'We have good things to really talk about,' Amtrak’s president and CEO says. Amtrak on track to set rider record

Amtrak is riding the wave of ridership records, but the national passenger railroad will most likely get the wind knocked out of it when its brass appears before a House hearing Tuesday.

It will be the second in a series of hearings in what House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) told POLITICO is his “holy jihad to try to get Amtrak’s operations under control.”


The hearing will drill down into how Amtrak competes for commuter rail contracts in what likely will be an uncomfortable examination for the passenger railroad.

A briefing document prepared by the committee posits that as providing commuter rail services has grown increasingly competitive, Amtrak has fared increasingly poorly in those competitions because of “Amtrak’s inability to adapt its nationwide model for intercity passenger rail to regional commuter rail markets.”

The document also notes that Amtrak hasn’t won the right to provide new commuter rail services in 10 years.

The day before the committee looks at what has been called Amtrak’s “monopoly mentality,” the railroad got some good news: Amtrak announced that it’s on track to break yet another ridership record this fiscal year. The railroad expects after September to break last year’s record-setting 30.2 million passengers.

So far, Joseph Boardman, Amtrak’s president and CEO, doesn’t seem to be sweating the hot seat. In an interview with POLITICO, Boardman said he’s “going to go in pretty positive about things, because we have good things to really talk about.”

“I think commuter [rail] is not important in regard to what they’re really talking about, because we only have 12 percent of the commuter market altogether. I think it’s more about the state-supported services,” he said.

Boardman also offered a pre-emptive rebuttal of some of the critique his company will receive related to how much federal subsidy some of its routes require. He said by law Amtrak has been required to calculate how much states should pay to the railroad for service on state-supported corridors based on certain criteria.

“By that happening, you reduce the federal subsidy by about $200 million. So that’s what reduces the subsidy — not competition, not anything else; it’s the fact that that law changed,” Boardman said.

In an interview with POLITICO in Tampa, Fla., during the Republican National Convention, Mica hinted at what he wants the hearing to examine, saying “Amtrak can’t compete with [others] even though they’re subsidized by the taxpayers.”

In particular, Mica said, the hearing will focus, in part, on Amtrak’s bid for operating Florida’s Tri-Rail system. Amtrak was outbid by Veolia Transportation, which won the contract.

“Now Amtrak is subsidized, and they couldn’t beat out a private contractor. The private contractor won, and Amtrak used public money, the money we subsidized, to sue the private contractor,” Mica said.

Amtrak sued Veolia for allegedly promising three Amtrak employees future employment if they assisted Veolia in spoiling Amtrak’s contract bid. A jury found that Veolia wrongly enticed the Amtrak employees but that it didn’t cause Amtrak to lose the contract.

It’s clearly been stuck in Mica’s craw ever since. Part of the committee’s original transportation bill draft contained a section that would have prohibited Amtrak from using federal funding to pay outside counsel to sue another passenger rail service provider related to a competitive bidding process.

“The intent of this provision is to ensure that Amtrak not use federal funds to chill competition for the provision of passenger rail service,” the bill read.

Adam Snider contributed to this report.