Duke to GoTriangle: Drop Dead

On Monday, GoTriangle asked Duke University to agree to mediated negotiations, a last-ditch effort to save a $3.3 billion light-rail line two decades in the making that was now teetering on collapse. 

Today, Duke responded: No thanks. 

In a letter to Durham County Commissioner Ellen Reckhow, who chairs the transit agency’s Board of Trustees, and GoTriangle CEO Jeff Mann, Duke president Vincent Price, vice president Tallman Trask III, and health system CEO A. Eugene Washington said there wasn’t any point in further talks. They weren’t budging. 

“Having concluded that your proposed [Durham-Orange Light Rail Transit] route down Erwin Road is simply not workable, we do not see any value in entering into mediation,” they wrote. 

Reached for comment Thursday afternoon, Durham Mayor Steve Schewel seemed at a loss for words: “I’m just … uh, I’m … so, I’m just disappointed,” he told the INDY. “This is just a tremendous breach in this relationship we’ve had for so long.”

In the letter, Duke reiterated its objections to the Erwin Road alignment: electromagnetic interference, construction vibration, issues related to utilities, and liability. GoTriangle has said that all of these problems have solutions, and it would pay for them. But Duke said EMI, which it first raised in late 2017, was a particularly pernicious issue: Its experts had warned that the interference would go deeper into its facilities than GoTriangle believed, and the alignment “would limit the type and location of future devices, which are likely to be even more sensitive.”

Duke also argued that, contrary to GoTriangle’s narrative and the available evidence, it has operated in good faith and been consistent about its concerns over the Erwin Road route, even though it signed a memorandum of agreement in 2016. Duke points out that the MOU was “nonbinding” and subject to “definitive agreement regarding the exact route alignment.” 

That’s somewhat deceptive, however. GoTriangle was locked into the route by 2015, when it completed the arduous Environmental Impact Study process. Any changes would have been minor, and everyone knew that, Schewel says. “This route—this has been the route for a long time.”

Without Duke’s cooperation, the DOLRT appears dead. Because of a timeline imposed by the legislature last year, GoTriangle had to secure federal funding by November to receive up to $190 million from the state, and to do that it needed to apply by April and have its cooperative agreements, including with Duke, in place by February. The day before last Thursday’s deadline, Duke announced that it would not sign an agreement. 

The GoTriangle Board of Trustees will meet next week to figure out if it has any options—perhaps eminent domain, though that’s a long shot. More likely, the project is finished. 

In its letter today—and you should really read this quote a few times, because holy shit—Duke, having just murdered a keystone project and squandered the $130 million taxpayers have already spent on it because they found it inconvenient, called for unity (!): “Now is the time for those of us who have been entrusted with positions of leadership to lead, to seek common ground, to unite and not divide, and to activate the energy and spirit and creativity of a community in which we have all invested so much, for so long.”