Statement of the Honorable Corrine Brown, Ranking Member
Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials
Full Committee hearing on Opening the Northeast Corridor to Private Competition for Development of High-Speed Rail.
Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials
Full Committee hearing on Opening the Northeast Corridor to Private Competition for Development of High-Speed Rail.
I want to thank Chairman Mica and Ranking Member Rahall for holding today’s hearing on Opening the Northeast Corridor to Private Competition for Development of High-Speed Rail.
I too support the private sector’s involvement in passenger rail, and believe there is a lot we can learn from the experience of the private sector. But I don’t support cherry picking the best routes on our national system and turning them over to a private company. We need the operators of public transportation to be worried about the passengers they serve, not some stockholder who rides around in a limousine. That’s the problem were facing in the health care industry today. Insurance companies aren’t concerned at all about the care their customers get; they’re concerned about how much money their stockholders make.
I want to take this time to express my strong support for Amtrak. Congress has micro-managed and financially starved them for most of their existence. We created Amtrak because the freight railroads couldn't make a profit on passenger service yet we continue to hammer Amtrak for not making enough money. The Bush Administration even went so far as proposing in its FY2006 budget to force Amtrak into bankruptcy. We demand that they operate a 21st Century rail system with infrastructure build in the 1890’s. It really defies logic.
Since were discussing private sector involvement in rail today, I want to once again express my deep disappointment over Governor Rick Scott’s decision to kill high speed rail for the citizens of my home state of Florida. The high speed rail plan for Florida served as a perfect example of a successful public-private partnership that would have created tens of thousands of jobs. Estimates from Florida’s DOT were as high as 48,000 and the business community estimated another 10,000 to 15,000 jobs as a result of economic development from the new rail line.
The high speed rail line between Tampa and Orlando was going to be procured under a public- private partnership scheme covering design, construction, operations and maintenance. Eight private sector consortiums were set to bid on the project, including fifty-five of the biggest private companies in transportation. So here we are talking about encouraging private sector involvement, and we just witnessed one of the biggest projects collapse under a Republican governor who is more concerned about playing politics than looking after his people.
Now we will have to wait a little longer for high speed rail in Florida, and this new Republican leadership will attempt to destroy the rest of the high-speed intercity passenger rail program, a program that the private sector would benefit from and which would create good jobs in this country.
This is why I’m particularly disappointed the Committee invited the Reason Foundation to testify, knowing that Governor Scott’s idiotic decision on high speed rail was helped along by the clearly inaccurate information provided by the Reason Foundation. I guess being a credible witness is no longer a prerequisite for testifying in front of our committee.
If anyone thinks that asking the private sector to invest significant money and manpower in applying to operate a high speed rail system and then cancelling the project encourages private sector involvement, they have truly lost all sense of reason.
With that, I want to welcome today’s panelists, and I look forward to hearing most of their testimony.