 Both council and community members came together at Bemidji City Hall tonight to hear the results of a study on the development of the city's railroad corridor. Josh Peterson was there and shares with us how the city will move forward with the project. Bemidji's Railroad Corridor, a hot topic of conversation among many downtown residents and businesses. But when the city purchased the land years ago, no set plans have been made for the property, and that is why there is a push to develop the underdeveloped land. We have what I would say is lost opportunity or economic cost for the last 18 years that it hasn't had any development on it and so I think anything that we do is a win. Through the services of Port Consulting, a study looked at multiple needs and uses for the site and found that before anything could be done, environmental issues would need to be addressed at a significant cost. So we did analysis on this and we still had extreme costs and it was still getting, you know, these two buildings, eight, nine and ten, had volumes of soil to be hung off. Even if the property is cleaned up, deciding what will be built there was another part of the study. With a growing city, the study showed that housing was in the forefront. We wanted to make sure we were identifying the polygon, if you will, that is cost-effective to build upon, identify what the most likely users are to be of whatever that structure is, housing, office, apartments, etc. With more work and investments needing to be made by the city, some council members heard echoes of the past with land dealings that proved problematic. This is going to be, as far as I'm concerned, another moneypend. We're going to throw large dollars into this. These guys will bring up vetted people. I agree. They want things that the city can throw in before they do that. We don't have that ability. We've got very little dollars to throw at this project. For some, even if the city breaks even with the land deal, having the property cleaned up is more important. If at the end of the day we clean it up, we sell the property and we are even, we are still winning on this. In Bemidji, Josh Peterson, Lakeland News. The council voted 6-1 to continue with phase 2 of the study to get solid numbers on cost for cleaning up the property and continuing with the railroad corridor project at this time. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.