WASHINGTON — For more than three decades, Congress and the White House have given Amtrak enough to keep its network of passenger trains running but not enough, its supporters say, to develop the kind of long-term program necessary for success, reports Gannett News Service.
Both supporters and foes of the financially ailing rail company hope that will change next year when Amtrak’s reauthorization — or radical reconfiguration — will be fiercely debated. That debate was supposed to have taken place this year after Amtrak failed to meet a mandate to break even, but lawmakers opted not to tackle a potential reduction of rail service during an election year.
“They’ve got to do something,” Amtrak President David Gunn told Gannett News Service recently. “It’s not stable the way it is.”
Gunn’s immediate goal is to convince lawmakers that he needs a $1.2 billion subsidy for the current fiscal year, about $150 million more than last year’s record amount and twice what the administration has proposed.
But GOP control of the new Congress does not bode well for the quasi-governmental company that hasn’t turned a profit in its 31-year history. Republicans are generally less supportive of Amtrak than Democrats, particularly Sen. John McCain, who takes over in January as chairman of the Senate committee that oversees passenger rail.
McCain, R-Ariz., said he wants to eliminate federal subsidies for Amtrak, which have totaled $25 billion. He especially wants to eliminate long-distance lines, which transport relatively few riders and lose as much as $200 per passenger. He also has proposed privatizing the entire system, even though Amtrak was created because passenger rail service was unprofitable. But McCain admits overhauling Amtrak won’t be easy.
“Look, I’m not making any promises just because I’m the chairman of the committee,” he said. “I understand what the entrenched interests are that we fight.”
Some of those interests include senior members of his own party. Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott wants Amtrak to continue serving his home state of Mississippi. The three Amtrak lines that stop in Mississippi are among the company’s most unprofitable, each losing more than $125 per passenger in 2001, according to the General Accounting Office.
Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said he firmly backs McCain.
“America put forth its best effort, but I think you have to face up to an impossible situation — that there are only certain geographic locations which can support passenger transportation and that we ought to focus on those areas,” he said.
But asked whether he supports eliminating Amtrak’s money-losing Cardinal line that goes through his state on its way from Washington, D.C., to Chicago, Warner practically blanches and says he would not propose such an unpopular idea.
Warner’s reaction typifies Congress’ ambivalence toward Amtrak: unhappy with the system in general but reluctant to do away with a program that serves constituents, no matter how few.
Amtrak’s bottom line has always been in the red. It has to shell out about $300 million a year just to keep up with its debt payments. Only a last-minute government bailout prevented a systemwide closure this summer.
Yet lawmakers complain loudly if Amtrak threatens to close the very money-losing lines that have backed the company into a financial corner. The Cardinal is a prime example.
In 1981, after Amtrak canceled the Cardinal and two other lines because of Reagan administration budget cuts, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., inserted special language into a transportation bill mandating that Amtrak “provide through rail passenger service between Washington, D.C., and Chicago via Cincinnati.” The Cardinal, the only Amtrak line mandated by law, resumed service within four months.
Last year, the Cardinal lost $12.6 million, or $187 per passenger, according to the General Accounting Office.
Amtrak officials have warned that anything less than the full $1.2 billion request for the current year could lead to a shutdown as early as spring. The system carries 65,000 passengers a day, half of whom travel the Northeast corridor between Washington and Boston.
The House Appropriations Committee has approved only $762 million, however, and McCain’s ascension to chairman of the Senate transportation committee is not the best news for the company.
Bowing to reforms imposed by the administration during last summer’s bailout, Amtrak has met with state transportation officials throughout the country to tell them they will have to start paying for service to their communities.
Amtrak runs through 46 states but some of its most heavily used lines, such as the Northeast corridor, are not subsidized with any state money. Eleven states paid $121 million last year, about 4 percent of Amtrak’s roughly $3 billion operating budget that year.
Some states, notably California and Florida, are embarking on their own high-speed passenger rail projects.
Some Amtrak supporters, including Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., a former Amtrak board member, have floated the idea of raising the national gas tax a penny to pay for Amtrak. But any tax hike is considered remote, especially with GOP control of Congress.
Ultimately, the decision may be to eliminate most of the 18 or so long-distance lines and concentrate on developing a series of high-speed corridors linking regions: Chicago-Milwaukee-Minneapolis; Jacksonville-Orlando-Miami;
or San Diego-Los Angeles-San Francisco.
One bill, by House transportation committee chairman Don Young, R-Alaska, would provide $59 billion in grants, loans and bonds for high-speed rail systems. Young wants states to develop the rail corridors, not Amtrak.
Amtrak’s president steadfastly refuses to propose canceling long-distance lines because of the political fallout that would follow. Instead, Gunn said Congress and the administration need to devise a long-term strategy for passenger rail service — with or without Amtrak — that would avoid the year-to-year financial crises. For now, however, Amtrak is the only train in the station. And lawmakers’ attachment to the trains that stop in their states and carry their constituents suggests it will not be easy to dismantle the status quo.