By Michael Aubele, VALLEY NEWS DISPATCH
Monday, February 6, 2012

Robert Ardolino is making believers out of skeptics.

Count among them Penn State New Kensington Chancellor Kevin Snider, who said Ardolino recently encountered a roomful of doubt when he spoke to the members of Westmoreland Economic Development Initiative for Growth about plans to run a commuter rail between Lower Burrell and Pittsburgh.

By June 2016, Ardolino, a consultant with Pittsburgh-based Urban Innovations, expects commuters to be traveling between the Alle-Kiski Valley and Pittsburgh on the rail, paying $14 per round-trip from endpoint to endpoint.

It’s a $380 million project.

“They were very skeptical at first,” Snider said. “Everybody thought the train had to live and die solely on ridership. It turns out that’s not the case, and everybody left very impressed and really excited.”

Ardolino is, too. He says plenty of commuters would support the rail — an estimated 7,000 per day, according to his most recent study — but that branding rights, station development and commercial and residential development along the 22.5-mile corridor would generate the bulk of the revenue that keeps the line viable.

How much revenue could the rail generate during its first 20 to 25 years of operation when all of the potential development is factored in? Ardolino estimated $1.5 billion.

Ardolino said he has used $36.7 million in private money to acquire the rights of way through a nonprofit he established. He said he has “signed commitments” with Allegheny Valley Railroad to buy the tracks, real estate and easements. The two sections of property he still needs are the endpoints in Lower Burrell and at Steel Plaza in Downtown Pittsburgh.

He said he’s in negotiations with developer Gary Sukala to acquire right of way in Lower Burrell, which would be the rail’s endpoint and a spot where Ardolino envisions a business park or light industry center.

“There are about 100 acres there that are flat and could be used,” Ardolino said, adding it could be within three to five years after the line is built that the property gets developed.

Sukala said he and Ardolino have been “in discussions” for about six months and “everything seems in line.”

Ardolino will need to acquire about 1.5 miles of right of way for the rail line, Sukala said, adding that the line would extend only about a quarter-mile north of the Tarentum Bridge.

Sukala couldn’t say how much he would sell the right of way for, indicating a dollar figure hasn’t been set.

“How could you not be for this?” Sukala asked.

Financial backing

Investors seem to agree.

Cleveland-based First Service Commercial Loans has committed as much as $350 million to the project and a charitable organization in Texas plans to pledge up to about $100 million, Ardolino said. He declined to identify the Texas group until the deal is finalized.

Ardolino said he plans to meet in Washington next month with congressional leaders, including Rep. Jason Altmire, D-McCandless, to push for government funding.

“I’ve been in close contact and continue to actively work to promote the project,” Altmire said. “Last year, we were able to secure the funding that was used to confirm that the project is viable, and our next step is a stable, long-term funding source. This is one of my top regional transportation priorities.”

Ardolino hopes to obtain at least $245 million in federal grants, with most of that coming through the Federal Transit Administration. He expects to submit a grant application through the federal New Starts program in June.

The amount of private money to be used on the project depends on how much federal money is obtained. Private investors would make up the difference between that and the $380 million estimated cost. If the government kicks in $245 million, for example, First Service and others would pay the remaining $135 million.

Ardolino said the project’s environmental impact is being assessed. The proposal won’t enter its final engineering stage until a year from now, and the 18-month construction period won’t begin until 2014.

Ardolino, who is overseeing the project for rail line owner Russ Peterson, said freight trains would continue to run along the line from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m.

Read more: Alle-Kiski Valley link to Downtown picks up steam – Pittsburgh Tribune-Review http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/pittsburgh/s_780168.html#ixzz1mIeJ54pF

By Tom Fontaine, PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Saturday, January 28, 2012

Developers of a proposed $350 million commuter rail line between Lower Burrell and Downtown asked Port Authority officials on Friday to help them determine the best way to connect the line to the East Busway and Steel Plaza Station.

Port Authority officials said they would cooperate, but stressed they could not afford to put any money toward the project. The agency is facing a $64 million deficit for the fiscal year starting in July.

“We are not asking Port Authority for any money,” said Robert Ardolino, president of Urban Innovations, the project’s lead consultant. Allegheny Valley Railroad owns the tracks on which the line would operate.

Ardolino said Cleveland-based First Service Commercial Loans has pledged up to $350 million in private financing. Developers also are seeking federal grants, loans and other funding.

The commuter rail line would run 22 miles along existing Allegheny Valley freight tracks. The line then would pass over a Norfolk Southern rail line in the Strip District, then connect to the East Busway before following the path of an unused light-rail “T” line into the Steel Plaza subway station.

The alignment would require removal of Port Authority’s police station and another building, but Ardolino said the facilities could be relocated to a planned switching station that would be built as part of the project.

Ardolino said five stations are planned along the route, with a possible sixth one along the East Busway. He expects it to take about 40 minutes to travel the length of the line, which is expected to cost $7 each way when it opens, tentatively in 2016. About 7,000 daily riders are expected.

Read more: Rail line developers seek Port Authority’s advice – Pittsburgh Tribune-Review http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_778873.html?_s_icmp=NetworkHeadlines##ixzz1kp97lRXG

Allegheny Valley Railroad’s long-talked-about commuter rail service has received some key funding. The proposed Tarentum to Downtown Pittsburgh service received a commitment of $350 million from Cleveland-based First Service Commercial Loans Inc.

AVR President Russell Peterson says he believes this funding represents a turning point in effort to build the commuter-service, which was originally proposed in 1999.

“Funding is probably the most crucial of all the elements of putting the service into play,” Peterson says.

AVR plans to sell 18.42 miles of track to a public-private entity, which would operate the commuter service. The railroad would retain a permanent easement to run freight in the overnight hours.

Robert Ardolino, president of Urban Innovations, is leading the project on behalf of AVR. Ardolino says five stops are currently proposed for the system. Those stops include Tarentum, New Kensington, a combined Oakmont-Verona stop, in Lawrenceville, and a final connection into Penn Station or Steel Plaza. A weekend stop at the Highland Park Zoo would be included.

According to Ardolino, a possible sixth stop could occur in the Strip District, where a light-rail Lawrenceville-Strip District circulator is being considered.

The next step for the project is to conduct a combined environmental impact and alternative route study. The study will be done in conjunction with the city, and potentially Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, with AVR as the stakeholder, Ardolino says.

Although Ardolino says he hopes to break ground on the project by 2014, a few obstacles remain. Foremost is a missing connector from 26th Street in the Strip into a downtown station. However Ardolino remains optimistic.

“The time has come for this project to get built,” he says. “This is a big undertaking. It’s going to take a lot of collaboration, with both Westmoreland County and Allegheny County and the City of Pittsburgh.”

Writer: Andrew Moore
Source: Russell Peterson; Robert Ardolino

www.popcitymedia.com

Allegheny Valley Railroad’s Pittsburgh rail project lands $350 million
Pittsburgh Business Times by Tim Schooley, Anya Litvak
Date: Friday, September 30, 2011, 6:00am EDT

Allegheny Valley Railroad’s plan to establish commuter rail service from Tarentum into Downtown Pittsburgh, a project more than 10 years in the making, has chugged closer to reality, securing a $350 million commitment in private equity financing from Cleveland-based First Service Commercial Loans Inc.
A project that expects to run from Tarentum to the Westmoreland County community of New Kensington through Highland Park, Lawrenceville and the Strip District into Downtown, cutting transit times in half along the way, is seeking to secure at least a 50 percent match from federal and state sources. A local match from Westmoreland and Allegheny counties along with the city of Pittsburgh is expected to be generated solely from the value of the real estate of the rail line — $30 million — in their communities to the overall package, said Robert Ardolino, who is helping to shepherd the project through his Pittsburgh-based Urban Innovations.
Ardolino, whose firm has consulted on such projects in Arizona, Colorado and New Jersey, characterized the private investment as the more difficult to generate and said he is confident the remaining public funding and approvals from the Federal Railroad Administration and other federal agencies will come together, allowing construction and planning to take place over the next three years.
“Now it’s in the queue,” Ardolino said of the project. “Before, it was just a dream.”
Russell M. Oates, a principal of First Service, confirmed his company has committed to establish private financing for the project.
“Everything is going smooth,” Oates said. “The contracts are all signed. We’re just trying to push it over the edge.”
The commuter link would run on a stretch of Allegheny Valley Railroad, currently a freight-only passage. Allegheny Valley would sell the 22-mile segment of rail to the entity in charge of the commuter project, but it would retain a permanent easement to run its freight trains for an eight-hour period overnight.
Upgrades to the rail system are expected to cost about $70 million, to install traffic control signals and reconstruct the lines so that both freight and passenger trains can travel at up to 70 miles per hour. Currently, Allegheny Valley’s cars have a 25 mph speed limit.
Russell Peterson, CEO of Carload Express Inc., which includes Allegheny Valley Railroad, called the project “a total game-changer for the region.”
“We could see this was an underutilized corridor,” he said.
And like other cities with underutilitized rail, such as Camden and Trenton, N.J., whose River Line commuter link serves as the model for the Pittsburgh project, Peterson said, this screamed for a passenger opportunity.
THE FINANCIAL CASE
Allegheny Valley operated a passenger train only once in its history when, in 1998, the railroad invited potential stakeholders to consider it for passenger service.
That launched a handful of studies, including a 2009 opus by HDR Engineering Inc. that predicted ridership between Arnold and Downtown would be about 2,700 a day. Ardolino, whose project extends all the way to Tarentum, disputes that estimate and calculates daily ridership to be around 7,000.
“Funding projects in today’s fiscal world is a challenging activity,” Peterson said. “And the fact that a private investment finds the project to have a high enough rate of return to really get involved in it, really expedites the project.”
Relying mostly on federal funding for the public match, Ardolino hopes the deal structure will circumvent Pennsylvania’s lack of a public-private partnership law, which would allow private companies and public agencies to codevelop transportation and other projects. P3 bills have been introduced in the previous three legislative sessions and haven’t advanced to law, although another such bill is in the Senate and the concept enjoys the support of the governor and his transportation advisory commission.
At about $7 one way, the train would run from Tarentum to Penn Station in 40 minutes, stopping about half a dozen times along the way at sites still to be determined. Station development would cost around $35 million.
Ardolino said the round-trip price is less than the cost to park all day Downtown.
“Ridership will need to be economically viable, but it’ll never pay for itself because transit doesn’t pay for itself,” Ardolino said. “Without a federal grant program, it won’t work.”
What makes the deal enticing for private equity, then, are the “spinoff revenues,” such as advertising, naming rights and economic development land opportunities.
Oates described the project as a “no-brainer” in the way it’s being set up.
While he wouldn’t divulge what the expected rate of return would be for his investors, Oates said his company would establish public-private bond financing and expect to be reimbursed by federal grants to get the project up and rolling.
“It could be a huge catalyst, but we just want to make sure it’s coherent with the larger transportation plan for the city,” said Lena Andrews, a planning and development specialist with the Urban Redevelopment Authority .
The URA is in the middle of a $2 million study looking at development, stormwater management and transportation along the Allegheny Riverfront.
Whatever happens with the Allegheny Valley Railroad project would “not happen in isolation,” Andrews said.
Instead, it would need to fit into the area’s larger transit network.
Heather Pharo, a spokeswoman for the Port Authority , said the agency isn’t involved in the project but finds the concept interesting.
“While it is a worthy idea, there are some pretty pressing issues that we have to focus on in terms of having the resources to run our own system,” she said.
CHALLENGES AHEAD
The Allegheny Valley project will hinge in part on the last few miles between the Strip District and Downtown stations.
“The first thing we want to see gel is the feasibility of seeing a connection to Downtown,” said Patrick Roberts, principal transportation planner with the city. “How much would it cost to actually create the last needed connection and operate that? You have to look at the socioeconomic factors” of possibly disturbing a community to run elevated rail lines in the Strip in order to get the train over Liberty Avenue and the existing railroad tracks.
“We have to carefully plan how the last mile is connected into a larger system,” Roberts said.
At the same time, he said, the Federal Railroad Administration must sign off on a plan to run freight and passenger service on the same tracks.
Down the road, any federal funding request would require Allegheny Valley Railroad to conduct a series of studies chronicling the environmental impact and outlining alternatives.
It’s a major undertaking involving a swath of the region’s real estate, meaning it will require a lot of political and bureaucratic cooperation.
Chuck Hammel, president of the Strip District-based truck firm Pitt-Ohio Express, whose real estate holdings include the Cork Factory Lofts along with a handful of other properties along Smallman and Railroad Streets in the Strip, said he sees it as a project with big challenges but far larger potential benefits.
“It’s a nightmare trying to get the political will to get it that far, because, let’s face it, it’s not cheap,” Hammel said. “What happens to fuel if it goes to 10 or 15 bucks a gallon? And it could. It would be nice to have the ability to park your car and still get around.”

SALT LAKE CITY It took 26 years, but all of Utah County now is part of a public transit district. The Utah Transit Authority Board of Trustees approved a resolution Wednesday to annex all remaining Utah County communities into the district, an action that will result in about $200,000 per year in additional sales-tax revenue for the transit authority.

“We’re finally getting done what we’ve wanted to get done for a long time,” said Utah County Commissioner Larry Ellertson, who sits on the UTA Board of Trustees. Unlike Salt Lake, Davis and Weber counties, Utah County did not join the transit district as a whole. Instead, it’s been a piecemeal process that started in 1985 when Provo and Orem became part of the district. The addition of Santaquin to the district last year left only small communities Cedar Fort, Elk Ridge, Fairfield, Genola, Goshen, Vineyward and Woodland Hills, as well unincorporated areas of the county as nonmembers.

“We envision in the future that the transit needs will spread throughout the county, and we felt it was appropriate that all of the county was part of the district,” said Hugh Johnson, UTA regional general manager. UTA now will receive .526 of a cent of every dollar of sales tax collected throughout the county. Areas that were not members of the district already were playing a quarter-cent of that to help fund commuter rail and critical road projects in Utah County.

“The purpose is to allow us to provide services throughout the county as it grows,” Johnson said. The annexation previously was approved by the Utah County Commission. Timeline of Utah County cities joining UTA 1985 Provo and Orem joined. 1989 American Fork, Lehi, Lindon, and Pleasant Grove joined. 1990 Springville joined. 1992 Alpine, Cedar Hills and Highland joined. 1995 Mapleton, Payson, Salem and Spanish Fork joined. 2008 Eagle Mountain and Saratoga Springs joined. 2010 ? Santaquin joined. 2011 All remaining cities and towns, as well as unincorporated areas, are annexed into the transit district. E-mail: jpage@desnews.com

By Jared Page
MassTransitMag.com