Thursday, July 21, 2011

Fiscal Responsibility Railroaded Out Of Town

Remember how Scott Walker was crowing about killing high speed rail in Wisconsin?  He summarily rejected more than $800 million in federal funds which would have built a high speed rail system from Milwaukee to Madison as well as upgraded the line from Chicago to Milwaukee, which would eventually have become part of a greater rail system that spread from coast to coast.

It would have brought thousands of good paying jobs to the state and would have been a great boon to the state's economy.  Walker rejected it outright saying it would have cost tax payers too much money, even though it would have cost no extra money to build and less than $5 million a year to maintain.

But as I had pointed out, Walker's killing off the train was a Pyrrhic victory, to say the least.

Fast forward to this week and we see the Republicans just approved of spending $31.6 million of our tax dollars to fix up the Hiawatha line, and that doesn't even cover the whole bill!  And, just to emphasize the point, this would have been totally covered by the federal funds that Walker said was too expensive:
Wisconsin taxpayers could wind up paying more to keep existing passenger train service from Milwaukee to Chicago than they would have paid to run new high-speed rail service from Milwaukee to Madison, according to a Journal Sentinel analysis of state figures.

The Legislature's budget committee voted 12-2 Tuesday to spend $31.6 million in mostly borrowed state money on Amtrak's Milwaukee-to-Chicago Hiawatha line, costs that could have been paid largely by an $810 million federal grant that would have extended the Hiawatha to Madison.

But Tuesday's vote doesn't cover all the spending that will be needed to keep running the Hiawatha, a growing service that carried nearly 800,000 passengers last year.

State transportation officials have estimated they would need millions more for locomotives, signals and a new maintenance base, even without expanding service beyond the current seven daily round trips.

And, like the spending approved Tuesday, all or most of those new costs would have been covered by the federal grant spurned by Gov. Scott Walker last year. That's because the Milwaukee-to-Madison service would have operated as an extension of the Hiawatha, as part of a larger plan to connect Chicago to the Twin Cities and other Midwestern destinations with fast, frequent trains.

Taken together, state taxpayers' share of the Hiawatha capital costs that would have been covered by the federal grant could total as much as $99 million, significantly more than the $30 million they would have paid for 20 years of operating costs on the Milwaukee-to-Madison segment, as estimated by former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle's administration.
The long year of Walker's reign just keeps getting longer and longer and longer. And much more expensive.

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