Please DO NOT let this happen.

Elected officials in Cincinnati are considering a lucrative deal with rail executives that would sell one of the last publicly owned stretches of rail line in the US to Norfolk Southern, the company behind the disastrous train derailment in Ohio last winter.

Next month, the company behind an Ohio train derailment that triggered a toxic inferno and national scandal could close a lucrative deal: at the urging of elected officials and company executives, the state’s third-largest city could sell railroad giant Norfolk Southern more than three hundred miles of track — one of the last publicly owned stretches of rail line in America.

Earlier this year, on February 3, a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, and the company subsequently released a plume of dangerous chemicals over the small town.

The fiery catastrophe spurred calls for a national crackdown on rail monopolies that have slashed their workforces to pad profits and enrich investors, while opposing new safety regulations on trains transporting hazardous materials.

While no crackdown has occurred, the cloud of the disaster looms over a November ballot measure in Cincinnati, Ohio, asking voters to approve the sale of the city’s publicly owned rail line to Norfolk Southern, which has been operating on the tracks since the nineteenth century.

As part of the city’s deal with Norfolk Southern, the rail company agreed to fund third-party campaigns to persuade voters to approve the sale in November. Now, voters are being bombarded with ads and mailers that argue ceding control of the railroad would be a win for residents — by providing a tax-free source of funding for infrastructure projects — without naming the buyer.

“Public ownership gives you control, it’s an inherently flexible ownership form,” said Thomas Hanna, the founder and president of the Institute for a Democratic Economy and Society and an expert on public ownership. “It allows you as a community to make certain decisions about what you would like to use the asset for — and what you would like to not use the asset for. There’s a lot of debate about what the railroad is worth in financial terms, but I think we have to consider what the railroad is worth in a larger perspective.”

Cincinnati is the only city in America to own interstate rail tracks, and the publicly owned line that runs to Chattanooga is a rare stretch amid a national freight rail system that is almost exclusively privately owned and operated.

The proposed sale would abdicate the city’s ability to use the right of way as it pleases, slamming the door on future possibilities like securing better terms during lease renegotiations, running passenger trains along the line, or using the associated rights of way as a conduit for broadband or renewable energy infrastructure.

Voters from across the political spectrum question whether a one-time payment of $1.6 billion is worth relinquishing such a valuable asset — 337 miles of track, signals, tunnels, and other infrastructure, as well as 9,500 acres of right of way. If the sale goes through, the revenue would be put into a trust fund, and the investment’s returns would be used to fund infrastructure improvements for the city.

Ohio’s US senators, J. D. Vance (R) and Sherrod Brown (D), have vocally criticized Norfolk Southern’s response to the East Palestine derailment and proposed bipartisan rail safety legislation, the Railway Safety Act, to more strictly regulate the rail industry in the wake of the disaster. But neither has weighed in for or against the proposed Cincinnati sale.

“This decision will be made by the voters of Cincinnati,” Vance said in a statement to the Lever. “I’m doing all that I can in Washington to ensure our rail system is as safe as possible, regardless of who owns it. We do that by passing the Railway Safety Act.”

Brown’s office did not provide comment for this story.

But safety concerns loom over the sale, so much so that the Ohio affiliate of one of the state’s largest rail unions has come out against it.

“It was our organization that saw Norfolk Southern’s wrongdoing in East Palestine and quite frankly, still don’t trust them,” said Clyde Whitaker, Ohio state legislative director for the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail Transportation Union transportation division (SMART TD), a major rail union whose Ohio affiliate is opposing the sale. “Why are we not addressing the East Palestine issue? There’s such a push for this sale — and just look at how much money that Norfolk Southern has spent to defeat the rail safety bill that Sens. Vance and Brown put in the Senate. [Norfolk Southern] doesn’t care about safety.”

Read more at Jacobin.