TRANSPORTATION MKT: TROUBLE ON THE TRACKS

And now, it’s “’Katy Railroad, The Sequel!” Residents whose homes border the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad line in Dallas are bracing themselves for another chapter in their neighborhood horror story. Over the past decade, they’ve beaten back repeat-ed attempts to put some type of mass transit on the little-used railroad tracks through Oak Lawn and Turtle Creek. Now, they find themselves in battle again with the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Board, which is scratching its collective chin and wondering if it isn’t time to buck the neighbors, scrap the old agreements, and use the Katy for trains or a bus expressway. At a meeting in late October, a divided DART board agreed to restudy the Katy line.

The issue boils down to money. Supporters of the plan are sure that DART can build a rail line cheaper along the Katy than along North Central Expressway, where plans originally put the DART line. The MKT proposal has become a litmus test for both sides: would you please tell the court whether you’re in favor of financial prudence and saving money? Or are you for keeping promises and saving neighborhoods?

The idea of using the Katy has riled Highland Park. Turtle Creek, and Oak Lawn residents who live along the tracks. “They’re about to get into the most serious lawsuit in the history of government in North Texas,” promises attorney David McAtee, a former Dallas Plan Commission vice chairman whose home abuts the railroad tracks. McAtee warns that even if DART prevails in court, the line “will not be built in this century.”

Council member Jerry Bartos is one public official who believes the MKT should be drawn onto the DART map again. Bartos likes the idea of a “cut and cover” tunnel along the Katy-basically a box built in a ditch with a hiking and biking trail on its top. According to Bartos, highway engineers say the Katy tunnel would be far cheaper than a similar tunnel under Central. “I ask people, ’If you can’t hear it and you can’t feel it and you can’t see it, what is your objection?’ ” Bartos says. He presumes the DART study will favor the MKT route, “but we’ll never know unless we take a fair and unbiased look at it.”

Opponents, however, are adamant that DART trains on the MKT would be noisy, ugly, and intrusive-in short, not the sort of thing that encourages people to live and invest in inner-city neighborhoods. They insist that the savings promised by Bartos and others aren’t real because they don’t take into account the costs of delay, the money that would come from area businesses who want a DART station nearby, and the millions in federal grant dollars that DART may lose. (Congressman John Bryant has already blocked the first installment primarily because DART put the MKT issue back on the table.)

But more important than money is the precedent DART will set-whatever the decision. A vote to build a more expensive line along Central will anger the suburbs, who have complained that DART is wasting their money. If DART holds the Katy sacred, other neighborhoods will demand the same kinds of favors granted the well-to-do. If DART does decide to use the MKT, neighborhood groups will feel abandoned by the transit authority. Already there are charges of betrayal.

“There were promises made for the past ten years that were broken in one night,” says John Sartain, a Turtle Creek resident and former Park Board member, “promises that people used to make investments of time or money or families or residences. They were broken in one night.”