The South Shore Line’s two major expansion projects would be doomed if the federal budget proposed Thursday by President Trump passed unchanged through Congress.
But Michael Noland, the South Shore’s president and general manager, remained positive as he hoped for support in Congress.
“We’re continuing to work full speed,” he said. “No one said it would be easy.”
Funding for new grants to expand or improve public transportation would be eliminated if the Trump budget proposal passed Congress. The proposal says funding should come instead from “the localities that use and benefit from those localized projects.”
The South Shore is asking for two Federal Transit Administration grants. One would pay half the estimated $600 million cost for extending the South Shore service from Hammond to the Munster/Dyer border on the West Lake corridor; the other would pay half the estimated $290 million cost for building a second set of tracks between Gary and Michigan City, to improve the service’s speed and reliability. The rest of the funding would come from state and local sources.
The budget proposal released Thursday – the so-called “skinny budget” – is preliminary to a fuller budget proposal coming later, Noland noted, and Congress typically revises the president’s proposal significantly.
Also, Trump promised during last year’s campaign to invest heavily in the nation’s infrastructure – roads, bridges, airports and, presumably, railroads.
“We’ll have to wait to see what he’s talking about,” Noland said.
He noted also that Congress already has passed a five-year transportation bill with funding for new public transportation starts.
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“At the end of the day,” Noland said, “we have a lot of partners around the country.”
U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-Merrillville, who has strongly supported both South Shore projects, also wasn’t panicked.
“Today’s Budget Blueprint is a 62-page press release,” Visclosky said in an emailed statement, “whereas the Fiscal Year 2017 full budget document with funding justifications and annotated annexes is a detailed 1,968-page proposal, and we are months away from seeing the full Fiscal Year 2018 request.”
He said he would continue to work with “like-minded colleagues of both parties” to invest in new and existing transit.
Visclosky testified March 9 before the House Appropriations Committee about the importance of the South Shore projects, which he said “would allow us to better access the good-paying jobs in Chicago and diversity our economy through transit-oriented development.”
“Reducing funding for this critical program,” Visclosky told the committee, “would be counterproductive to our goal as federal representatives to support jobs and economic development.”
The Trump budget proposal also came up for discussion at Thursday’s Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission meeting.
Ty Warner, NIRPC’s executive director, said the proposed budget also calls for cutting U.S. Department of Transportation spending by 13 percent, eliminating most Amtrak funding, and cutting the Environmental Protection Agency budget by 31 percent.
The final budget, he added, likely will be different after it has worked its way through Congress.
If the budget passes as proposed, Gary Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson told the mayors and town officials on the NIRPC executive board, “we all stand to lose quite a lot.”
LaPorte Mayor Blair Milo, chair of NIRPC’s legislative committee, said that group will “take a deeper dive” into the federal budget and its impact at a future meeting.
Tim Zorn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.