(The following story by Todd J. Gillman appeared on The Dallas Morning News website on June 14.)
DALLAS — Union Station is barely visible from David Laney’s law office high atop a downtown Dallas skyscraper. Time it right, crane your neck and you can just see the Texas Eagle pulling in twice a day.
Mr. Laney rarely boards the Eagle, one of the trains that Amtrak’s many critics love to hate. But after nearly a year as chairman of the board of the passenger rail system, he has come to believe that these routes have a future – as building blocks linking high-speed rail corridors such as the one between Washington and Boston.
“It’s hard for some people to envision Northeast Corridor-like operations elsewhere in this country. I do. I do envision those,” Mr. Laney says. “How you translate that into political support, I don’t know.”
That vision puts him at odds with key lawmakers and even President Bush, whose budgets have reflected a desire to curtail rather than expand Amtrak operations. But it’s music to the ears of rail buffs and rural lawmakers who weren’t sure what to expect when Mr. Bush installed him at Amtrak.
“Bush is our enemy, far as that goes,” says Dan Monaghan, a rail enthusiast and expert from Garland who has served on the Dallas Area Rapid Transit board. “I think Laney is smart enough that he sees the big picture in transportation.”
Mr. Laney chaired the Texas Highway Commission for five years during Mr. Bush’s tenure as governor. But he rarely boarded a train and had scarcely thought about Amtrak before Mr. Bush named him to the board.
“Paid no attention to it,” he says. “I was overwhelmed with highways.”
He came to the job with no preconceptions and no marching orders, he said.
Mr. Bush “knows that I am fiscally very conservative,” says the 55-year-old Mr. Laney. “He also knows that I step into Amtrak from the passenger’s standpoint, and I’m not prejudiced by nostalgia. I come at it as coldly as I would any business.”
But not everyone can square a strict fiscal outlook with support for long-distance routes.
The Texas Eagle, for instance, loses $258 per passenger on its way from Chicago to San Antonio via East Texas and Dallas. The delay-plagued Sunset Limited loses $400 per passenger on each trip from Los Angeles to Orlando, Fla.
Peter Sepp, a vice president at the conservative National Taxpayers Union who has criticized Amtrak, called it the “wrong direction” to protect money-losing long- distance routes.
“Amtrak is having to do too many things at once,” he says.
And yet the trains ease highway congestion and provide mobility to rural areas and to people who can’t or won’t fly, Mr. Laney says.
“We’re in 46 of the 48 contiguous states,” he says. “It is pretty close to essential transportation for a lot of people. … That may not be enough to keep them going. But there’s a real love for rail travel – by an element of the population. It’s not ‘I gotta get to a business meeting by 10 o’clock in Dallas,’ though.”
Mr. Laney contends that if such routes are abandoned, there will be no chance of building a true national passenger rail network.
“Once lost, it will not be recovered,” he says.
Coming on board
A graduate of St. Mark’s School of Texas in Dallas, Mr. Laney attended Stanford University and Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law. He’s a partner at Jackson Walker LLP.
In 2002, he became one of the campaign “Pioneers” for Mr. Bush, raising $100,000. And he put his law training to use as a recount volunteer in Florida.
Although Mr. Laney’s name had surfaced as a potential transportation secretary, the job went to Democrat Norman Mineta, a former congressman and Clinton commerce secretary.
Mr. Laney got a lower-profile slot on the Amtrak board and steeped himself in balance sheets and strategic plans developed by president and CEO David Gunn.
The men speak highly of each other.
“He’s incredibly good,” says Mr. Laney of the man widely credited with chipping away at deferred maintenance, cutting costs and boosting revenue in the two years he’s worked for Amtrak.
And Mr. Gunn calls Mr. Laney “a very intelligent guy, obviously.”
“He’s very thoughtful. He’s very logical in his approach,” says Mr. Gunn from his office atop Washington’s Union Station – a place where the U.S. Capitol dominates the view and the chairs rattle with each passing train.
Mr. Laney became chairman last July after a year on Amtrak’s seven-member board. But he’s facing the prospect this summer of five vacant seats on the board as the final Clinton appointee’s five-year term expires. Three nominations are stalled in the Senate, including that of former American Airlines chief Robert Crandall, victims of partisan bickering over judgeships.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who lost the 1988 presidential race to Mr. Bush’s father, says the administration wrongly declared his and the other seats vacant. He argues that the law allows board members to serve until replacements are confirmed.
“Can you imagine, in this era of corporate responsibility – no audit committee, no board committees, no nothing,” he says. “The whole thing’s absurd.”
But his complaint isn’t aimed at Mr. Laney.
“He’s a decent guy. But he’s an appointee of the current administration,” Mr. Dukakis says. “This is just not an administration that understands that this country desperately needs a first-class, modern, high-speed rail system everywhere, including Texas.”
Such a system could be built for 8 percent of the national annual outlay on highways and airports, he contends.
Yet to get rolling
To be sure, ridership is up on short- and long-haul routes. And high gasoline prices could lure even more people from cars and planes.
But the terrorist attack on a Madrid train a few months ago prompted a fresh look at security, a costly challenge on a system with 500 stations and 22,000 miles of track.
Coupled with that, Amtrak struggled to wrest $1.3 billion from Congress this year. That was just a fraction of what the federal government spent on highways, airline bailouts and the air traffic control system, and $500 million less than Mr. Gunn and the board wanted.
“It is truly peanuts,” Mr. Laney says. “A negligible piece of the fiscal puzzle.”
The Bush budgets for this year and 2005 included $900 million for Amtrak, a “shutdown” number, Mr. Gunn says.
He’s been the public face of the budget fights.
But Ross Capon, executive director of the National Association of Rail Passengers, gives Mr. Laney credit for bucking the White House on funding, too.
“When you look at what’s been accomplished, it’s fairly impressive in spite of the overwhelming opposition that Amtrak confronts at every turn,” he says.
Amtrak has teetered for years, caught in a stalemate between lawmakers who would just as soon shut down the system or strip it to its most successful core, the 600-mile Northeast Corridor, and the defenders who see long-distance service as vital to ease highway congestion and provide a rural lifeline.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, has even proposed massive investment for repair and expansion, arguing that Amtrak has never gotten the chance to succeed.
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., notes that despite $27 billion in subsidies over 34 years, Amtrak loses $1 billion a year, owes $5 billion, and “in most areas of the country neither meets a market demand nor provides needed public transportation.”
In April, he introduced a bill to divide Amtrak into two agencies. One would operate trains. The other would own the Northeast Corridor but would probably lease it to a private consortium. States with short-haul routes would lose them if they didn’t help cover losses. It’s close to what the White House wants, but it has gained little support in Congress.
Mr. Laney is optimistic that as Amtrak’s finances and service improve, criticism will dissipate.
“Most of the opponents, most of the arch antagonists of Amtrak,” he says, “are driven by fiscal philosophy. They say, ‘I’m opposed to subsidies, and therefore I’m opposed to Amtrak.’ ”
He considers it futile to try to sell or restructure the Northeast Corridor, given its disrepair.
“Nobody in their right mind would take it,” he says.
But he does see the corridor as a role model.
Federal agencies have designated 11 high-speed corridors around the country, most of which exist only on paper: from Miami to Tampa, Fla., Seattle to Portland, Chicago to St. Louis, in California and even from San Antonio to Tulsa, Okla.
When Mr. Laney comes East for monthly Amtrak board meetings in Washington, he usually catches a high-speed luxury Acela or business-class Metroliner to visit a daughter in New York.
The service is so great, he says, it should be available elsewhere. Congress won’t spend the billions of dollars needed anytime soon, and states are strapped for cash. But for Mr. Laney, that just makes it a question of patience.
“I don’t think you get from where we are now to a 200-mile-an-hour train in one fell swoop,” he says.
(Staff writer G. Robert Hillman contributed to this report.)