(The following article by Christopher Dinsomore was posted on the Virginian-Pilot website on October 4.)
NORFOLK, Va. — The railroad’s 14-page lobbying disclosure statement reads like a wish list.
Twice a year, Norfolk Southern Corp., the 21-state railroad headquartered in Norfolk, must file a report with Congress describing its lobbying efforts and spending. As part of that disclosure, it lays out what legislation it follows, supports and opposes.
There were a lot of issues concerning the railroad, ranging from spending on transportation and homeland security to taxes and environmental policy.
“If you look at our wish list – at least at this railroad – at the top is eliminating the 4.3 cent deficit reduction fuel tax,” said James A. Hixon, Norfolk Southern’s executive vice president-finance and public affairs.
The tax was enacted for railroads and trucks in 1990 and later extended to the barge and airline industries to help pay down the federal deficit; however, the tax on fuel for trucks and airlines has since been redirected to their respective federal trust funds for infrastructure.
Railroads, which pay for their own infrastructure, unlike the trucking and airline industries, have paid $2.3 billion under the tax since 1990, according to the Association of American Railroads. The association argues that the tax is unfair and discriminatory.
Norfolk Southern also has multiple stakes in the reauthorization of the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century. It opposed efforts to increase truck sizes and weight limits in that bill, but supported expanded spending on grade-crossing safety. It also wants to see a provision in the bill that sets money aside for transportation projects of regional and national significance.
Specifically, Norfolk Southern hopes that a $1.5 billion public/private project in Chicago known as CREATE – or Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency – would move forward, Hixon said. The project is designed to reduce the impact of freight rail traffic on the city and surrounding communities by improving the rail connections in the nation’s busiest rail hub.
The railroads involved have agreed to invest $212 million in the project, called the first of its kind because it entails public investment in railroad infrastructure. While it involves separating numerous road and rail crossings, it also includes new track, new switches and new control systems.
“What we’re trying to do is develop projects where rail can be part of the solution,” Hixon said. “Right now the railroad industry provides its own infrastructure, but the railroad needs a return on its investment. Some of these projects are too expensive to do on our own. But there’s a public benefit, so we’re asking for public investment.”
The railroad is also quietly pushing for a smaller, $266 million public/private project known as the Heartland Corridor, which would cut a day-and-a-half off intermodal train times between the port of Hampton Roads and Chicago.
The Heartland Corridor wouldn’t qualify under the program for projects of regional and national significance.
The project would improve rail access to the Maersk marine cargo terminal now under construction in Portsmouth by realigning Commonwealth Railway’s line to the median of Route 164. It would also raise clearances in 28 tunnels along Norfolk Southern’s mainline through southern West Virginia, allowing for the passage of intermodal trains with double-stacked containers.
Hixon was reluctant to discuss the project, saying there’s nothing in any transportation bill for the Heartland Corridor. However, he held out hope that the railroad might persuade the affected states to spend some of their federal transportation funds on the project.
Norfolk Southern also supported aspects of the proposed Rail Security Act, which offered $1.2 billion to fund anti terrorism security needs on the nation’s passenger and freight railroads.
On the environmental front, Norfolk Southern opposed several bills designed to cut pollutants, particularly the Clean Power Act, which would have required cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, sulfur oxides and mercury back to 1990 levels.
Norfolk Southern derived $1.5 billion in revenue last year from hauling coal and owns the mineral rights to tremendous coal reserves in Appalachia through its subsidiary Pocahontas Land Corp.
However, Hixon said, Norfolk Southern’s opposition was based more on the law’s likely impact on coal companies, electric utilities and the economy.
“It would have required less coal to be used in power generation,” Hixon said. “Coal-fired generation is more cost efficient, so it helps the economy. This bill would have raised energy costs.”
The railroad did support expanding a program for trading pollution credits, a voluntary market-based approach to controlling pollution.
“We’re not one to just say no to everything,” Hixon said. “We’re trying to be reasonable.”
But Norfolk Southern and the rest of the railroad industry is most vehement in its opposition to an effort to reregulate the industry, deregulated by the Staggers Rail Act of 1980.
A shippers group known as the Association for Rail Competition has pushed for changes in federal oversight of the rail industry. In particular, one bill would require railroads to quote shippers served by only one railroad a rate to the nearest competing railroad and requires binding arbitration in rate disputes.
“We are fighting a pretty entrenched interest, and they don’t want to change,” said Michael E. Grisso, executive director of the shippers group.
Little has happened on any of the bills. Even the transportation bill remains hung up and under a veto threat because of differing funding levels proposed by the Bush administration, the House and the Senate.
“We’ve got a Congress so polarized it can’t agree on Mother’s Day,” Grisso said. “It’s been a year of building grassroots, not a year of moving legislation.”