Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2014

Floor Speech

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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chair, this is a slash-and-burn budget. I don't know why we bother.

Whether you're looking at the community block grant or the section I'm going to say a few words about, the Amtrak section, you can see what we're about--we're supposed to reauthorize a highway bill this year and a railway bill this year. That certainly won't matter if the Transportation and HUD appropriations bill simply ignores authorized infrastructure spending and building.

The federal government has Amtrak because the private sector insisted that we take it. They showed, they proved that you can't run a railroad without public subsidy.

Amtrak has done an amazing job considering how little public subsidy it has gotten. The private sector gave it to us because they couldn't handle the operating expenses, and they couldn't handle the capital costs.

Now, Amtrak, by the ticket, is basically handling the operating expenses. Shame on us that we will not come forward to do our part with the capital expenses. With a 37 percent cut in capital expenses, that is the way, Mr. Chairman, to run a railroad into the ground that otherwise is doing very well on its own dime.

There is a thirty-five percent difference between the House and Senate bills. The Republican bill is bipartisan. Yet, we're about to pass a bill here that nobody would consider in the Senate, and that the President would have to veto.

Why are we going through these appropriations exercises that amount to nothing?

Amtrak is more than sustaining itself. Virtually each month this year, it has had record ridership. Amtrak actually recovers almost 80 percent of its operating costs out of ticket revenue. That's amazing. It seems to me Amtrak ought to be rewarded rather than, as this bill does, be punished.

Amtrak carries 31 million passengers every year, and it keeps increasing. Travellers are preferring rail and 20,000 people across 47 States work for Amtrak. Yes, we know about it best here in the East, where Amtrak also has 1 million daily commuters.

This is our national railroad. It's unbelievable that we would be content to see every single nation in the world that considers itself an advanced nation be generations ahead of us on railroad development. We are two generations behind, for example, on high-speed rail. Yet there are zero dollars in this bill for high-speed rail.

Amtrak is very well managed. In the committee we have heard what they have done and how they have done it. But they can't manage without at least some recognition from the Congress that we, too, have a role to play in the railroad. No railroad in the world is unsubsidized. This one is subsidized very little. It is still able to run most of its trains over 100 miles an hour.

We ought to understand who we're talking about. We're not just talking about the Acela from the District of Columbia to New York. Among the 25 busiest Amtrak stations are Seattle, Harrisburg, and Bakersfield, California.

At a time when the airlines are in trouble and have reduced their operations, Amtrak keeps growing in ridership each month. I have a winning operation here. But this bill sends it back into losing for us. We don't need to do that. We have a railroad that offers middle class jobs to 20,000 people, 200 of them in the District of Columbia. Let's do what we need to do in the T-HUD bill.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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