Salt Lake Council is preparing to seize properties in rail-line realignment

The Salt Lake City Council took a step toward quieter trains, a new park and an above-ground City Creek — and frustrated a few business owners in the process.

The council, by unanimous vote Thursday, started the eminent-domain process on eight properties in the area around 800 West and South Temple to make way for the Grant Tower rail-line realignment.

"We're just not being offered enough money to make our move," Jason Broschinsky, who owns a metal-finishing shop at 777 W. South Temple, told the council before Thursday's vote. "The first appraisal that came in was just a joke."

Eminent-domain laws allow governments to seize land to make way for public projects when land-purchase agreements can't be worked out. An eminent-domain condemnation requires the government to pay a fair market price, based on appraisals, and to help finance a relocation.

D.J. Baxter, an adviser to Mayor Rocky Anderson, said the city has already negotiated purchase agreements with several landowners in the area, and he holds out hope that deals can be worked out with the remaining property owners. If a deal is worked out, the eminent-domain proceedings can stop.

The Grant Tower rail line includes two 90-degree angle turns in the area west of The Gateway. Because of the dramatic slowing the turns require, Union Pacific in 2001 reactivated an abandoned rail line that runs along 900 South so its trains could bypass the bottleneck.

That has left residents near 900 South dealing with fast, noisy trains in their once-quiet neighborhoods.

The Grant Tower realignment would straighten the turns and allow Union Pacific to stop using the 900 South line. The city plans to build a so-called linear park along the abandoned 900 South track's right-of-way.

The Grant Tower project will also make way for the underground City Creek to see daylight again, part of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce's Downtown Rising plan.

Without the disputed land, the Grant Tower project could not happen, Baxter said.

"We look forward to the day the abandoned rail line will become a linear park," Poplar Grove Community Council chairman Mike Harman told the council, urging it to do "whatever it takes" to move forward on the Grant Tower project. The properties facing condemnation are in the Poplar Grove neighborhood.

Landowners at Thursday's council meeting were not solidly against the project. Most said they simply want more money to make a relocation more feasible.

"Moving for the community to make it a greater place in that area, I understand that," said Alan Knox, whose Knox Fabrication at 741 W. South Temple has been at that site for 23 years. His Knox Investments has been renting out parts of his property to 14 other tenants since the early 1970s.