(The following article by Tim McLaughlin was posted on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website on August 25.)
ST. LOUIS, Mo. — Amtrak Chief Executive David Gunn told a St. Louis audience Thursday that the passenger railroad is not in a crisis, then blasted the U.S. Transportation Department for a mind-set he says could destroy Amtrak.
“If Amtrak fails, intercity passenger rail will be gone in this country,” Gunn said at a Downtown St. Louis Partnership breakfast at the Sheraton hotel. “If we can’t make it at Amtrak, we’re all in trouble.”
When Gunn joined Amtrak in 2002 as an appointee of President George W. Bush, the national passenger railroad was in a financial crisis and weeks away from missing its payroll. “We’re not a company in crisis today,” Gunn said.
Crisis is a relative term at Amtrak, where turmoil has been a way of life since Congress created the railroad in 1970 to provide the passenger service that freight railroads no longer wanted. Since then, the federal government has subsidized Amtrak’s service to the tune of $30 billion. But as Gunn quickly notes, highway and air travel have received nearly $2 trillion in subsidies during that time.
Amtrak requested $1.8 billion for fiscal 2006, but Gunn said $1.45 billion will adequately keep its capital improvement program on track. The House and Senate have approved Amtrak spending of $1.2 billion and $1.4 billion, respectively.
Still, over the long run, Amtrak needs to spend billions of dollars to repair years of deferred maintenance, on bridges and signals, for example. For the nine months ended June 30, Amtrak posted a net loss of $967.1 million. That figure excludes federal and state payments recorded as revenue.
While Amtrak carries some 25 million passengers a year, the White House is not a big supporter. In February, the Bush administration introduced a fiscal 2006 budget with zero funding for Amtrak. Gunn said the Transportation Department also is a detractor.
“The goal is to destroy Amtrak,” he said. “I think (the Transportation Department) is viewing it as a budget-cutting exercise.”
Gunn blames Washington’s Beltway mentality and the absence of a comprehensive transportation funding policy, or one that doesn’t have the various modes competing against each other for money.
Numbers crunchers don’t see Amtrak as that vital, because its passenger levels pale in comparison with the airline industry. U.S. airlines carried 630 million domestic passengers in 2004, or 25 times more passengers than Amtrak carried, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
But Gunn sees passenger rail as a key alternative as fuel prices soar and the airline industry plays round robin in bankruptcy court. Cutthroat airline pricing is punishing network carriers, such as Delta Air Lines, but those cheap fares also prevent Amtrak from raising ticket prices.
Rural towns, such as Cut Bank, Mont., and Rugby, N.D., see Amtrak as vital, because they’re not near a major airport hub. Gunn said he recently passed through Rugby late at night, but he didn’t go to sleep in his rail car because he knew the mayor of Rugby would be waiting for him on the platform.
“If he found out I was sleeping, he’d call the local newspaper,” Gunn said. “That’s what he did to my predecessor.”
In Illinois and Missouri, Amtrak carried 3.1 million and 422,063 passengers, respectively, in fiscal 2004.
State Sen. Mike Gibbons, R-Kirkwood and president pro tem of the Senate, said he’s been in a pitched battle to keep Amtrak in Missouri’s budget for more than a decade.
“Our fingernails are getting pretty thin,” Gibbons said.