WASHINGTON — According to the Washington Post, Amtrak would have to shut down if the national passenger train system receives only the $521 million requested by the Bush administration in next year’s budget, the Transportation Department’s inspector general said yesterday.
Kenneth M. Mead, the inspector general, said that even Amtrak President George Warrington’s plan to end all long-distance service Oct. 1 unless he gets double that amount would not stop the unraveling of the whole system. Savings from ending most other train service around the country would be only “chump change” compared with the needs of the Northeast Corridor from Washington to Boston, he said.
After paying necessary railroad retirement payments, interest on burgeoning loans and other mandatory expenses, Mead said, Amtrak would be left with only $9 million.
“It’s not possible to do it,” Mead testified to the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on transportation. “The system cannot continue to operate.”
In the past, Mead has not been among those sounding alarms about whether Amtrak could continue to operate, although he has warned frequently that Amtrak had failed to cut costs and was not getting enough money for capital expenditures.
Several witnesses at the hearing said Amtrak had mortgaged everything it could to remain in business over the past few years, and no more loans are possible. Amtrak has halted all but required maintenance, put off $175 million in planned capital expenditure, and begun major layoffs of station personnel nationwide, leaving many stations with no baggage checking or services for the handicapped. Those savings may not be enough to get the corporation through this fiscal year, according to sources in the Transportation Department, Amtrak and Congress.
“We’ve run out of tools in the toolbox to keep the service together,” said a subdued Warrington, who only a year ago spoke of reaching “operational self-sufficiency” and spreading high-speed rail to many parts of the country outside the Northeast.
Mead and other witnesses, including Warrington, said that even Amtrak’s requested $1.2 billion would barely keep the wheels turning while Congress decides what to do about the passenger train service. Mead called it “a limp-along budget to get them through [fiscal] 2003.”
Subcommittee Chairman Harold Rogers (R-Ky.) criticized both the administration and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee for failing to come up with a plan to restructure the national passenger train system and a funding method to meet a rising demand from the states for more higher-speed passenger rail service.
“It may very well depend on this subcommittee,” Rogers said. “So be it.”