(The following article by Larry Kline was posted on the Havre Daily News website on May 31.)
HAVRE, Mont. — U.S. Sen. Max Baucus and Gov. Brian Schweitzer will join Amtrak officials and representatives of local, state and federal government in Havre on Wednesday as part of a whistle-stop tour to rally support for the long-distance passenger rail service along the Hi-Line.
The tour will be a model of support for other areas of the country to duplicate, an Amtrak official said.
Local citizens are invited to share their opinions about Amtrak and the Empire Builder, which have been threatened by a lack of federal funding.
The event begins in Havre at 1 p.m. with a town hall meeting at the Eagles Club. Schweitzer, along with state Department of Commerce director Anthony Preite, Amtrak vice president of government affairs Joe McHugh, National Association of Railroad Passengers president George Chilson, Hill County Commissioner Kathy Bessette, Havre Mayor Bob Rice, and representatives from Baucus’ and Rep. Denny Rehberg’s offices will share their views on Amtrak before opening the meeting to public comment.
Schweitzer said in a telephone interview Thursday that Amtrak is important and the voices of Hi-Line residents need to be heard. President Bush’s 2006 budget contains no money designated for Amtrak.
“In this business of politics, the wheel that squeaks gets the grease,” he said. “It’s high time the folks on the Hi-Line start squeaking. I’m ready to help them do that.”
At the meeting, the opinions expressed by citizens will be recorded, along with comments from other stops along the tour, and sent to the state Department of Commerce, Bear Paw Development Corp. executive director Paul Tuss said.
After the town hall meeting, the group will head over to the Amtrak station to meet Baucus, Lt. Gov. John Bohlinger and other members of the delegation traveling west on the Empire Builder from Glasgow. There will be a rally with additional comments and a press conference, Tuss said.
He urged residents to attend both events and make their opinions known.
“We want to encourage everybody who is concerned about Amtrak to show up and to demonstrate to Amtrak and federal officials that we’re serious about our support for Amtrak,” Tuss said. “I’m hoping we can get a lot of citizens to show up and testify about the importance of Amtrak. It’s one thing to hear from politicians and Amtrak officials, and it’s another to hear from people about what Amtrak means to their lives.”
Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said in a telephone interview from Chicago on Thursday that the whistle-stop tour will serve as a model for other areas across the country that utilize long-distance passenger rail service. Magliari will travel along the Hi-Line the day before the events and end up in Whitefish, where he will observe the meeting and rally there.
He will then travel to Arkansas the following week to tell officials and citizens what he’s seen in order to assist them in organizing their own support for Amtrak.
“You are setting the pace,” Magliari said of Montanans. “The passion of the folks in Montana needs to be known nationwide. I’d wager that you’d find people as passionate along other routes, but there’s a special kind of leadership in Montana.”
Magliari said Amtrak has faced zero-funding proposals before, including one from President Reagan. This round is different, however.
“It’s a very different year than years past,” he said. “(This administration) has offered a reform plan without any funding. They are, in their budget planning, calling for an Amtrak bankruptcy.”
The railroad received $1.2 billion this year. The current budget funding runs out Sept. 30.
“To suggest that rail passenger service should operate without federal funding … would be most generously described as inconsistent, if not inequitable,” Magliari said. “Other forms of transportation, such as roads, aviation and waterways, receive significant federal funding.”
Magliari said Amtrak is far from a “dying railroad,” as Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has said.
Total ridership was more than 25 million in 2004, up a million from the previous year. The Empire Builder, which serves a dozen Hi-Line communities on its way from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Seattle was used by more than 129,000 people last year, up 5.7 percent from 2003. The train contributed $14 million to the Montana economy.
In April, top Amtrak officials announced a series of strategic reform initiatives and requested $1.82 billion in federal funding for 2006. Among other things, the railroad suggests utilizing a federal/state matching approach for development of rail corridors. The railroad also wants to upgrade the status of infrastructure in the Northeast, phase in financial performance thresholds for long-distance trains and create markets for competition.
Some at the federal level have criticized Amtrak for being unprofitable and inefficient. Magliari said the reforms are part of a continuing process to make the service more efficient. He also pointed to the fact that Amtrak was created by the federal government because passenger service had become unprofitable for the nation’s railroads.
“Amtrak was created in 1970 because the freight railroads were obligated to provide passenger rail service and had lost money for a decade or more doing it,” he said. “That was 35 years ago. The price of everything has gone up. Money couldn’t be made doing it then.”
If Amtrak does not receive federal funding and goes bankrupt, $360 million will be set aside to continue operating trains along the Northeast corridor. Magliari said that would be unfair to people in vast swaths of the country.
“To say that wholesale parts of the country should be disenfranchised from passenger rail service simply because they don’t have the same population density as other areas of the country would be to argue that interstate highways should never have been built in some states and rural electrification should have never taken place,” he said. In the 1930s and 1940s, electricity was brought to rural areas of the country with federal money because it was unprofitable for utility companies to do so, Magliari said.
The fight for Amtrak is far from over.
Rehberg recently signed on as a co-sponsor for the Amtrak Reauthorization Act of 2005, a bipartisan effort sponsored by Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
The bill would authorize Congress to give Amtrak $2 billion a year in federal funding over the next three years. Rehberg, who sits on the Appropriations Committee, said he will continue to work for Amtrak funding.
“It’s an essential service,” he said today in a phone interview. “I clearly understand that. It’s easy for me to be supportive. One of the things that you become very aware of when you represent a state like Montana is that you’ve got a very large geographical area and a sparse population. Over the course of history, subsidization has not only been accepted, it’s necessary. It’s something the federal government has clearly understood as a function. We wouldn’t have passenger service along the Hi-Line without the federal government’s help.
“It’s easy for me to be a supporter and an advocate for Amtrak,” Rehberg added.
Rehberg will join the wistle-stop tour in Whitefish.
Baucus has been consistently supportive of Amtrak. He voted for an amendment that would have provided the railroad with $1.04 billion next year. He also wrote a letter to President Bush urging support for the service. Baucus will ride the train from Glasgow to Whitefish.
Burns has been criticized by Montana Democrats for his votes on Amtrak. He, along with Rehberg, voted for the president’s budget. He also voted against the $1.04 billion amendment. A Burns spokesman said Thursday that to say the senator does not support Amtrak is “ludicrous.”
“Maybe this has been a partisan issue,” spokesman James Pendleton said. “To say that there was no money in the budget for Amtrak is wrong. There is a section that is for transportation, period. In the appropriations process, they will divvy up those funds. Senator Burns feels that we can get the necessary funding for Amtrak.”
Burns will not be participating in the whistle-stop tour, but he recently rode the Empire Builder with Missouri Sen. Kit Bond. Bond is the chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on transportation, of which Burns is a member.
Magliari said Amtrak officials appreciate what Montanans are doing to show their support.
“We’re very grateful for the governor and the lieutenant governor’s plan to pull people together across the Hi-Line and work with their members of Congress to make it clear that Montana deserves passenger rail service,” he said.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this story.