State of South Dakota snubs tribes, will sell railroad right of way to Kansas polluter

South Dakota's rail board is made up of two Democrats and five members of the Republican American Nazi Party. A majority has voted to put all of the state-owned track up for sale.

Watco Companies owns some 43 shortline railroads in North America and Australia but in Chicago the firm has been accused of environmental racism after the US Environmental Protection Agency found high levels of manganese, lead and arsenic in the soil on the city's Southeast Side. Chicago is a notorious railroad bottleneck where spills of toxic materials are myriad. Based in Pittsburg, Kansas Watco's biggest customer is Koch Industries, a major campaign contributor to Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. 

After USEPA required Watco to install air monitors for manganese, the facility in February 2019 committed to stop handling unpackaged manganese. However, throughput data reported under a zoning change adopted in response to community pressure shows massive amounts of the neurotoxin moving through several other Southeast Side facilities. The monitoring data also shows significant spikes in manganese, indicating that harmful emissions are not under control despite USEPA’s enforcement actions and the City’s regulations. “If Lincoln Park had these levels of lead, arsenic or manganese, the Mayor would do everything in her power to fix it,” said Peggy Salazar, director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force. “When this happens in the Southeast Side or the West Side, no one seems to care about the consequences that our kids have to live with. We are calling for an end to environmental racism in Chicago.” [Natural Resources Defense Council]

Despite those revelations the State of South Dakota intends to sell the former Milwaukee Road right of way from Mitchell to Rapid City to Watco instead of deeding it back to the tribal nations signatory to the Fort Laramie Treaties of 1851 and 1868.

The move comes after catastrophic plunges in commodities prices, numerous wrecks and water breaches on track owned by Rapid City, Pierre and Eastern Railroad (RCPE), a subsidiary of Genesee and Wyoming operating just north of the former Milwaukee line on a nearly parallel trackbed. The Trump Organization's Department of Transportation headed by the wife of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has just awarded more than $5.6 million in grants to upgrade infrastructure and enhance rail safety in the red moocher state that is South Dakota including $2.24 million for the RCPE mainline.

Recall that in 1997 the perpetual welfare state received $23 million from taxpayers for going without Amtrak service then TEApublican former governor, Mike Rounds squandered it on an airplane for his personal use now Republican Governor Kristi Noem is using it to campaign for Herr Trump.

This blog spoke to a RCPE executive in 2015. She said that the line connecting Rapid City to Crawford and Dakota Junction, Nebraska is active and hauling bentonite south from Colony, Wyoming to the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway and to the Union Pacific but building two east-west rail systems exclusively for freight in South Dakota is lunacy. 

The same geology that thwarts RCPE along the Bad River from Fort Pierre to Wasta and forces engineers to rebuild I-90 between Reliance and Rapid City and I-94 between Mandan, North Dakota and Billings, Montana every year also makes construction of the Keystone XL pipeline untenable.

Photo: rail switch on the former Milwaukee Road at Stamford in occupied South Dakota.