Economy

Maine rail cargo secrecy law bypassed public access, safety defenses

By Dave Sherwood, Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting
Posted Feb. 10, 2016, at 6:15 a.m.
Last modified Feb. 10, 2016, at 6:39 a.m.

After a runaway oil train killed 47 people in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, just miles from the Maine border in 2013, Mainers demanded to know more about the state’s railways. ... How much oil was moving through Maine? Which companies shipped it and along what routes? Was the government doing enough to keep communities safe?

At about the same time, the rail industry began its own campaign to keep much of that information secret, according to interviews and correspondence with regulators. ... Those efforts paid off last year when state officials — who for years had reported the volumes of monthly crude oil shipments — stopped making them public in October. ... The new law not only blocked the public’s right to know what dangers lurked on Maine’s train tracks, but its passage followed a haphazard process in which lawmakers repeatedly ignored red flags and safeguards designed to prioritize the public’s right-to-know over private business interests.

The bill, An Act Regarding the Confidentiality of Railroad Carrier Cargo, passed into law with no debate and over a forceful veto from Gov. Paul LePage. Its sponsor, former Rep. Mike Shaw, D-Standish, presented it as a commonsense compromise: If state officials promised to make confidential shipments of hazardous materials, he said, then railroads — which had argued such details could be used by competitors to undercut their business — would volunteer to share them.

“I thought it would facilitate communication between first responders and the railroads,” Shaw said four months after the bill took effect. ... But the spare, 80-word exemption did not require railroads to share information with first responders. Instead, it simply forced the state to keep those details secret from the public.