Jefferson County, Tennessee, Farmers May Get Railroaded

Tennessee has passed a "Sunshine Law" that compels state and local governments to inform the citizens of any bills submitted to the legislature or senate. Within the last few weeks, the citizens of Jefferson County, Tennessee, just found out that the railroad wants to build a 1000 acre Truck/Rail Terminal and Industrial Park.

This simply means that they want to condemn and take people's farms and land and houses. Some of theses properties have been in families for hundreds of years. For some of these farmers, farming is all they have. For the people who will lose houses, will they really get any kind of fair deal so they can rebuild or buy (in this economy anyway)?

Not only will it take property and houses it will create excess noise and traffic and a lot of air pollution. It is also said that people from many miles away will be able to see the lights and hear the noise of this terminal.

The local four lane highway which exists now will be turned into a six lane causing many more accidents. There are already numerous and deadly accidents on this highway. Plus, to expand the highway more land would have to be taken and condemned.

This site that the terminal would be built on is the last remaining rural farming communities on this highway (extending from Jefferson City to Mascot Tennessee).

It seems that this all started when the University of Tennessee Center of Transportation Research did a proposal for the Jefferson County Chamber of Commerce. This proposal was done in secret and submitted to the legislature without the citizen's of Jefferson County knowledge.

People here in Jefferson County are taking a stand to try to keep this from happening and thus losing much more good and valuable farm land. Farm land has been vanishing at thousands and thousands of acres a year. The economy has already driven farmers out of business. So now people are just going to take the land of the ones who have been able to hang on. It is not right folks.

You can see a story, which was done on the 11:00 P.M. news on May 26, 2009, about this on www.wbir.com.

Many people say that this will create new jobs for the area. What most people do not realize, however, is that most of the jobs will take special training and the majority of the jobs will be filled by those who are already qualified and/or certified. Not a lot of farmers are certified or trained to work for the railroad. I doubt very seriously that the railroad will take time to train them when they already have employees who are certified in this type of work.

Of course, there are many of those who only look at the monetary end of the deal. In other words, they want to take money away from others to put money in their pockets.

This is a very unfair situation to everyone on the wrong end of it (the farmers and others who will lose). So as the citizens of Jefferson County come together to try to stop this farce of a project, we feel that the entire world has a right to know just what kind of government we really have.