County Rents Property Where Sumpter Valley Railroad Depot Sits

Baker County has had its yearly rent hiked by almost $3,000 on the property where the historic Sumpter Valley Railroad Depot sits.

The county-owned Depot, on the north side of Broadway Street just west of 10th Street, is on Union Pacific Railroad property adjacent to the railroad tracks.

Until last year, the county leased the property from Union Pacific for $1 per year.

The original 20-year lease agreement dates to 1995, when the building was moved across Broadway to the Union Pacific property.

County Commission Chair Bill Harvey said Union Pacific officials weren’t willing to renew the terms of the 20-year lease, which expired on June 30, 2015.

Harvey signed a year-to-year lease in late 2015 that includes a $3,000 annual lease fee.

“We tried negotiating for four or five months,” Harvey said. “We don’t control them. We’re basically at the mercy of the railroad. You can negotiate until the cows come home.”

Harvey said it’s unfortunate that officials in charge of Union Pacific’s real estate holdings have a different idea of how to do business than the ones the county negotiated the lease with two decades ago.

“Once the lease was up, we had to deal with new people,” he said.

Paul Nahas, Union Pacific’s director of real estate, referred questions about the agreement to a company public affairs director, who could not be reached in time for this story.

Union Pacific leases space in the Depot, paying the county $9,705.60 per year under the terms of a six-year contract that continues through the end of 2017.

The county’s Parks Department, which also has offices in the Depot, receives some of the money from Union Pacific’s lease payments.

The county also uses some of the money to maintain the building, Harvey said.

Under the previous agreement, with the county paying Union Pacific only $1 per year, the railroad’s lease payments covered maintenance costs with money left over to bolster the Parks Department’s budget.

That’s not the case now.

“The lease money we receive basically breaks us even at this point,” Harvey said.

Ed Elms, director of the Baker County Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, said the board was not involved in negotiating or approving the new year-to-year lease with Union Pacific.

“Our role isn’t to make decisions – that’s what the county commission is for – but we do make recommendations and advise them,” Elms said. “We were circumvented, we weren’t involved in the process.”

See more in Friday’s issue of the Baker City Herald.