Nomination of Michelle T. Friendland to be United States Circuit Judge for the Ninth Circuit -- Resumed
Floor Speech
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Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I would like to start this afternoon by thanking Chairman Murray for her tireless work on the Budget Committee--on which I serve--to develop and pass a bipartisan budget, a budget that sets us on a path to return to regular order.
Senator Murray has also been a tireless advocate for transportation and infrastructure programs, and as chair of the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee--on which I also serve--she fought tirelessly to include adequate funding for Amtrak back in the fiscal year 2014 omnibus and moving forward.
The topic I would like to take up today is the role of Amtrak in our country and our communities and its appropriate role as a central piece of Federal transportation policy going forward.
Senator Murray has been a terrific advocate for investing across a wide range of transportation modalities. As a member of the Appropriations Committee, I look forward to working with her and our leading full committee chair Senator Mikulski to make sure we are successful in fighting ardently and steadfastly for Amtrak this year and into the future.
I come to talk on the floor today about the importance of our national passenger rail system--Amtrak--because this is not just about getting people from point A to point B. Investing in Amtrak also means creating jobs, making our whole economy more dynamic, and making America more competitive.
Amtrak is performing better and better each and every year. As the Presiding Officer knows all too well, ridership over the last decade has steadily increased. In fact, 10 of the last 11 years have seen record numbers, and last year we broke through 31.6 million riders on Amtrak. The trains are more and more crowded, but they are arriving more and more frequently on time and the quality of the train sets and the quality of the service provided by the conductors and the other folks who work for Amtrak has steadily increased.
As the value proposition of Amtrak has increased, so has ridership. Record ticket sales and other revenues have made this possible. Today Amtrak covers nearly 89 percent of the cost of operating their trains, which is by far the best of any passenger rail operation in the United States. They are, in fact, on track to cover 90 percent, through revenues, of their total operating costs in 2014. Because of this success, since 2002 Amtrak has decreased its debt by more than half.
My home State of Delaware and the Presiding Officer's home State of New Jersey are part of one of the oldest and most critical sections of our national passenger rail system, the so-called Northeast corridor, which goes from Boston to Washington. If it were its own separate economy, the Northeast corridor would produce $3 trillion a year--21 percent of our Nation's total economic output--which would make it the fifth largest economy in the world if it were on its own. But it is not. It is an integrated part of our Nation, and its passenger rail infrastructure is an integrated part of our national commitment to efficient and effective transportation.
In this region in particular, Amtrak is not a luxury; it is a fundamental and critical part of our economy and moving our community and our people forward. If Amtrak service were cut off in the region for just a day, it would cost our economy $13 million. One-third of all the jobs in the Northeast corridor--or 7 million jobs--are within 5 miles of a station.
Amtrak's impact on my home State of Delaware is particularly large because Amtrak employs over 1,000 men and women in the State of Delaware. Many of them work at two maintenance facilities--Wilmington and Bear--where they repair everything from train seats to the heavy trucks to the cars themselves. I have had a chance to visit them on a number of occasions. It is incredible to see the work ethic and capabilities of the men and women of Amtrak. These shops have been there for a long time. They have worked hard to modernize, to be relevant, and to contribute to the strengthening bottom line of Amtrak overall.
I would like to mention ``Irish'' John, who is a good friend of mine and has been a leader for the sheet metal workers for a long time. Sheet metal workers with Amtrak were one of the unions that worked with management to find ways to significantly save costs on overhaul work on Acela train sets, which resulted in Amtrak choosing not to farm out their service work and instead do a $125 million job to overhaul 20 Acela sets in-house. This is union labor, and this helps support good middle-wage jobs. This helps support good middle-class families and middle-class communities in Delaware and our region. This particular work on this Acela overhaul will last more than 3 1/2 years and sustain dozens of jobs at our Bear repair facility.
My friend Bill, who is with the IBEW Amtrak union, is another friend who has helped me understand the critical role of the employment Amtrak provides to our whole region--not just to Delaware, not just to the Philadelphia area, but to the whole Northeast corridor.
When we talk about investing in Amtrak, we are not only investing in new options for commuters and businesses, we are talking about investing in our communities and in workers who will build and maintain the next generation of American rail. As I said, these are great, high-skilled jobs. By investing in Amtrak's present and giving them a predictable future, we will preserve and continue these important skills and these important workers and their families in our communities.
Amtrak's benefits go beyond just the immediate skilled workers and their families and the communities that benefit from them.
In Delaware, the services Amtrak provides help to keep and draw in new businesses through a ripple effect in our whole economy. Last week there was an announcement of a new company that is spinning off out of Sallie Mae that will be locating its headquarters and 120 jobs in Wilmington. They have chosen a site specifically because it is walking distance from our Amtrak station--from the Joseph R. Biden Amtrak Station in Wilmington, DE.
In Newark, the University of Delaware is building a new campus called the Science, Technology and Advanced Research--STAR--Campus, which will build partnerships between several important entities, such as the Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. What makes that partnership possible is the backbone of the Northeast corridor--the connection between these different cities that has made all of us stronger and better because of passenger rail.
I hope from these few examples it is clear that passenger rail is also a critical component of economic development. Passenger rail tends to link downtown urban areas and tends to be absolutely central to anchoring their revitalization, as the Presiding Officer knows so well.
Passenger rail is also critical not just in the Northeast corridor but in communities across the country that rely on it to connect with other communities and our country's major economic centers.
State-supported services have become a major source of ridership growth for Amtrak as well, with that ridership nearly doubling between 1998 and 2013.
Long-distance ridership across the great heartland of our country has also grown by roughly 20 percent without the introduction of any new services, frequencies, or equipment. In fiscal year 2013, long-distance ridership reached its highest point in 20 years.
However, we are at the proverbial crossroads--or I suppose I should say crossing--now because ridership is soaring, Amtrak is more popular than ever before, and demand will continue to grow, but we are not keeping up with the investment in infrastructure that we need to sustain this growth into the future.
For instance, right now there is nearly $6 billion in outdated, delayed investments that need to be made just in the Northeast corridor to bring it to what is called a state of good repair. I will focus on a few of the critical infrastructure needs in the Northeast corridor, but there are also needs across the country.
Baltimore is a city I traveled through this morning on my way to this Capitol on the Amtrak train. In Baltimore, Senator Mikulski's home State, the B&P tunnels have stayed open since 1873. Although they have undergone periodic repairs, none of them were built to be permanent. We can't be competitive if we continue to rely on tunnels that have been around since roughly the time of our own Civil War. We need to invest in modernizing this infrastructure.
Between the Presiding Officer's home State of New Jersey and the great State of New York, preliminary planning is underway on the Gateway Tunnel, which is a critical tunnel that will ease the bottleneck under the Hudson that causes delays throughout the whole region, limits the options of travelers, and ends up costing the economy more in the short and long run. We need to invest in our infrastructure.
In Delaware, we have a bottleneck around our most popular station, the Joseph R. Biden Station in Wilmington. The rail lines north and south of that station slim from three lines to two, restricting service and preventing the addition of new rail service. Thanks in part to a Federal high-speed rail grant, construction will soon be underway to add a third track to alleviate this critical chokepoint, the main one just south of the station. Without new investment, that chokepoint will continue north of the station.
And that is not to mention the hundreds of bridges and tunnels and other connection points--including the overhead centenary lines--that require repair and replacement on the Northeast corridor alone. We need to invest in our infrastructure not just in the Northeast corridor but across this whole country. We do spend a lot of time here on this floor, as we should, talking about our Nation's fiscal deficit and debt, but we should also focus on our physical deficit and debt--the delayed repair of critical pieces of infrastructure that we rely on for our economy and for our communities but that we are not focused on.
If we invest in our infrastructure today, it will employ people in repairing it and lay the groundwork for improvement of our economy over the long term. I recognize the reality that while the budget picture has improved, it is not yet as good as it should be. We are still facing real fiscal challenges.
I ride between Wilmington and Washington nearly every day on Amtrak, and our workers are responsible for repairing and retrofitting a lot of the trains on which I ride. I am impressed with their skill and the caliber of their repair work. As a rider and our State Senator, I see how critical Amtrak is to our economy, our communities, and to our country as a whole. I hope that is clear to the rest of the Members of this Chamber.
I hope that anyone watching who has appreciated the value of Amtrak's connecting power that links this country together from east to west and north to south will communicate with their Senator and convey the importance of strong and sustained investment in the Northeast corridor, yes, but across the whole reach of our country. Only by strengthening Amtrak and ensuring the vibrancy of the entire Nation's system of passenger rail can we really ensure that American rail will be there for years and generations to come.
With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
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