County to decide how to fund SunRail in coming months

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  • A northbound SunRail train pulls into the Kissimmee station. Osceola County will take over its local operations in July 2024, and must decide this year how to transition. FILE PHOTO
    A northbound SunRail train pulls into the Kissimmee station. Osceola County will take over its local operations in July 2024, and must decide this year how to transition. FILE PHOTO
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Funding for SunRail will switch on July 1, 2024 from provided by state and federal sources to local funding partners.

Translation: Osceola County will be on the hook, and so it is preparing now to decide how it will take care of those operations.

At Monday’s County Commission meeting, Assistant County Manager Tawny Olore presented some background and three options for how the county might operate the commuter train system, which has Osceola County stops in Poinciana, downtown Kissimmee and adjacent to the Tupperware headquarters off Orange Avenue.

“The county needs a transition plan,” said Olore, who came to Osceola County in 2017 as its Transportation and Transit Director, and pulled notes from a transition study done by an outside partner. “They look at everything; staffing, contracts, operations and assessment.”

The entire operations of SunRail is made up of several contracts that oversee heavy maintenance from Amtrak, signal maintenance, and rail operations. They all end in 2024, when Osceola County would take over.

Here’s where the study kicks in: It outlined three ways the county could transition. One, the most expensive, would be to hire a full in-house staff of 200 employees to provide all management, administrator and operations.

“Some existing rail systems in other parts of the country do this,” Olore said.

The second choice would be to keep those three biggest contracts in place and self-operate the rest, and hire 30 employees. A third, and cheapest, alternative would be to subcontract out the entire operation, and hire about nine employees. That would involve LYNX (Central Florida Regional Transportation Authority).

In either case, the Department of Transportation would keep a $10 million self-retention fund to pay for any accidents or incidents, and a $322 million insurance policy for any costs above that. The county’s system operating costs would come from operation and maintenance costs, fuel and running the ticketing system and the feeder bus network to take riders to other city points. Osceola’s share of the costs would be just under 16 percent of the entire rail line, based on its local ridership. (For example, Orlando’s cost of their part of Orange County is 33 percent.)

Olore shared that SunRail’s 2021 revenue was $15.5 million, and that the operations costs will be between $51-65 million per year in the fiscal years 2025-29, depending on how local funding partners staff it. Osceola’s portion would run about $7-9 million annually, minus local revenue generated.

The Central Florida Commuter Rail Commission needs to adopt a transition plan by this November, so Olore said the county needs to decide how to implement operations by August.

“Tawny has put a lot of work into this not only as the chair of our committee but as part of that transition team in getting all these complicated pieces put together,” Commission Vice Chair Viviana Janer said.

At Monday’s meeting, the Commission also:

Approved negotiations with the Osceola County School District to establish a Manufacturing, Career and Technical Education Academy at Liberty High School, at a cost just over $2 million;

Approved over $20 million in spending on nearly 500 units of affordable and elderly housing units near the Poinciana SunRail station, in Buenaventura Lakes and an extension of the Cameron Preserve development on Yates Road;

Adopted an ordinance that hookah bars and lounges be closed from 2-8 a.m. County documents show the Osceola County Sheriff ’s Office responded to 207 calls at hookah establishments, despite the pandemic, for service between 2-7 a.m. from 2020 to February 2022, and the majority of the calls for service were due to physical altercations and shootings. One of those was the Oct. 9, 2021 shooting death of 23-year-old Danilee Hernandez, an innocent bystander, outside the Red Star Hookah Bar on West U.S. Highway 192. Seven arrests were made in that incident, and the business has been closed since the shooting.

“We’re trying to be proactive, and assist our law enforcement in any way we can,” said Commission Chairman Brandon Arrington of the ordinance.