N E W S
| March 17, 2005 |
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| WASHINGTON, DC - Montana's Congressman, Denny Rehberg, lauded House passage of the 2006 Budget Resolution this afternoon, which includes funding to continue Amtrak and its Empire Builder service across Montana. The Budget resolution also leaves much of the budget specifics up to the Appropriations Committee, a panel on which Rehberg now sits.
"Clearly, we won today in our efforts to continue Amtrak service,” Rehberg, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said. “The Administration provided nothing for Amtrak; the Senate dropped the ball on Amtrak. The House today said, ‘not so fast, we’re going to fund Amtrak.’ Last week I urged the House Budget Committee to restore Amtrak funding, and that effort proved successful. Funding for Amtrak is now safely in the House budget.” In a letter last week to House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle, Rehberg asked that the panel “provide sufficient funding in the fiscal year 2006 Budget Resolution to sustain Amtrak's national network of passenger rail service. The company is headed in the right direction and it is our duty to continue to provide Americans with effective and environmentally friendly transportation options.” “More importantly, the Budget Committee this year is leaving most of the specifics of the federal budget to the Appropriations Committee, which is one of the reasons I fought to be on appropriations,” Rehberg added. “It gives me an opportunity to be more involved in funding Montana’s priorities.” "We have to remember that Montana is a huge, rural state, with nearly a million people that don’t have access to the kind of transportation choices that most everyone else in this country has,” Rehberg said. “Let’s get real here, we can’t just zero-out federal operating funding for a rail system that employs 20,000 people, carries 25 million passengers on 22,000 miles of track every year, and has operating agreements with hundreds of daily intercity trains.” |
