City of Cornelia taxpayers will pay 71% more per year in rent to hold on to their iconic train depot.
City Council members this week approved a new lease with Norfolk Southern Railway Company for the land underneath the depot. The annual rent jumps from $700 to $1200 per year. While that is a sizable increase, Cornelia City Manager Donald Anderson says the train folks originally wanted a whole lot more. “Norfolk Southern was proposing that the rent be increased from $700 a year to $4800 per year.”
Anderson was able to talk them down, “We reached a compromise,” he explains. The new lease replaces the original agreement signed in 1989.
The city would likely have paid the higher price if Norfolk Southern had pushed the issue because the building is the symbolic and historic heart of the town. The depot, along with its Big Red Apple, is the most widely-know symbol of the town and Cornelia’s first city limits were set at half-mile increments in all directions from the depot making it the literal center of the original town.
Originally constructed in 1910 and rebuilt in 1914 after a fire, the depot currently houses a railway museum and is the site of numerous public gatherings and concerts.
