Hotline #780
July 2, 1993
The House did not consider H.R.2490, the 1994 DOT appropriations bill, this week and is not expected to take it up until the week of July 19. This gives you time to write to your Representative in opposition to the amendment Rep. Billy Tauzin (D.-Cal.) is to offer cutting Amtrak's operating figure $20 million -- from $351 million to $331 million and transferring the $20 million to the Coast Guard. The address is House of Representatives, Washington, DC 20515.
House-Senate conferees reached agreement on the "son-of-stimulus" fiscal 1993 supplemental appropriations bill on June 29. Both houses of Congress passed the conference report on July 1. President Clinton was expected to sign it quickly. The Amtrak figures are $20 million for operations and $25 million for capital, of which $4 million is earmarked for preliminary design and engineering of the Boston rail link.
The $20 million operating figure in the supplemental is lower than both the House-passed $30 million and the Senate-passed $25 million and makes defeat of the Tauzin amendment even more important because it means Amtrak will have to borrow more to survive fiscal 1993, paying it back out of the 1994 grant. We understand that the problem was that the Administration requested only $18 million, because the necessary offsets were coming out of the DOT's administrative budget and may result in some positions being cut at DOT headquarters.
Before the Senate adopted its deficit reduction plan last week, it approved a little-noticed amendment by Hank Brown (R.-Colo.) earmarking all of the 4.3-cents a gallon transportation tax to the Highway Trust Fund, all to the highway account and nothing to the transit account.
The American Public Transit Association says the Senate bill not only exempts transit from the 4.3-cent tax, but also exempts commuter rail from the 2.5-cent deficit reduction tax that all railroads have been paying since 1990. APTA is urging that the Brown amendment be modified so that the Highway Trust Fund's transit account gets the usual 20% of highway-tax revenues. If Amtrak must pay both the existing 2.5 cents and the new 4.3 cents, that will total 6.8 cents a gallon in taxes that airlines don't pay. At 90 million gallons a year, that's $6.1 million.
Transit funding in H.R.2490 totals $4.477 billion, up 18% from the actual 1993 appropriation of $3.8 billion. The lead story in the June 29 Wall Street Journal was another hatchet job on transit, this one by staff reporter Frederick Rose. It ran under the headline, "Empty Seats, Despite Huge Outlays, Transit Systems Fail to Lure Back Riders, A Big Problem is the Inability to Handle People Going from Suburb to Suburb, But the Proponents Press On." Rose focused on total transit market share, not actual ridership. He ridiculed transit supporters' calls for land-use planning this way -- "If transit routes don't fit the way cities are developing, transit supporters add, cities should be built to fit the routes." Rose concludes that car-pooling is the answer and Houston's reversible commuter lanes the model. An accompanying table with Census Bureau figures shows the following market share changes nationally from 1980 to 1990 -- solo drivers are up from 65% to 74%, carpoolers down from 20% to 13%, public transit down from 8.4% to 5.3%. We urge you to write a reply.
The ICE train was pelted with rocks in West Baltimore yesterday, before a diesel hauled it to Ivy City in Washington. Four windows were broken and the body suffered some dents.
The X2000 is on display in Seattle on July 4 from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, then leaves at 7:30 pm for Portland. On July 5, it is on display at Portland from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, leaves 6:00 pm for Seattle. On July 6, it is on display at Bellingham from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm, then stops at Seattle from 4:00 pm to 4:30 pm and Tacoma at 5:20 pm, on its way to Portland. On July 7, there is a 9:30 am Portland-Centralia VIP round trip, then the train goes to Eugene. On July 8, there is a Eugene media event at 8:30 am, a display at Salem from 10:20 am to 11:20 am, and display at Eugene from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm. Then it leaves Eugene at 7:00 pm, stops at Sacramento on July 9 from 8:00 am to 10:00 am, arrives Oakland at 12:05 pm. On July 10, it is on display at Jack London Square from 2:30 pm to 6:30 pm. The train may visit Canada after July 26.