Like many other residents I always believed that the train track running through Stuart was part of our city’s charm. The few freights running were sometimes a pain but as I waited at a crossing it was quite manageable. I would listen with a certain fondness to the whistle almost nostalgically for an earlier America as the train rumbled through at night.
But I no longer view the train track running through our city with charm. Nor when caught now at a crossing waiting for what seems to be an interminable amount of time am I so placid. And the night whistle of the rumbling freight is now not nostalgic to my ears. For I foresee a time when emergency vehicles can’t get through or boat traffic is paralyzed. For now I realize that what I thought was small town charm can possibly destroy much of what Stuart has accomplished in the past 30 years.
“All Aboard Florida” or FECI or FEC or The Fortress Group or whatever they create and call their selves tomorrow is taking away 108 parking spaces from downtown. Increasing the amount of money we need spend to maintain crossings. With the additional track we probably will have to reroute traffic in places and loose turns and create a real confusion at confusion corner.
The worst however is what we don’t know. How much more will the freight traffic increase in the years to come? We hear about the Panama Canal doubling. The Port of Miami and Fort Lauderdale are expanding and the opening of Cuba in the coming years could be a factor. The company is using our tax dollars in the form of federal loans to lay that entire new track. It is as if we are giving them the very means to affect the damage they will do to us.
“Big Cho Cho” and their political allies are telling us how little power, we on the Treasure Coast have to stop them. The governor and maybe the president and his administration is all for this. Well this is not a party issue. It is as nonpartisan as something can be. This will affect our property and our quality of life. Al of us need to be of one voice and mind and prevent this travesty from occurring.
Stuart is celebrating its 100th birthday and Flagler’s railroad was instrumental to our early growth. But we do not live in late 19th or early 20th century Stuart or Florida or America. An entire modern state with millions of people have grown up around the tracks that ceased to be anything more but a charming nostalgic sight with a few rumbling freights fifty years ago. You can’t now try to bring back an earlier business model and devastate the surrounding communities.
I have no doubt that you will take the appropriate step tonight. For what tonight symbolizes is a mark of solidarity with all our Treasure Coast communities and a determination to fight for what is right. This resolution in this fight, to quote a much more polished and gifted person than I, is “not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.