(The Associated Press circulated the following article on April 5.)
WASHINGTON — The high-octane Mississippi Senate delegation is using a mammoth bill funding hurricane relief and the war in Iraq to have taxpayers foot the $700 million bill for closing a just-rebuilt rail line along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.
The track, running east-west through virtually every city and town along the Coast, was damaged by Hurricane Katrina. CSX Transportation and its insurers just spent about $300 million repairing it.
Now, Mississippi GOP Sens. Thad Cochran and Trent Lott want to tear it up again and use the right-of-way to build a new highway along the congested coastline.
Lott is from coastal Pascagoula and is the project’s longtime champion; Cochran supplies much-needed muscle as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, which approved the project Tuesday as part of a $107 billion-plus measure funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and additional hurricane relief.
Critics already are blasting the move as a power play by the Mississippians, accusing them of using the must-pass Iraq and Katrina bill to advance a home-state project that’s hardly an emergency.
“For $700 million, the Congress could certainly do a lot more to help people that are still without homes,” said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, a taxpayer watchdog group. “It’s certainly unclear what this has to do with an emergency. It sounds like a wish list from the senators from Mississippi.”
The plan to tear up the track isn’t real popular with CSX either. They’re negotiating with state and federal officials, and the $700 million price tag was determined largely by the railroad.
“We rebuilt that line across the Gulf Coast as quickly as possible because it’s a critical artery for us,” said CSX spokesman Gary Sease. “It serves our purposes. It meets our customers’ needs. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.”
But Mississippi officials like Lott and Gov. Haley Barbour have long wanted to replace the rail line, which causes traffic jams along north-south roads, with a new east-west road to supplement the heavily congested U.S. 90.
“It’s going to be very important to the future economy of the Coast,” said Mississippi Power President Anthony Topazi, who was vice chairman of a state commission on Katrina recovery planning. “We were already hamstrung in terms of traveling east and west along the Coast, and we needed a new route, and we suddenly had this really great opportunity.”