Passenger Rail Investment And Improvement Act Of 2008
Floor Speech
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Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I might consume.
Again, I first have to compliment Mr. Oberstar. It has been a pleasure to work with him on this initiative. This is actually very historic in nature. The House of Representatives and the Congress has not passed an Amtrak reauthorization since 1997. That is 11 years.
One of the first things, when Mr. Oberstar and I met, when we took over the committee, I on the Republican side, he as the Chair of the committee for the new majority, we set some goals aside. One was to pass a WRDA bill, water resources, so our Nation would have water resources. We hadn't passed a bill in 7 years. And the last bill we passed was about a four or $5 billion authorization. We passed one for almost $24 billion, the first one, in, again, a long, long time.
We committed to try to reauthorize and authorize Amtrak, our national passenger rail service. And we have worked together. I have to compliment my colleague, Ms. Brown, who chairs the Rail Subcommittee, and also I want to thank the Republican side of the aisle, Mr. Shuster, the gentleman from Pennsylvania, who also rolled up his sleeves and worked diligently, and for that we were able to pass, by a very wide margin in the United States House, about a month ago, I think it was 311 votes, a very wide margin, Amtrak reauthorization.
Now we have an opportunity to take to conference, the other body, the Senate has passed legislation. What we are doing today is taking the Senate bill and we are adding the language from the House because we want to negotiate a bill that can become law and make the changes that the House voted on a month ago, and that we will get a chance to vote on again today.
It is my hope that many of the highlights and provisions of the House Amtrak reauthorization will be included in the final conference report, and that will be the measure that both the House and Senate vote on individually, and hopefully we can get the President to sign into law.
But the conference process also gives us a chance to make further improvements, even on what the other body passed and what we passed about a month ago, as I said, because it is important that we make good Amtrak reforms. And some things we have learned even since we passed legislation in the House.
We want to open the door to more competition. And in a time when we are struggling to find positive solutions to address the energy crisis that our Nation is facing, it is important that we look at transportation alternatives that are cost effective and that can improve passenger rail service, just not in one area, but across the whole country that we have responsibility for.
So the bill that we have before us, S. 294, will be amended, and it will have the text of the House bill that we passed, again, a month ago. But one of the most important provisions is something, again, that I have insisted on trying to do, and that is to drag the United States, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century of high speed rail.
In the proposal that I crafted in the bill, and with the help of Mr. Oberstar, Ms. Brown, and Mr. Shuster, what we have is a simple provision. And it says that the Department of Transportation can take proposals from the private sector to develop, to finance, to construct and to operate high speed rail service.
We do have a caveat that we want high speed rail service from Washington to New York in 2 hours, and we want stops along the way to service areas. Now, some folks say, well, we have Acela. Yes, we do have Acela, and Acela's come a long way, and had some difficulty in its implementation. But I am not going to go there. I don't want to talk about the past. I want to talk about the future.
And the future is, stop and think about this. Going just a few blocks from here, from Union Station to New York City, Center City to downtown Manhattan in less than 2 hours, with stops along the way. Now, think of how that would revolutionize travel in the Northeast Corridor and in the United States.
Why start there? Because that is the only corridor that Amtrak owns. Amtrak runs over 22,000 miles of rail track, but that 22,000 miles of rail track, with the exception of a little over 700 miles, is all on private freight rail. The only thing that Amtrak owns as far as right-of-way, the primary piece of real estate it owns, and one of the most valuable real estate assets in the world, if not the United States, is the Northeast Corridor. And that Northeast Corridor, right now the way it is constructed, with commuter service, freight service and Acela service, doesn't operate very well.
So what we are asking is the private sector to come in, give us the ideas on how we can have high speed rail. Give us the ideas.
Now, I always say, folks, that we are sitting on our assets; the Federal government is sitting on our assets. And that Northeast Corridor is a great public asset that we all have interest in, the taxpayers out there have interest in. So we can take that asset and we can maximize its utilization, both as a utility corridor, as a high speed rail corridor, as a better commuter service corridor and as a better freight service corridor. So we take that and we get a better return. We develop it so that we have jobs, we have construction, we have service between here and New York in less than 2 hours. Think about that.
Instead of going out to National Airport or to Dulles, waiting for an hour and then on the other end trying to commute back in. Think of the people that we take off of the road. Think of the change in the pattern of travel in the Northeast Corridor. And I can tell you, even with next generation air traffic control technology, this is the most important thing that will impact aviation congestion in our country, because 78 percent of all of the delays in our entire national air space system and in aviation in this country ripple from New York City's air space.
It's congested air space out to the rest of the country. When you can't get into New York or out of New York, the rest of the system goes down, and there is nothing, even next-generation air traffic control that can make planes fly that much closer, to solve this problem.
What we're going to have to do is go to a different system, and that system is high-speed rail. And I would like for Amtrak to do it by themselves, but they are running long-distance service, and they are running other services. And we think that it's our last hope to have the private sector come in, which Amtrak would have them do anyways, and give us proposals as to how we can maximize the utilization, separate the traffic, and get true high-speed service in that order.
So that's the proposal. As I said, Amtrak now chugs along at 83 miles an hour. It's almost embarrassing to call that high-speed rail. That's Acela, not the other service. It's 83 miles an hour. In the rest of the world, Europe and Asia, high-speed is defined as between 120 and 150 miles an hour on average. So we can do the same thing. There is no reason why the United States cannot do the same thing to maximize the developmental potential of the Northeast corridor, the most densely populated and valuable corridor in the Nation.
So I think, again, working with Mr. Oberstar, Ms. Brown, Mr. Shuster, we have a plan, we have a vision. We want the other body to go along with us. We think this is the way to go by substituting our bill this afternoon, and hopefully we can go to conference. Hopefully, we can go back to the American people and say we've done something that will impact energy, impact transportation, not just rail. Also, remember what I just said about aviation capacity in the United States, and we can do it all in this package.
This isn't an impossible dream. This is doable.
So I ask again that we give full consideration. I give full support, am pleased to join Mr. Oberstar in that effort as we change out the Senate bill 294, insert our legislation, and work with the other body again in bringing long-distance, high-speed, better passenger service rail service in not just the Northeast Corridor but with the reforms we've advocated for Amtrak for the whole Nation. We can do it. We must do it. And I look forward to doing it with Mr. Oberstar.
I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. MICA. If I may, I would yield myself the balance of the time on our side.
In closing, let me address a couple of comments that have been made. First, Ms. Brown was surprised to hear me speaking in favor of Amtrak reauthorization. And probably there are some people turning over in their graves that have since gone on to their higher rewards hearing me speak about that. But I have long been an advocate of public transit, transit alternatives, high-speed rail.
What I am not an advocate of is not good stewardship of the money that the hardworking Americans send to us. And people must realize we subsidize right now Amtrak to the tune of every single ticket sold to the tune of $50.12. Just take the number of passengers last year and divide it by the $1.2 billion given by Congress. So we've got to find a way to cut down that subsidization. We've got to find a way to actually get the most cost-effective transportation and make it available.
So it's not sometimes how much money we spend. It's how we spend it.
The reason I support this bill is because it has long-overdue reforms in it. Some of them deal with accounting and finance that Members don't want to hear about right now and mundane things. They may be mundane, but it will let us know what the bottom line is.
I come from a business background. I'm not an attorney. I want to know what the bottom line is, the cost, and we'll be able to determine the sum of Amtrak's finances, which we haven't been able to determine the costs in the past. We will be able to cut down that subsidization.
We will be able to bring in the private sector. Heaven forbid we should have some of these routes--we can't tell how much they're costing us now exactly, and some routes, I hate to tell you exactly, some tickets are being underwritten as much as $300 per ticket according to the Government Accountability Office.
But that being said, how do we get the subsidization down and the relief for the taxpayers? And that's through some competition. This bill does provide, and the other body's also provided, for bringing in some competition. Let's see if it can be done for less, for a lower subsidy and cost effectively because we do want to provide transportation.
If you think people want transportation now, when we get through with this aviation crisis this year, they have already dropped 100 airports across the country or will drop by the end of the year in service because of high fuel costs. There will be an even greater demand for passenger rail service.
So we look at how we can do it most cost effectively. That should be the name of the game here, again, with these hardworking folks sending us their cash to expend it.
And this will never happen, even with the authorization. This authorization is a 5-year authorization, I believe in the neighborhood of $14 billion, give or take a billion here or there today, but $14 billion. Just do the math. If we're going from a $1.2 billion to a $1.9 billion subsidy and have $6 billion in backlog, plus they have debt, you can't make the kind of substantial improvements, say, for high-speed service that will cost billions of dollars. Only the private sector, in partnership with the Federal Government and again the State partners and others, can make that happen.
So that's the vision we have for making that happen, for putting in place the reforms that we need in Amtrak as far as its finances and getting better operations.
Let me also tell you an interesting thing I learned today. I never knew this. Today I was told that by authorizing this legislation for the first time in 11 years, listen to this, we will actually, by having authorization, the bond markets and finance markets will lower the amount that we have to pay, that the taxpayer has to pay, for the bonds and for the indebtedness that we already have for Amtrak. So we win again. Taxpayers will win again. We will have to pay less. We're paying about $300 million a year, I think, on bonded indebtedness in Amtrak, if my numbers are correct. So we win again with this reauthorization, those that are fiscal hawks like myself.
Finally, labor, how did somebody like a conservative Member from Florida sell this to some people in labor, and I said, When I came to Congress 16 years ago there were 28,000 people working for Amtrak. Today, there are 19,000 and the number is going down. Mr. LaTourette just talked about labor fighting with the Amtrak board to get their salary and wages when their brothers and sisters in the unions that represented the freight railroads were getting higher pay, better working conditions, better benefits, and settling with the private sector. They got it all.
So we can do that for people with the proposal that we have here, and we have the hope for more employment, a better transportation system, with benefits to the public and taking our asset, that asset that we're sitting on, the Northeast Corridor, and expanding it, making it something positive by any stretch of the imagination.
So with those couple of comments, Madam Speaker, I look forward to seeing high-speed rail because this will be a model, if we succeed in the Northeast Corridor, also for Speaker pro tem Tubbs Jones' communities that she serves, we can have a model, not just in the Northeast Corridor that Amtrak owns, but for communities throughout the Nation where it makes sense.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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