February 8, 2005: NORTON ON MISSION TO KEEP BUSH FROM FORCING AMTRAK INTO BANKRUPTCY

Washington, DC--At a news conference today on zero funding in the President’s budget for Amtrak, designed to force the railroad into bankruptcy, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) warned of the “crippling effect not only on transportation but also on the local economies of small and large cities across the nation and on the national economy itself.” Norton, a senior member at the Transportation Committee, said that concerns here were particularly great for security reasons as well and because D.C. is the Amtrak hub. After 9/11 when National Airport was closed for three weeks, she said, “Amtrak was almost the entire ballgame for getting in and out of Washington to places of more than short distances in time to do business. Forcing Amtrak into bankruptcy, as the President’s plan would do, creates not only huge losses of revenue to our regional economy and untold inconvenience to residents, but also more ominously, security risks to residents, federal workers and institutions.” Norton believes that she can find many allies on the Transportation Committee in the House and Senate, but returning Amtrak to last year’s $1.2 billion underfunded appropriation would in any case leave the railroad “weak and tottering.”

The Congresswoman said that the Bush administration is well aware that every rail system in the world is subsidized by its government. “Consumed with privatization as the elixir for society’s problems,” Norton said, “the administration has come up with a notion even more far fetched than private accounts charged to a social security system that is already facing a large deficit. The President’s proposal is to privatize Amtrak after bankruptcy by opening its routes to competitive bidding and requiring the states to come up with the subsidy the federal government has funded since it created Amtrak in 1971. Bankrupt railroad anyone?”

Norton said that the Bush administration started by trying to “starve Amtrak with unsustainably low funding” for the past two years. However, Congress has rescued Amtrak each year. The Congresswoman said that another rescue will be far more difficult this time. Zero funding would force Congress to make large cuts elsewhere to get the requisite funding. As devastating as this would be, Norton said, the implications for states and cities throughout the country are “so unthinkable that saving Amtrak must be done and I predict that it will be done.”