Josh Woods was a senior in high school when Amtrak last made a stop in Mobile before Hurricane Katrina’s wrath ended passenger rail service east of New Orleans along the Gulf Coast.
Nearly 19 years since the devastating storm, Woods finds himself in an odd political spot as the newest member of the Mobile City Council. He is the crucial swing vote on the council that is keeping the Gulf Coast rail project afloat despite more than a decade of earnest planning and congressional activity involving hundreds of bureaucrats and rail advocates aimed at getting the service restored.
That work includes:
- Millions spent and secured in federal grants and capital improvements along the rail route. Most of the work needed for the train to restart is already done. As Woods observed in April while visiting Pascagoula, the city’s train station is ready to go. “They’ve installed signs and everything,” he said. And that was before Amtrak approached the council requesting its support on a funding and lease agreement to connect New Orleans to Mobile.
- A lengthy case before the U.S. Surface Transportation Board that centered around the future of Amtrak service along established freight rails.
- A negotiated agreement that is allowing the service to return, including the fate of approximately $225 million in federal funding for capital improvements along the rail line.
“I find it kind of humorous a little bit,” said Woods, who announced last week he was supportive of a funding agreement crucial to making the Amtrak project possible connecting Mobile to New Orleans with twice-daily trips. He was previously opposed, leaving the entire project in limbo.
“At the end of the day, it could have been anyone (who changed their vote),” Woods said.
State-support criticism
The process playing out in Mobile is illuminating an unusual bureaucratic reality that gives enormous political sway over the nation’s passenger rail service, and the fate of its coveted state-supported route, to a vote on a local governing board.
Amtrak officials and Gulf Coast rail advocates say they are following the process that is laid out by federal law.
For some national rail advocates, the scenario is troublesome and demands reconsideration by federal lawmakers.
“I personally think it’s a bad idea,” said Jim Mathews, president of the Rail Passengers Association, a Washington, D.C.-based rail advocacy group. “Over the long-run, we need to move away from the paradigm of state-supported.”
Mathews is a critic of Section 209 of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008, which governs how Amtrak operates short corridor services to states by defining those routes as 750 miles or less. The law also provides the mechanism to bill the states for those costs.
Mobile is in a unique situation. No other city in the U.S. is currently providing local funds to subsidize Amtrak’s operations. It has been done before – the Hoosier State route in Indiana required city support of the train’s operations – but that route was suspended in 2019, after the State of Indiana ceased to fund it.
Amtrak officials and others say the Hoosier State route – a 196-mile service between Indianapolis and Chicago – is not a good comparison to the Gulf Coast project. The biggest difference they say is in the sizable amount of federal funds going into improving the rail infrastructure in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In Alabama, officials say that more than $72 million will be spent to upgrade the rail infrastructure.
The Gulf Coast route will be the first state-supported route in the Southeastern U.S. south of North Carolina, and the only Deep South route aside from the Heartland Flyer that links Fort Worth, Texas, with Oklahoma City.
Amtrak has long-distance routes that crisscrosses multiple Southern states, including the Crescent connection from New Orleans to New York City that has Alabama’s only train stops in Tuscaloosa, Anniston, and Birmingham.
Amtrak has 30 state-supported routes of 750 miles or less, carrying approximately 15 million riders each year and accounting for 48% of Amtrak’s ridership.
“There is no magic to 750 miles,” Mathews said, adding that the 2008 law was crafted at a time to resolve a “short-term political problem to get Amtrak funded.”
“We have looked for legislative vehicles to make that 750-mile thing go away or, failing that, make it a lot shorter and get us to a place where the trains that cross state boundaries should qualify as federal trains,” Mathews said. “If there is a need to get three states to agree on anything, that’s where the complications come from.”
Gulf Coast complications
Indeed, that has been the case along the Gulf Coast. Louisiana and Mississippi state governments are committed to providing their state matches of around $3 million each to match a federal Restoration & Enhancement Grant to support the operations. In Mississippi, Republican U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker has been a key champion on getting the route restored.
Alabama, until recently, has mostly opposed the project. In February 2022, during public hearings before the U.S. STB, almost every Alabama public official raised concerns about how two Amtrak trains per day could disrupt freight rail activity at the State Docks north of Mobile’s train stop. The Alabama State Port Authority was added as one of the litigants in the STB case along with CSX and Norfolk Southern – the two freight operators along the Gulf Coast route.
That case has since been settled, and the Port is now supportive of the project largely related to the millions of dollars in federal grant money “critical” to improving the agency’s operations. Council members who have been supportive to Mobile’s funding commitment say the city is spending $3 million over three years to get $72 million in capital expenditures in return.
But the commitments to support the R&E grants with Mississippi and Alabama were never finalized, drawing criticism from members of the STB during a hearing in February. Mississippi state officials have since committed to the three-year funding of the Gulf Coast route.
“You are dealing with an issue that should have been resolved since before you filed your papers (with the STB, in March 2021),” STB member Karen Hedlund said during the STB’s hearing in February. She then cited Amtrak’s plans for a nationwide expansion that includes doubling the number of state-supported routes in 15 years.
“Amtrak is making no little plans, but it has to figure out how to implement them,” she said.
Knox Ross, chairman of the Southern Rail Commission, said the scenario in Mobile is one of the reasons why their organization – created by Congress in 1982 – gets involved. Ross said that Mobile city officials were approached to get the service started because there were no other options, noting the lack of financial commitments from the State of Alabama.
“Is there a better way to do it?” Ross said. “There’s got to be. There are other areas of the country that benefit from passenger rail by connecting cities who also benefit it.”
Supermajority needed
Mobile is also a bit of an oddity as well in which votes on funding and lease agreements with Amtrak requires a supermajority, and not a simple majority of the seven-member body.
The city’s current form of government that requires supermajority votes on most council matters, was established in 1985 after a federal judge in the late 1970s dissolved the former commission form of government. Before 1985, voters elected three commissioners from an at-large pool of candidates city wide. The system was viewed as an “unconstitutional dilution of votes of Black Mobilians.” Past efforts to undo the supermajority vote have been met with swift backlash from Black politicians.
At least two members on the council – Ben Reynolds and Joel Daves – have raised concerns over the funding agreement for Amtrak, meaning that no other council member can say “No” to the any of the Amtrak-related items.
Woods, before last week, shared the same concerns as Reynolds and Daves until announcing his support following meetings with Mayor Sandy Stimpson and other members of the city’s administration. No other council member has hinted, in recent weeks, that they would vote against the agreements.
Woods said he supports the language written in the funding agreement that aims to cut off future city commitments toward the Amtrak project beyond the initial three years, which is sometime in 2027.
Reynolds remains concerned about the arrangement, despite a $1 million commitment from the Port Authority to offset the city’s $3 million, three-year obligation.
More financial support could be coming. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has also signaled she is interested in some sort of state subsidy as well, though the state’s fiscal year 2025 budget is already approved, and lawmakers are not due back to Montgomery to consider additional budget requests until next spring.
“It’s basically the city of Mobile subsidizing the federal government’s operations,” Reynolds said. “That’s where the principal concern comes from.”
Borealis comparisons
Amtrak officials believe the Gulf Coast project can be a success and similar to what they say is the popularity of the recently started Borealis route connecting St. Paul, Minn. to Chicago.
The route has the financial backing from three states – Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois. The service, unlike the Gulf Coast route, is not being funded by a city aside from any costs by local governments to build a train station.
“New routes and services are harder to start, always,” said Ray Lang, vice-president of state-supported service with Amtrak. “We started that new route in St. Paul this year and it took a similar amount of time (as the Gulf Coast service) to get up and running.”
Lang said in the first full month of the Borealis service exceeded Amtrak’s forecasts by 2,800 passengers. In July, the service was “right around 100 percent of the forecasts.”
“The demand is there,” he said. “We’re filling seats.”
One longtime business journalist in Minnesota isn’t so sure. In a MinnPost report earlier this month, journalist Adam Platt noted that Borealis is an extension of an existing Amtrak Chicago-to-Milwaukee route and was not necessarily a “new” route. Platt noted that figures were not available on how many of the Borealis riders rode only the commuter portion of the route between Chicago and Milwaukee, versus those new riders traversing a much-longer distance to St. Paul.
Platt did note that data from the Wisconsin Association of Railroad Passengers, based on figures from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, showed that 38.5% of Borealis ridership in May was Chicago-to-Milwaukee, “meaning fewer than 200 of the train’s roughly 300 daily riders were using the ‘new’ train,” according to his MinnPost analysis.
Amtrak officials told Platt that they will not draw any conclusions on the success of train with little data available. In a news release, Amtrak touted the Borealis’ first month in operation of having a ridership greater than 18,500.
The service also represented the first time in 22 years that passenger rail had been expanded in Wisconsin.
Mathews, with the Rail Passengers Association, said the Borealis has proven to be successful so far, and noted that officials have to work within the constraints of the existing law.
Mobile’s agreement is for the three-year funding commitment. Beyond that, the city said Amtrak will need to seek other sources – most likely, coming from the state government – to continue paying for the train’s operations.
“We need to get Alabama to sign on,” Mathews said. “This is the policy we have right now and given that, everyone needs to sharpen their pencils and make sure these corridors are well understood by these municipalities they will be passing through.”
