Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Rep. John Mica (R-FL) no longer chairs the House Transportation Committee, but that doesn’t mean he’s eased up on his crusade against Amtrak. Calling the company a “Soviet style monopoly,” Mica used his afternoon address to the U.S. High Speed Rail Association to announce his plan to revive his despised and defeated measure to privatize parts of Amtrak.

Ray LaHood takes questions from reporters after telling the U.S. High-Speed Rail Association, "Do not be dissuaded by a few detractors." A few hours later, Rep. Mica called Amtrak a Soviet style monopoly that should be disbanded. Photo: Tanya Snyder

Mica plans to introduce legislation to end Amtrak’s “monopoly” by allowing “open competition to provide intercity passenger and high-speed rail service.”

Of course, high-speed rail in California is open for bids from private, mostly foreign, firms, and many have expressed interest. Fully private entities are moving forward with rail projects in Florida and Texas. Amtrak simply doesn’t have the stranglehold on rail in America that Mica tries to convey. And in the sense that Amtrak does have a broad network of lines, it’s in large part because it was created by Congress and is partially funded by taxpayers with a mandate to provide mobility services to the country.

To illustrate the land of milk and honey that awaits rail privatization, Mica cited the European Union’s decision to end state rail monopolies. Perhaps he isn’t up to speed on the latest news: The European Commission planned last month to break up the monopolies and open the rail system to free market competition but took a step back from that two weeks later due to opposition, favoring instead a proposal that will allow Germany and France to keep their state-dominated systems. Meanwhile, rail privatization in the UK has let to a tripling of fare prices and plummeting investor confidence.

Earlier in the day, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood also had an anecdote from Europe and Asia. He’s toured 18 countries’ high-speed rail systems during his tenure as secretary. “The common thread in every country was the idea that unless the national government makes the investment in high-speed rail, it will not happen,” he said.

Mica hopes to include his privatization proposal in the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act reauthorization this year. The last time he tried to include a similar idea in the surface transportation reauthorization, the proposal was so widely panned he had to retract it. Mica now has no leadership post within the committee. He is the senior member of the Rail Subcommittee but not the chair or the vice chair.

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Perhaps Rep. John Mica’s most remarkable legacy as chair of the House Transportation Committee is the single-minded focus he gave to attacking Amtrak. Under the guise of wanting it to succeed, Mica has repeatedly excoriated it as a “Soviet-style monopoly” and a waste of taxpayer dollars. He’s tried to sell off its only profitable line, the Northeast Corridor, and made a mockery of every aspect of its operations, right down to food service. If there’s anything he got more glee out of criticizing, it was the Transportation Security Administration.

Last year, Mica took a field trip to McDonald's to berate Amtrak for losing money on food service. Photo: WUSA

Mica’s no longer chair of the Transportation Committee. But as of this morning, he’s got a new post from which he can take shots at these agencies.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, where Mica was already a senior member, is consolidating two subcommittees into a new Subcommittee on Government Operations. That new subcommittee will oversee the TSA and Amtrak. And Mica will be the chair.

In other committee news, 10 new Republicans and 10 new Democrats are joining the T&I committee. Democrats gained one seat on the 60-member committee. New Chair Bill Shuster has a track record of taking new members under his wing to bring them up to speed on the intricacies of transportation policy. No doubt, many lobbyists will take it upon themselves to do the same.

In the Senate, Maryland Democrat Barbara Mikulski will take over the chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee. Media reports about her leadership of that committee center around her gender — she’ll be the first woman to chair it — but more notable to transportation reformers is the fact that she’s a vocal supporter of transit. She’s fought for federal funding of all the transit systems under her jurisdiction as well as Amtrak. After the red line Metro crash in 2009, she sponsored legislation to bring federal safety oversight to local systems, a provision that was included in MAP-21. She also favors parity between commuter tax benefits for drivers and transit riders, which was included in the fiscal cliff deal that was approved late on New Years Day.

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Rep. John Mica's chairmanship of T&I is almost over. Photo: That's My Congress

Rep. John Mica (R-FL) has withdrawn from the running to remain chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. He was up against Republican term limits, which specify that no Congressmember can spend more than six years as the highest-ranking member of their party on a committee — regardless of whether that time is spent as chair of the committee (while their party is in the majority) or as ranking member (when in the minority).

Mica had been in conversations with House Speaker John Boehner about getting a waiver, as Rep. Paul Ryan did, allowing him to stay at the helm of the Budget Committee. But it wasn’t looking likely. So Mica did the gentlemanly thing: He pulled out and threw his support to Rep. Bill Shuster, the chair of the Rail Subcommittee, who was also jockeying for the hot seat. Politico reported the news this morning.

“Bill has served in two Subcommittee leadership positions,” Mica wrote in his letter to Boehner, “and has both the experience and ability to assume this important position for our Conference.”

Streetsblog recently reported on Shuster’s record on rail and bike/ped issues.

In his letter, Mica acknowledged that the Republican Conference had recently upheld the decision to withhold all term-limit waivers except for Ryan’s, and its decision to continue counting Ranking Member service toward the six-year limit.

Mica says he’ll stay on the Transportation Committee, and hopes to take over the chairmanship of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee in two years.

This is the second of two posts examining Rep. Bill Shuster’s candidacy for the chairmanship of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Yesterday, we took a look at Shuster’s positions on rail and his leadership style. Here we delve into his record on active transportation and the always-thorny topic of funding.

Legendary wheeler-dealer Bud Shuster got emotional when his son, Bill, took his seat in Congress. The younger Shuster now stands to take his father's old place at the helm of the House Transportation Committee. Photo: Gary Baranec/Altoona Mirror

While you might not agree with him that privatization is the best medicine for a struggling passenger rail program, by most accounts Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) has a genuine interest in the future of rail in America. It’s hard to make the case that he cares nearly as much about making streets safe for walking and biking.

Bike Paths Kill!

Indeed, perhaps the most alarming aspect of a Bill Shuster chairmanship is what it would mean for progress on street safety. Shuster is no friend of the movement to make American cities and towns more bikeable and walkable.

He fell in line with the Republican army against Transportation Enhancements, a program that mostly funded bike/ped projects under the previous transportation law. “Not everybody uses a bike path,” Shuster said at the time. He chafed at what others in his party called “set-asides,” saying, “That’s for [the] community to decide, not for our federal government to sit up here in Washington and decide.” He claimed that eliminating TE was “fundamental to the reforms that we are trying to include in this bill.”

Indeed, Shuster’s conviction that transportation is a federal responsibility ends at the interstate. “When you start getting into the inner city, the federal government has less of a role to play,” he told an audience at the Transportation Research Board’s annual conference in January, ignoring the fact that much interstate spending is used to provide capacity for local car trips on highways. “It’s up to the local community and state to decide [their transportation priorities].”

His position that federal transportation dollars should be “focused like a laser [yes, one of his favorite phrases] on the national highway system” alarmed the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, which issued an action alert to Pennsylvania voters when Shuster was appointed to the conference committee negotiating the final surface transportation bill. RTC noted that during his official conference statement, Shuster “regrettably… call[ed] out ‘bike paths’ as wasteful, even dangerous.”

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Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) could be the next chair of the House Transportation Committee. Photo: Office of Rep. Bill Shuster.

This is the first of two posts examining Rep. Bill Shuster’s candidacy for the chairmanship of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. We’ll post the second one, focused on his positions on bike/ped programs and funding issues, tomorrow.

Over the next few weeks, we could see a shake-up on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in the House. Current Chair John Mica (R-FL) has been the top Republican on the committee for six years, and according to GOP rules, that’s the limit. While Mica is asking leadership for a little wiggle room, his deputy is making the case for his own candidacy. Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) announced late last week that he would seek the chairmanship.

If that name rings a bell, it may be because his father was a legend on Capitol Hill. Evoke Bud Shuster’s name in Washington and you’ll hear story after story of the deal-making he pulled off when he chaired the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure from 1995 to 2001. He brought home more bacon to his district in rural Pennsylvania than it could even handle, according to a profile that ran in the National Journal as his Congressional career came to an end.

Bill Shuster took over his father’s seat in Congress in 2001, and soon joined the committee his father presided over. Now he could take over his dad’s gavel, too, when the new Congress is seated in January.

Mica is meeting with Republican leaders this week to discuss the possibility of getting a waiver to the six-year rule. Rep. Paul Ryan is expected to receive such a waiver, so that he can go on serving at the helm of the Budget Committee. But does Ryan’s exception mean Mica will get one too? Unlikely. Last spring, rumors circulated that Republican leaders were fed up with Mica’s inability to pass a transportation bill and were looking to Shuster to step in. Those rumors were somewhat overblown, but may indicate that leaders aren’t looking for two more years of John Mica at the gavel of T&I.

Shuster, meanwhile, has excellent relationships with House GOP honchos. And as chair of the Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials, he put his own stamp on the reauthorization process. He, with Mica, inserted a highly contentious “red meat” provision (later dropped) to privatize Amtrak’s profitable Northeast Corridor service, and he supported the inclusion of automatic approval for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.

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UPDATED 9/24 with chart.

House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica continued his “holy jihad” against Amtrak yesterday, holding the third full-committee hearing in a series on “Reviewing Amtrak’s Operations.” He’s planning at least three more hearings during the lame duck session after the election.

House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica is on a "holy jihad" to curb Amtrak's subsidies. Image: C-SPAN

Mica went after subsidies in this one, and he clearly thinks this is a winning issue. After all, Amtrak has gotten nearly $1 billion a year in federal funds over its 41-year existence. The per-ticket subsidy over the past five years has averaged nearly $51. Mica compared that to other forms of transportation: Using 2008 data, he showed that the average per-ticket subsidy to aviation was $4.28, for mass transit was 95 cents, and for intercity commercial bus service 10 cents.

What’s missing? Highways, of course. Luckily, Amtrak CEO Joe Boardman was on hand to remind him. “In the past four years, the federal government has appropriated $53.3 billion from the general fund of the Treasury to bail out the Highway Trust Fund,” Boardman told the committee. “That’s almost 30 percent more than the total federal expenditure on Amtrak since 1971.”

Considering that about 20 percent of the Highway Trust Fund goes to transit, that’s still more for highways alone over the past four years than Amtrak has ever gotten.

Meanwhile, Amtrak affirmed this week that the rail line covers 85 percent of its operating costs with ticket sales and other revenues [PDF].

Mica did acknowledge in his opening remarks that “almost all forms of transportation are underwritten by subsidies” but didn’t mention roads, despite the massive subsidies road builders receive.

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At a highly politicized hearing on Tuesday, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair John Mica slammed “Amtrak’s failure to compete with the private sector,” arguing that the national rail company should stop bidding to run commuter rail services.

Congressional Democrat Corinne Brown, of Florida, said the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is no longer bipartisan. Image: House T&I

The hearing centered around a new report from House Republicans [PDF] criticizing Amtrak for competing with private companies for commuter rail contracts. “Amtrak is a highly subsidized, Soviet-style rail system,” Mica said, “but despite every ticket being underwritten nearly $50 by the taxpayers, Amtrak is an absolute failure in competing with the cost-effectiveness and level of service provided by the private sector.”

But it also seems that Republicans would prefer to see Amtrak become even more of a “Soviet-style” operation. One of the report’s major conclusions is that Amtrak should stop trying to compete for commuter rail contracts awarded by local governments. “Amtrak wastes the taxpayers’ money bidding on commuter rail contracts that it cannot win,” Mica said in a press release. The report cited seven instances where Amtrak entered competition for these contracts and lost or withdrew.

Meanwhile, Florida Democrat Corrine Brown pointed out that Amtrak makes a profit of $15 million annually on its commuter rail service. Brown accused Republicans of orchestrating the hearing to punish Amtrak for suing Veolia Transportation, which nabbed a contract for commuter rail service in Florida after hiring away three Amtrak employees. A jury faulted Veolia for the hirings, but said Amtrak would not have kept the contract even if they had retained those employees.

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I was not expecting this: Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) just released a statement saying “the tentative agreement establishes federal highway, transit and highway safety policy and keeps programs at current funding levels through the end of fiscal year 2014.” That’s a full year longer than the Senate bill allowed for.

A loose interpretation of the "three day" rule will set the clock ticking before midnight tonight, and the House will vote Friday morning. Photo: NYSUT

This will no doubt please states, local governments, and the construction industry, which have long complained that a short bill wouldn’t do enough to give them the certainty they need to move big projects.

Still, given the contortions the Senate Finance Committee had to perform just to get the bill funded through September 2013 — the expiration date of the Senate bill — it’ll be very interesting to see what had to happen to finance this thing for a whole extra year without the Highway Trust Fund going bust.

It’s not just that the clock is starting so much later than the Senate bill (an outline of which was drafted nearly a year ago). Money from the bill will be used retroactively to pay for the amount the country has been overspending the HTF as it continually extended the current transportation program without paying for it, according to a Capitol Hill aide.

An aide to the committee told Streetsblog he expects the full text of the conference report to be available sometime tonight. We’ll bring you more details as we have them.

Mica says he plans to have everything wrapped up by 9:00 tonight so that conferees can vote on the final report sometime between 9:00 and 11:00. Due to an extremely creative interpretation of the three-day rule, a vote tonight allows the full House to vote on the report early Friday morning. (The three-day rule derives from Republican indignance at being asked to vote on the health care bill without enough time to read it. At the time, three days meant 72 hours.

Sen. Barbara Boxer and Rep. John Mica just released this statement:

The conferees have moved forward toward a bipartisan, bicameral agreement on a highway reauthorization bill.  Both House and Senate conferees will continue to work with a goal of completing a package by next week.

From what we’re hearing, whatever deal they’ve reached only applies to the EPW portion on highways. That means transit and rail are still pending an agreement, as are the hot-button issues like Keystone, coal ash, and environmental reviews. But bike-ped funding is part of the highways section, so with any luck, we’ll have word soon on whether the Cardin-Cochran amendment has survived. The amendment provides for some limited local control over funding for small-scale transportation projects.

Over the past month or two, I couldn’t help noticing that Rep. John Mica, chair of the Transportation Committee in the House, seemed completely consumed with fingerpointing at federal agencies. While the country’s transportation programs neared a crisis point — and indeed, there is no other way to describe the current deadlock over a transpo bill – the top dog in the House was barking up a whole other tree.

Why isn't Chairman Mica making the rounds of news shows to talk about the transportation bill?

The House and Senate are locked in a battle royale over funding levels, pipeline approvals, environmental reviews, transit operations, street safety programs, and timelines. If they don’t figure it all out within the next 18 days – only six legislative work days for the House – transportation programs will expire, and reimbursements to states will halt. An estimated three million jobs hang in the balance.

That’s a pretty big responsibility for the transportation chairman. He must be staying up nights trying to craft a solution, right?

It’s hard to say what Mica is doing behind closed doors, but by the looks of his press machine, it looks like he’d rather be bird-dogging the Obama administration. His recent TV appearances have all been opportunities to express outrage over the conduct of federal agencies: inefficiencies at the Transportation Security Administration, partying at GSA conferences, even wasted office space at federal buildings.

His committee’s press release today, as conference talks break down: an attack on the EPA for daring to regulate clean water.

Mica’s committee office may not be talking much about the $109 billion surface transportation bill, but it sure is focused like a laser on this EPA “power grab.” This is the third press release this week on that issue.

Of course, there should be oversight of the TSA, the EPA, and GSA. But is it just me, or does this flurry of press attacks look a little more partisan than policy? Where is Mica’s urgent call to get a bill done?

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