Tracking the DM&E's big dream: Chapter 11

The DM&E's home office is on the southeastern fringe of town. Its neighbors include hotels, small manufacturing plants and ranch-style homes.

In the entryway is a display of artwork from elementary school children who've drawn pictures of trains. Leaning against the wall is a sign that says, "Huron loves trains."

Employees are dressed in casual business attire -- knit shirts,

Kevin Schieffer talks about the proposed upgrade of the DM&E Railroad in his Brookings, S.D., office. Schieffer has become a lightning rod for criticism among opponents of the Powder River Basin project.

slacks and loafers. No suits, ties or dresses. An assistant leads me to Schieffer's office, a large corner room where the walls are decorated with an American Indian painting and photographs of trains. On his desk are stacks of papers and a photograph of his 10-year-old daughter, who he says is caught up in the Pokemon craze.

Schieffer, who commutes to Brookings from his home in Sioux Falls, 40 miles to the south, asks the assistant to direct me to a conference room to meet him. He's wearing his typical office duds -- blue khaki pants, striped Oxford-style shirt and loafers -- eschewing the blue jeans and western boots he wears while campaigning for the expansion project in rural towns along the route.

He sips coffee, refilling his cup three times, and chews gum throughout our talk.

It's unclear if it's his blessing or curse, but nearly everyone along the DM&E line has heard of Kevin Schieffer. It could just as well be called the Schieffer Railroad, for all of the attention he has garnered during the past two years.

But that's the way Schieffer likes it. He is a hands-on administrator who prefers to deal with sticky situations himself, rather than send staff members to untangle things.

"I spend an awful lot of time trying to fix problems," he says. "The only way you can do that is to sit down at a table and talk."

Still, many of those who live along the proposed coal train route say they don't trust him. Schieffer's never been specific about where financing for the $1.4 billion project is going to come from, they point out. They also say they're leery of his background in politics, and that they don't like his negotiating style.

"We think he's his own worst enemy," says Sam Clauson of the Sierra Club. "He starts out friendly enough. But then he just turns people off."

Paul Johnson, a South Dakota State University entymology professor who helped organize an anti-coal train group in Brookings, adds that Schieffer is gruff during negotiating sessions and rigid in his positions.

"On the one hand he comes off as being very slick and smooth," Johnson says. "But on the other hand, when you actually sit down with him to negotiate, forget it. For all the time he spent in Washington, D.C., he sure doesn't seem to get along with people very well."

All of this befuddles Pressler, the former U.S. senator who was Schieffer's boss for a decade. "I've seen him out there talking to ranchers and farmers," says Pressler, who now splits his time between his Washington law office and his farm near Humboldt, S.D. "He's a very honest and decent person. He's the type of person that should be in business."

Schieffer, 42, grew up on a farm, where his folks raised chickens, cattle and hogs near the tiny town of Crofton, Neb., between Yankton, S.D., and Nebraska's Santee Indian Reservation. "We still milked by hand back then," he says. "Every morning and every night at 5:30."

He went to college at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, near the Nebraska border, and earned a law degree from Georgetown University in Washington. While attending law school, he got a job in the congressional mail room. He was still in school, taking classes at night, when he went to work for Pressler. Eventually he became Pressler's chief of staff and was a key player in the senator's efforts in the early 1980s to keep the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad from abandoning the only east-west rail line through South Dakota.

"Everyone thought we were tilting at windmills," Schieffer says.

Pressler says he fought for the line because he was convinced the Upper Midwest needed a heavy rail line to keep transportation prices for grain and durable goods in the region from skyrocketing.

Schieffer was the senator's point person on the rail issue. "Kevin took hold of the railroad thing," says Pressler. "He was an infantryman. He'd fly out to South Dakota and meet with people and then he'd fly back to Washington in the same day."

A deal was finalized in 1986 under which Chicago & Northwestern spun the line off to a group of investors as a short-line regional railroad.