Battle Over Rail System Expected to Be Fierce, When Current Authorization Expires in 2013

This story appears in the July 23 print edition of Transport Topics.

In March, when the Senate passed its transportation reauthorization bill by a wide margin, the measure addressed the nation’s total surface transportation system.

Later in conference with the House, however, the portion of the bill dealing with rail disappeared. And the two-year surface transportation measure signed into law by President Obama on July 6 addressed only highway construction and safety programs (7-16, p. 3).

Unlike highway authorization, which already was expiring, existing law governing the nation’s rail system is not due to expire until next year.

There are signs, though, that the battle over rail will be as contentious as was the battle over highway policy and spending.

The rail component in the Senate bill “contained numerous provisions that House conferees deemed onerous and could not support, such as steps towards

re-regulation of the rail industry,” said Justin Harclerode, spokesman for Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

The railroads have branded as “re-regulation” a Senate bill that would create rail-to-rail competition for shippers served by a single carrier. That measure, sponsored by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Commerce Committee, has cleared his committee but has not reached the Senate floor.

“The House and Senate positions were very different, and the decision was made by conferees to exclude a rail title in the final measure,” Harclerode told Transport Topics last week.

“The Senate bill made Amtrak eligible to receive passenger rail grants that now go to states and gave Amtrak authority to conduct its own National Environmental Policy Act reviews but did not do likewise for states,” Harclerode said.

The Senate bill also would have “stifled competition and private sector participation” in passenger rail programs, “laid the groundwork for re-regulation of the freight railroad industry,” and expanded the federal role in rail planning while “subordinating” that of the states, Harclerode said.

A staff member for the Senate Commerce Committee, which drafted the rail portion of the Senate bill, said on background that rail was in the original bill because many senators believed there were “substantive, practical issues that could be worked out prior to expiration” of the existing rail law.

The staffer called it “unfortunate” that House Republicans refused to negotiate on rail and said the rail aspect of surface transportation will not be addressed again until after the election.

“I think [that’s] a given on almost any topic but certainly on a topic like rail, which has a lot of controversy,” said Joshua Schank, a former Senate transportation staff member and president of the Eno Center for Transportation, a Washington think tank.

“On the passenger side, it’s very political, and on the freight side, the railroads are very careful about anything the federal government wants to do because they’re always concerned it’s going to come with regulation,” Schank said.

While he said he was not privy to the House-Senate conference committee negotiations, Schank speculated that rail was negotiated away pretty early on in the process.

The rail component was driven by the Commerce Committee, but the senators driving the transportation bill — Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and James Inhofe (R-Okla.) — were on the Environment and Public Works Committee, which has jurisdiction over highways, Schank said.

“I mean Boxer, Inhofe, Mica, [they] got this thing done,” he said. If House negotiators objected to the Senate rail title because it didn’t have anything in common with the House’s rail title, Mica and the senators “probably weren’t going to defend it,” Schank said.