(The following story by Michael Jamison appeared on The Missoulian website on Febraury 10.)
MISSOULA, Mont. — When Janice Bachini looks out the front office window of her tiny but tidy Siesta Motel in downtown Havre, the view across the street is filled with the bustle of an Amtrak depot.
“If they were to cut that rail service,” she said, “it would be devastating to Havre. It would devastate the entire Hi-Line, really. There’s no bus service here anymore, and more and more people are relying on Amtrak. We’re train people more than ever.”
And so are a whole lot of other folk, too. The number of travelers hopping on and off Amtrak trains in Montana has increased 40 percent since 2002, to nearly 155,000 riders a year.
About 17,000 boarded or departed in Havre last year, same in Shelby. A whopping 67,000 passed through the Whitefish depot, helping to make the Montana line “without a doubt the most popular overnight train in our system,” Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said. “Nothing else comes close.”
The Empire Builder – the Chicago-to-Seattle line that runs across Montana’s Hi-Line – carried a half-million people in 2007.
Which explains why Bachini is joined in her concern about Amtrak’s future by Montana’s top lawmakers.
In his annual budget proposal, released recently by the White House, President Bush offered Amtrak about $800,000 to operate through 2009. That’s a whole lot better than in 2005, when his budget provided zero dollars for the passenger rail service. But it’s still nowhere near the $1.2 billion or so Amtrak has received in recent years, or the $1.8 billion Amtrak has requested.
The annual federal support is an astoundingly small investment in the nation’s transportation network, Magliari said, when compared to the hundreds of billions spent on airway and highway travel systems.
The $450 million Bush cut from the Federal Railroad Administration “is symptomatic of an administration that does not understand the needs of rural Americans,” said Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. “Too much of our economy and livelihood is based on travel for this budget to move forward like this.”
The cuts “won’t work for Montana,” Baucus said, adding that “Montanans have just as much, if not more, need for these essential travel options” as do residents of more urban states.
Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., agreed, saying that “Montana is a huge rural state, and we can’t afford to lose any transportation options.”
The president’s budget proposal also trims out more than half of the nation’s Essential Air Service funding, which provides cash for rural Montana airports such as Glasgow, Glendive, Havre, Lewistown, Miles City and Wolf Point. The money, according to the senators, would have to be recouped through higher ticket prices for rural Montanans.
And the Amtrak cuts, they said, would slash spending on both maintenance and repair, focusing passenger rail funding in more urban northeastern states.
“The president’s budget is about as out-of-touch with Montana values as you can get,” Tester said. “We need to be making investments in the infrastructure of our country, not putting programs essential to rural America on the chopping block.”
Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., has called the president’s 2009 budget proposal a “mixed bag,” and he singled out cuts to Amtrak as one place where he and the president “don’t see eye to eye.”
“President Bush and I often disagree when it comes to funding Montana’s priorities,” Rehberg said, “and his budget proposal this year is no exception.”
In the past, such disagreements have resulted in battles between Congress and the administration over passenger rail funding, and 2009 looks to keep with that tradition.
“It’s the same song, different verse,” Baucus said. “Every year the administration proposes these drastic cuts, and every year we fight to get the dollars restored. This year will be no different.”