'Inland Port' Stirs Dissent in Quiet Corner of Georgia
CRANDALL, Ga. — State officials want to turn a 42-acre cow pasture into a train-and-truck depot along a lovely stretch of U.S. 411 that abuts the Cohutta Wilderness Area near the Tennessee state line.
The proposed “inland port” site sits across the two-lane Georgia Scenic Byway from a park with baseball fields, an old brick church and a scattering of homes. Sumac Creek skirts two sides of the tract, while Grassy Mountain, 3,700-feet tall, looms over the Fairy Valley.
Opponents hope to gum up at least one link in the state’s strategy to build a network of inland ports to provide quicker access to the port of Savannah and world trade.
They’ve established a nonprofit to fight the project, hired an Atlanta attorney, enlisted environmental groups, created a Facebook page with 276 friends, convened town hall meetings and filed open records requests seeking evidence of official shenanigans in the site’s selection.
Supporters say the inland port will bring jobs, economic activity and reduce truck traffic, albeit mostly in metro Atlanta.
“We see this as an economic engine for that region,” said John Trent, a Georgia Ports Authority senior director who manages the Murray County project. “All indicators point to that north Georgia market, and that east Tennessee market, as being one of the fastest growing areas in the country over the next 10, 20 years from a business perspective.”
“We’re just a bunch of small town, country people here trying to fight CSX, the port authority and the governor of Georgia,” said Michael Jones, the postmaster in nearby Cisco who’s also president of North Georgia Citizens to Preserve the Environment.
“They wanted to slam it on us all at once hoping we’d suck it up and take it. But that didn’t work very well. We will continue the fight until it’s 100% up and running and even after that if we can.”
Gov. Nathan Deal joined local and state officials last July outside the century-old courthouse in Chatsworth to announce the $24 million inland port. Jobs and more jobs were promised for a region that got hammered in the Great Recession and still carries an unemployment rate, 7.4%, two points higher than the Georgia average.
Truck-train depots feeding ports are all the logistical rage these days. CSX Corp. operates 40 intermodal yards in the eastern U.S. including two in metro Atlanta. Not only do the yards take trucks off the interstates — the Crandall project is projected to keep 40,000 big rigs out of Atlanta each year — but retailers and manufacturers expect cheaper shipping costs.
The Georgia Ports Authority, or GPA, plans a half-dozen depots around the state’s periphery, most near interstates. A private depot in Cordele, in the heart of the Southeastern cotton and peanut belt, opened in 2011 near I-75. The Crandall port is a public-private venture, with the state kicking in $10 million, the ports authority $7.5 million and CSX $5.5 million. Work hasn’t started yet but the port is scheduled to open in 2018.
Trent expects between 10 and 20 full-time jobs. Hundreds of other jobs, though, are likely if warehouses, factories, truck stops, convenience stores, motels and other businesses join the depot along U.S. 411.
The ports authority also looked hard at a site in Dalton with adjoining CSX and Norfolk Southern lines. But the estimated $50 million to $60 million cost to turn the Dalton site into an intermodal yard proved prohibitive, Trent said.
But Kristin Seay, a CSX spokeswoman, said the Crandall site wasn’t chosen to augment traffic on the Etowah Line that runs from Atlanta north into Kentucky coal country. No additional trains will be run to accomodate the inland port, she added, referring site selection questions to the ports authority.
Opponents say Atlanta’s gain — 40,000 fewer trucks — is Murray County’s pain.
“Those trucks have to go somewhere and that will be here,” said Jones, 65, the postmaster who once owned a trucking company.
All roads in the northern part of the county are two-lane. Truck-heavy Interstate 75 is 20 miles away. Jones and others expect a number of blacktops to be four lanes one day, especially if the depot attracts factories, warehouses and truck stops. GPA lists about 30 parcels of land — totalling 3,000 acres — available for development along U.S. 411.
“It will be like Fulton Industrial Boulevard through here,” said Greg Cockburn, whose family settled near Cisco in the 1840s. “Murray County has some of the most beautiful mountain lands in the Southeast and they want to turn it into an industrial park.”
The citizens group has enlisted hydrologists to determine whether the depot might let spilled diesel or chemicals enter the groundwater and, eventually, the nearby Conasauga River. Last year the Conasauga earned the state’s first “outstanding” waterway designation for environmental protection.
“We’re really concerned about storm-water runoff from the site; it’s in a really sensitive watershed,” said Gil Rogers, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Atlanta. “And this is certainly not a project that seems in keeping with the purpose of the Cohutta wilderness designation.”
Wilderness areas are federally protected lands where logging is prohibited and outdoor activities encouraged.
Trent says measures will be taken to prevent runoff. An earthen berm and tall fence will also surround the depot which will deploy 60-foot gantry cranes to move containers between trucks and trains.
“Anytime there is change there is always opposition and some level of discomfort,” said Brittany Pittman, the county’s sole commissioner. “But in order to provide a better future we have to move forward and diversify our industry. This is a great way to do that.”
