Latest on Katy Bridge at Boonville lawsuit

According to a Springfield News-Leader article, the lawsuit over the Katy railroad bridge at Boonville is heating up:

The Department of Natural Resources has hired a private attorney to do battle with Attorney General Jay Nixon in a dispute over whether the agency can legally relinquish the state's rights to an old Boonville railroad bridge.

The department said Friday that it will be represented by Kent Lowry, leader of the tort litigation group at the Armstrong Teasdale law firm. . . .

The Democratic attorney general sued Childers and his department last month, seeking an injunction preventing the agency from giving up the state's right to use the former Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad bridge as part of the Katy Trail State Park.

A federal law allows unused rail lines to be converted to trails, as long as they are preserved for potential railroad use again in the future.

Under that law, Missouri paid $200,000 for 200 miles of an MKT rail line between St. Charles and Sedalia in 1987. The agreement specified that the railroad would still own the Missouri River bridge near Boonville and would keep it available for future transportation use under the federal trail law. But the agreement gave the state the right to use the bridge for a trail, if it assumed liability.

Shortly before leaving office in December, Democratic Gov. Bob Holden's natural resources director, Steve Mahfood, claimed the bridge for state trail use. But Childers, Blunt's new director, reversed that decision in April, permanently relinquishing the state's right to the bridge.

The attorney general maintains that removing the bridge will create a break in the line, endangering the status of the trail as a "railbanked" line that could be recalled for service at some future time.

The concept of railbanking is what allows rails-to-trails conversions to happen under federal laws dealing with railroad right of way. See the Wikipedia article "Rail trail" for more information.