Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. already owns up to 600 acres of farm fields at the edge of Gardner, part of a soon-to-be-completed land stake worth at least $15 million, all to build a massive new intermodal logistics center designed to meet the national railroad’s rising demand for moving freight in an evolving global marketplace.

So pardon Matt Rose if he brushes aside efforts by a group of Gardner residents to oppose bringing the railroad’s planned 1,000-acre site into their city.

“Let me tell you what’s going to happen,” said Rose, the railroad’s chairman, president and chief executive officer, in Lawrence on Tuesday to deliver a lecture at the Lied Center. “Whether or not the city – the town – annexes the property or not, we’re going forward with this facility.

“There’s been a question of, well, if the town decides not to annex, then they won’t build it. That has nothing to do with it. We’re going to proceed with the application and permitting process to build this facility, whether Gardner annexes that property or not.”

The issue – the subject of boisterous meetings in Gardner and resulting in a ballot measure to be decided Nov. 7 – doesn’t sound all that contentious when Rose is doing the talking. It’s simply a matter of reality.

By year’s end, his railroad will have only 46 miles of single-line track on its major line connecting the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach with Chicago, and plans are under way to start going from two lines to three lines of track beginning next year.

Matt Rose, left, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp., talks with Anderson Chandler, chairman and president of Fidelity State Bank & Trust Co. of Topeka, while Rose visits the Dole Institute of Politics at Kansas University. Rose was in town Tuesday to deliver the 2006 Anderson Chandler Lecture, organized by KU's School of Business.

The line already has a logistics center near Chicago – a 2,500-acre complex at the edge of Joliet, Ill. – that is doing booming business, he said. Wal-Mart last month opened 3.5 million square feet of warehouse space at the center, in two buildings that each stretch a half-mile long.

That’s the kind of development foreseen for Gardner, where the center will be planned to have 12 million square feet of warehouse space – enough to swallow about eight copies of Kmart’s massive distribution center in Lawrence – and accommodate nearly 2,800 trucks each day.

The project would generate 7,000 jobs in Gardner, among 12,000 jobs forecast for Johnson County and 13,000 expected statewide during the next 20 years related to the project, Rose said.

“This is fairly significant economic development,” Rose said, after meeting with reporters at the Dole Institute of Politics.

Fred Sherman, a former Lawrence city planner who now works as community development director of Gardner, said the center would be expected to draw employees from Lawrence and other nearby communities.

“This is really setting up to be the next generation of industrial-warehouse distribution for this region,” he said.

Rose came to Lawrence to deliver the annual Anderson Chandler Lecture, organized by Kansas University’s School of Business. His speech, “Future Transportation Crisis,” addressed how Americans have grown complacent with their transportation infrastructure – particularly regarding rails and highways – and how the nation must come up with a long-term plan to upgrade such systems if it wants to keep up with global competitors.

“China is spending, literally, tens and tens of billions of dollars on infrastructure,” he said. “They’re building out high-speed rail. They’re building out freight rail. They’re building out Maglifts (monorails). They’re building out superairports, superhighways, and the reason why they’re doing that is they’re really taking a page out of our book: They’re seeing how productive our country has been, through this economy, through the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s and ’90s.”