Dear Editor:
I read the Opinion section by Jeffrey Silva in the April 12th issue of RCR News. It finally exposes a railroad company spinoff known as Catellus that is attempting to “trade” old railroad properties for money-producing mountain-top electronic sites. In a clever game, it appears the BLM is INFLATING the true value of sites to get an upper hand in land swapping with this development corporation. Meanwhile, all of us site users stand to be financially squeezed out by this dishonest scheme.
Catellus was formed initially to manage the enormous non-profit producing real estate owned by Santa Fe Railroad. Its corporate profile and history can easily be located via a Web search for the name Catellus.
This follows in DIRECT accord with the previous April 5th article relating to the skyrocketing site fees charged to the guy in Ridgecrest, Calif. It’s starting to make some sense. We have the ticket salesman, an audience, a concessionaire, the puppets and the puppeteers, but who owns the theater house? Are big wireline or wireless carriers really the quiet lay-back GAINERS after the curtain closes? Oh, sorry, did I forget to mention the people waiting in the lobby out front, too?
The newspaper’s Web site is: www.rcrnews.com. Hopefully, Mr. Silva will dedicate himself and stay with this story! This important subject matter is strangely missing from most other journals in the communications industry, and missing from even the BLM’s own Web site. As a local Ham Radio operator suggested, it’s probably too embarrassing for the agency to reveal what they have done and why!
Thank goodness for RCR to step in and cover this story.
Dan O’Connor
Sylmar, Calif.
