Cantwell Chairs Amtrak, NTSB Nominations Hearing

Hearing

Good morning. I am pleased to welcome the Amtrak and National Transportation Safety Board nominees and their families.

Amtrak is an essential transportation provider for communities across the nation. From the Northeast Corridor to the Pacific Northwest, Amtrak connects both rural and urban communities in an environmentally friendly way.

But the pandemic took a toll on Amtrak with ridership down 97 percent due to COVID-19. Thankfully, ridership has significantly improved from the recovery and companies projected to be back at pre-pandemic ridership levels next year.

I especially want to thank Amtrak for working with me to fully restore the Amtrak Cascades service in my home state of Washington and Oregon earlier this year.

As ridership nears full recovery, Amtrak can focus its attention on expanding service and improving the consumer experience.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided a historic $66 billion investment in rail, which will be used to purchase new passenger railcars for Amtrak Cascades and provide more opportunities for states to expand.

Ensuring these funds benefit the entire nation is important to us and we'll hear about transportation across our northern tier states and wanting to make sure that service there is fully operational. A very important aspect I know to Senator Tester, and to myself, and to many others who want access to our national parks.

While we are moving forward with this hearing on nominees, I encourage both the White House and Minority Leader McConnell to work together to ensure that these nominees put forward to the Senate meet the requirements of the law and the country.

These nominees are no strangers to the Committee. This is the third time the nominees have been before Congress so hopefully we can get you over the goal line.

The Amtrak nominees before us today are: Mr. Anthony Coscia, who served on the Amtrak Board and is the current chair since 2010; Mayor Koos, who I hear about all the time from my friend Senator Durbin, currently serves as the Mayor of Normal, Illinois;

Mr. Szabat, who recently retired from a long career in federal service, including as the Undersecretary for Policy at the Department of Transportation under then Secretary Chao.

We are also going to hear this morning from Mr. Alvin Brown who is nominated by the President as a Member of the National Transportation Safety Board, and is the nation's safety watchdog, ensuring that both the transportation industry and the Department of Transportation are putting safety first, investigating civil transportation accidents, and providing recommendations that Congress can act on to improve safety.

Mr. Brown, has had a long career in public policy, starting when he worked for then Sen. Nelson. But as former Mayor of Jacksonville, Florida, which is I'm familiar with your record, provides a unique perspective on transportation safety issues that the city had to deal with. And I think that will be beneficial as we require the NTSB to play a larger role in communicating important safety needs of our nation. Additionally, as the Mayor of the nation's 11th largest city, he managed thousands of employees and a budget of nearly $2 billion. So his unique experience will be helpful at NTSB at retaining a workforce that needs to have the technical expertise that is important in a rapidly changing, technological sector like transportation is today.

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And now we'll go to questions for the nominees. I'll jump in right here with the Pacific Northwest corridor that had service reestablished and to the pre-pandemic levels, but staffing was a major issue. And so I really want to know from each of the nominees, what you think we need to do to make sure that we are upgrading staffing.

I want to understand too what we are doing to add more capacity to those Pacific Northwest routes between Seattle and Portland, by the fall of this year.

And on safety, I want to understand … after the DuPont accident in Washington that killed three people and injured [more than] 60, Amtrak instituted a safety management system, very important for improving safety culture, but they were designed to ensure that they addressed the new risks.

I'm concerned about an inspector general report from December that found Amtrak had lacked security practices and led to former employees selling keys to sensitive areas on the internet. It is critical that Amtrak ensure that safety is the number one priority.

So, if each of you could address those issues to the degree that you are involved or knowledgeable.

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Do you think this is key to getting services expanded or reestablished.

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Safety management systems.

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Mr. Szabat, do you would you make workforce a priority and safety management system culture a priority and reestablishing service.

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Thank you.

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