxpayer money people are spending," state Sen. Mike Fasano said last month. Fasano, R-New Port Richey, is chairman of the Committee on Transportation and Economic Development Appropriations.

Asked last week about the maintenance charges, Fasano said he didn't know the state paid the railroads to take care of their signals. "You would think they would do that themselves, since it's their property," he said. "This is another issue and a question that we should ask the DOT. Why are we dishing out this money when we don't have to and other states aren't doing it?"

CSX complies with federal inspection regulations and considers signal inspection and maintenance "critical to public safety," the company said in a statement. It recovers part of its costs according to a schedule of fees worked out with the Florida DOT, the statement said. The company declined to answer questions about its relationship with other states that don't pay maintenance fees.

'Something We Have To Pay'

Florida has about 3,000 public crossings with signals designed to automatically go off every time a train approaches a road. Each one costs taxpayers about $935 to $3,570 a year, depending on several factors, including the size of the road, traffic volume and the number of tracks.

Who pays depends on whether the crossing is on a state, county or city road. The amount is almost always determined by agreements between the state and the railroads and written into each crossing construction contract.

From Ruskin to Keystone, Hillsborough County has about 140 railroad crossings with signals. Their annual maintenance fees cost the county more than $250,000 per year.

Signal maintenance in Pasco County costs its residents nearly $60,000 per year. In Tampa, the bill is more than $35,000. In Bartow, it's $21,000. This is on top of the $626,486 in annual fees billed to the Florida Department of Transportation for crossings on state roads.

"A lot of these agreements go so far back the guys who signed them are gone," said Paul Bertels, traffic manager for Clearwater, which pays about $28,000 per year for crossing maintenance. The costs carry over year to year. "A guy like me comes in and gets told, 'It's just something we have to pay.'"

He has no idea what the money goes for, he said. "We never receive anything showing if they were out there or what they did … We get the invoice, and we pay it."

"It's a predetermined thing that comes from Tallahassee," said Steve Valdez, Hillsborough County spokesman. "What we do is based on what the state has negotiated with CSX. We follow their lead."

The federal government has given states billions over the years to install and rebuild railroad crossings across the country. The money comes from a program created decades ago to enable the railroads to run their trains safely without stopping through growing cities and neighborhoods.

Federal regulations outline how the money is to be spent, and it doesn't include maintenance, said Doug Hecox, of the Federal Highway Administration. "That is the railroads' responsibility."

The regulations also state precisely what the railroads are required to do to ensure their signals work. Once a month, for instance, they must test the gates to see whether they go up and down as designed. Also once a month they are to test the flashing lights for visibility.

Officials in states that don't pay crossing maintenance fees cite the federal regulations to support their stands.

"It's been our position that the maintenance of crossing devices should be the responsibility of the railroad," said Mike Stead, Illinois rail safety administrator. "They're required to do it." And with more than 4,600 crossings with signals statewide, he said, paying for maintenance would cost too much. "We can't justify it."

"I believe they would like us to [pay for maintenance], but our policy is that the railroad is responsible," said Key Phillips of the Georgia Department of Transportation.

Several other states take the same position, including Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Kansas and Indiana. No one keeps track of which states pay and which ones don't. In addition to Florida, the states that do pay include California, North Carolina and Michigan, according to a random survey by the Tribune.

Federal regulations don't prohibit state and local governments from paying for crossing signal maintenance.

Florida DOT's rail office manager, Fred Wise, said he doesn't know how the maintenance payments got started in Florida, but the practice goes back at least to the 1970s. In the early '90s, the state made it official, Wise said, agreeing to pay half of what the railroads said it cost to maintain their crossing signals.

Four years ago, the state DOT took steps to strengthen the policy. State rules used to say only that Florida "may pay" for railroad crossing maintenance. But the rail office, under Wise, proposed replacing the "may" with a "shall," making the payments mandatory.

"It needed to be definitive," Wise said.

Paying for signal maintenance helps smooth the state DOT's relationship with the railroad companies, Wise said. "When they try to charge us fees for easements for utilities and other uses, we're able to hold them off because of our nonadversarial relationship."

Mostly, the fees ensure that the devices are well maintained, he said.

But officials have little proof of that.

They don't receive documents detailing when rail workers visited a crossing and what kind of work they did, whether it was replacing a light or putting up a new gate. That's because the state has agreed to pay the railroads in yearly lump sums. "They get paid if they have to go out there one time or two times or not at all," Fitzpatrick said.

The proof is in the government inspections, Fitzpatrick said.

Inspector Doesn't Do Own Testing

Florida has three inspectors who work throughout the state, but each year, they manage to visit less than 10 percent of the 3,000 crossings statewide. And when they do, it's in cooperation with railroads - the ones the government is supposed to be monitoring.

Inspector Henry Parrish, a former CSX employee, said the first thing he does before an inspection is contact the railroad and set up an appointment to work with a signal maintainer. "Where I go depends on what he's doing."

The railroad doesn't permit Parrish to conduct any tests on his own, said Ed Lee, state rail safety administrator. The railroad worker does all the testing while Parrish observes.

"I would request him to operate the gate mechanism. I would request him to flash the light units," Parrish said.

Following the same maintenance requirements that apply to the railroads, "we look at anything that pertains to the crossing … location of plans, security, standby power," Parrish said. "We look at track connections. We look at insulation joints. … If a train enters the approach, I time the train for accurate warning time."

Depending on train traffic, the process takes 45 minutes to three hours, he said.

Parrish then files an electronic report with the Federal Railroad Administration, detailing every defect, he said. Anytime a component doesn't work as designed, from a dirty light to a nonworking gate, it's considered a defect.

And though inspectors are spread thin, they find a lot of defects. Of 3,298 signal components looked at in Florida in 2006, they found defects in 36 percent, according to Federal Rail Administration records.

Several states that don't pay maintenance fees, including Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, had lower defect rates than Florida.

And the number of accidents stayed the same or went down in those states from 2000 to 2006. The numbers increased in Florida, from 15 to 18, during that time. The records include a variety of accidents, from a train hitting an abandoned golf cart to a train hitting a semi truck and killing the driver.

The records don't show whether any crossing defects were related to accidents. But a 2005 report from the federal DOT inspector general about accident reporting said more than 10 percent of the defects it examined were critical, meaning they could cause a warning device to fail.

The report said that from 2000 to 2004 inspectors found 69,405 crossing defects nationwide. Of those, 7,490 were "critical safety defects." The inspector general criticized the rail administration for recommending fines in only 347 of those cases.

Even though Florida has a 36 percent defect rate on its crossings, Wise and Fitzpatrick defended paying the railroads in annual lump sums, regardless of what kind of work they do.

Wise said it cuts the state's accounting expenses. It eliminates the need "to have a bunch of people with green eyeshades to look over the bills."

GOING UP

Florida allows CSX and other railroad companies to increase their annual signal maintenance fees regularly with inflation. The state has 12 railroad companies. CSX is the largest. Here are the fees for crossings on state roads.

Year	Fees
2000	$513,984
2001	$517,307
2002	$582,600
2003	$594,832
2004	$717,061*
2005	$606,717
2006	$626,486

*Note: The bigger increase this year was due to a one-time fee from CSX.

Source: Florida Department of Transportation

GOING UP

*Note: The bigger increase this year was due to a one-time fee from CSX.

Source: Florida Department of Transportation

Reporter Lindsay Peterson can be reached at (813) 259-7834 or lpeterson@tampatrib.com.