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player ready...Funding commitments from government agencies – including most Lake County cities and towns — have brought the proposed West Lake commuter rail project closer to reality.
Private investments also will be crucial to make West Lake succeed, the head of Northwest Indiana’s Regional Development Authority said.
“West Lake has only happened because we came together as a region” RDA President and CEO Bill Hanna said at the agency’s meeting Thursday. “We need to continue that.”
The West Lake project would build a nine-mile rail line from the Munster/Dyer border to Hammond, and then to downtown Chicago, for about $600 million. The service would be run by the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District and would connect in Hammond to NICTD’s South Shore Line.
NICTD will apply now to the Federal Transit Administration to enter the project development phase of West Lake, NICTD General Manager Michael Noland said. In that phase, the FTA will review the project and decide if it’s eligible to continue to the next steps: environmental review and preliminary engineering.
The FTA also wants to see that there’s local support for the project. To that end, the RDA board passed a resolution Thursday committing $20 million in support of NICTD’s application.
NICTD also is seeking federal and state funding to build a second set of tracks, parallel to the current ones, between Gary and Michigan City, to improve the South Shore service’s speed and reliability.
Both projects — West Lake and double-track — would bring Northwest Indiana closer to Chicago’s job market, entice more people to move to the region and create economic development, Hanna said.
“Connectivity equals prosperity,” he said.
The RDA doesn’t just want a new and faster rail service. It also wants to see business and housing development – so-called transit-oriented development — near the West Lake stations and along the South Shore corridor.
Bill Sheldrake, president of Indianapolis-based Policy Analytics, estimated that West Lake would bring about 2,500 jobs to Northwest Indiana over a 20-year period and the double-tracking project could add another 2,900.
“We are creating a more attractive economy in Northwest Indiana,” he said.
The resulting increase in property, income and sales taxes also will benefit state and local governments, Sheldrake added.
Hanna recalled his steelworker father telling him that every job in the mills created seven other jobs in the region.
He believes a similar multiplier applies to transit improvements.
The next 18 months will be critical to seeing that the West Lake and double-tracking projects succeed, Hanna said.
Also Thursday, the RDA reallocated $2.5 million for Hobart’s project to widen and improve 69th Avenue between Colorado and Mississippi streets, for future economic development. The money originally was authorized last year under a loan program that expired after a developer backed out of an anticipated project.
Tim Zorn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.