SENATOR HUTCHISON DISCUSSES THE PASSENGER RAIL INVESTMENT AND IMPROVEMENT ACT

I am pleased to be a cosponsor of this bill. Senator Lott has been another longtime champion of a national system. There are 41 cosponsors of this bill. We have worked together to make sure we don't only subsidize the eastern corridor. I have said all along, it is national or nothing for me. I believe in a national passenger rail system, one that connects our country from coast to coast. My vision is that we have a track going across the northern part of the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the southern part from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and then from the top to the bottom of our country, from the northernmost point down to the tip of Florida and the tip of California. That is a national system. It would have a track that also splits the middle of the country from Chicago down to Texas. From there, we have the capability to have State systems that would emanate from that skeleton.

It is important that we stay together. It would be easy to say: Well, the northeastern corridor does own its own tracks, and therefore it is more efficient, and why don't we just cut off the rest of the country and subsidize that? That is not a national system. I could not in good conscience support only a northeastern line. My constituents would be robbed of the Texas Eagle and the Sunset Limited lines, and there are other States that have legitimate needs as well. If we actually had done better by Amtrak all these years, we would require fewer subsidies.

I am pleased to support the bill, but I do not support the Sununu amendment. It isn't that I don't think his heart is in the right place. He is trying to save money because Amtrak is subsidized. We don't deny needed highways in the rural parts of our States. All of our Federal highway money is divided. It goes into rural areas. Why would we deny Amtrak service to other parts of the country that don't have the ridership mainly because of the on-time service not being dependable?

In 2003, a public opinion poll showed an overwhelming 85 percent of participants supported Amtrak, $2 billion worth of funding for Amtrak. We need a better system. We are working for a better system.

The bill before us is a well-debated, well-adjusted bill that isn't everything the Senator from New Jersey wants. It is not everything the Senator from Mississippi wants. It is not everything this Senator from Texas wants. But I know that if we have a national system, it is an important alternative mode of transportation for our country. We need highways. That is the bread-and-butter transportation system for the country. We need air transportation, and we do provide an air traffic control system to support that. A national rail passenger train is another mode that, in the event of an emergency, is a very helpful mode of transportation. After 9/11, when our air traffic system was shut down, people went to Amtrak. We needed that for the emergency. I believe we would be able to have much more in Amtrak if we funded it at a level where it would have better service and if we could get freight rail to work with us to actually help us alleviate some of the congestion they cause on their freight lines. We could work this out if we had rail support for Amtrak. It is important that we do that.

In 2005, SAFETEA-LU authorized more than $40 billion on our highways for fiscal year 2009. The Senate will take up an FAA bill later this year that will invest $17 billion in aviation annually. We just sent the President a water resources bill authorizing $23 billion over the next 2 years. There is always a different standard for Amtrak. Amtrak is asking for, in this bill, $2.1 billion a year. I don't know why Amtrak is a stepchild. If we have the resources necessary to make it a system that serves the whole country, it would be an environmentally effective, efficient system that would operate to not only provide transportation needs in rural parts of the country, where you can have buses that go into very small communities and feed into an Amtrak station, but the service would improve. The on-time delivery would improve. For the kinds of subsidies we need, that we are authorizing in this bill, it should be a national system, not a northeastern corridor system. That is what is fair for the country. It is right for the country.

Always in the Senate since I have been here, our Amtrak supporters have been national-or-nothing Amtrak supporters. I have supported the northeastern corridor. My friends on the northeastern corridor have supported a national system. Even in the hardest times, we have kept the system together. If we do that, we will see that the States will step in and do more, as California and some of the Western States have done, to their credit. We will have more private lines, more mass-transit lines, such as we have coming into Dallas, feeding into the Amtrak station, making it more used. In Texas, 250,000 passengers used the Texas Eagle and the Sunset Limited last year. It is a very important mode of transportation. The more we can do to make it efficient and effective, the better off we will be.

The Sununu amendment would wreck the national system. I hope we will reject that, even though I respect my colleague from New Hampshire. I know his heart is in the right place. I want to work with him to make Amtrak more efficient, but dropping national lines is not going to make it more efficient.

I yield the floor.

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