Tim Chapman at Porkbusters writes that good ole boy ex-lobbyist and Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (R) is off to Washington to fight for Trent Lott’s Magic Railroad:

Barbour, the former RNC Chairman and top DC lobbyist turned Governor is rumored to make an appearance tomorrow at the weekly Senate Republican policy lunch. The Governor is in town to provide much needed support to his Mississippi Senators Thad Cochran and Trent Lott, who are both under fire for securing the largest earmark ever. 

I believe that Barbour will use this image to show other members of Congress the merits of the railroad.

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The New York Times has joined the chorus decrying Trent Lott’s Magic Railroad:

Invoked in the name of public safety, the project is actually a transparent attempt to tap already scarce hurricane reconstruction funds so the rail bed can be replaced by a touristy “beach boulevard” long sought by Mississippi to aid the casino industry and coastal developers. The railroad relocation dwarfs the $223 million “bridge to nowhere” proposed for the Alaska outback, the giveaway that brought all the vows for reform from Congress.

Even worse, Senator Lott and his fellow Mississippi Republican, Thad Cochran, are attaching this frivolous add-on to a bill that is supposed to be used to pay for emergencies — specifically the war in Iraq and hurricane reconstruction.

Senator Lott angrily resents any description of his pet project as a right of way to the slot machines. He insists the rail line needs higher ground and his constituents better protection. But it seems clear the twin traumas of Iraq and Katrina are being used as cover. Economic development is a fine goal for the Gulf Coast, but it deserves careful consideration, not a devious rush to the pork barrel.

Sounds about right to me.

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The anti-porkers are ganging up on Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) like he’s Don Young. There’s now a website solely devoted to the “railroad to nowhere”, or as my colleague Bill Allison has called it, the “reoriented express”. Tim Chapman at Townhall.com and Porkbusters is hammering away at Lott and congressional Republicans:

The latest example, which you have heard of by now, puts Don Young’s (R-AK) Bridge to Nowhere to shame. This pork project, secured by Mississippi Republican Senators Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, is more than double the cost of the bridge. Weighing in at $700 million, the funding secured to scrap a coastal rail line in Mississippi and move it inland (thereby making room for coastal developers) is by far the largest congressional earmark ever secured.

Not only is the project exorbitantly expensive, it would appear to be unnecessary. The Mississippi senators tucked the project away in the massive “emergency” supplemental bill slated to be considered by the Senate next week. The funding for the CSX rail line was designated as “emergency” funding in the document, which reads, “As a result of Hurricane Katrina, the rail line was out of commission for 143 days and has since reopened only on a temporary basis.”

For full coverage of “Trent and the Magic Railroad” go to the Heritage Policy Blogs (h/t Instapundit) or go down the hall to Allison’s Under the Influence.

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Today the Washington Post picked up the “Reoriented Express” story that Bill Allison has been covering down the hall at Under the Influence.

Mississippi’s Senators Trent Lott (R) and Thad Cochran (R) inserted an earmarked provision to relocate a Gulf Coast railroad that had recently been destroyed and then rebuilt further north to make way for a highway. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who doesn’t mind knocking heads with members of his own party, is in his typical state of outrage at government waste, “It is ludicrous for the Senate to spend $700 million to destroy and relocate a rail line that is in perfect working order, particularly when it recently underwent a $250 million repair … American taxpayers are generous and are happy to restore damaged property, but it is wrong for senators to turn this tragedy into a giveaway for economic developers.”

As always you can find out why the railroad is being relocated if you just follow the money. As the Post notes:

For more than half a dozen years, Mississippi officials, development planners and tourism authorities have dreamed of the complex restructuring of Mississippi’s coastal transportation system that Lott and Cochran now want to set in motion. Under the plan, the CSX line — which runs a few blocks off the coast line — would be scrapped. CSX would move its freight traffic to existing tracks to the north owned by rival Norfolk Southern.

Then U.S. 90, a wide federal highway that hugs Mississippi’s beaches, would be rebuilt along the CSX rail bed. The route of the federal thoroughfare would be turned into a smaller, manicured “beach boulevard” through cities such as Biloxi, where visitors could “spend more time strolling among the casinos and taking in the views,” as the Governor’s Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal put it.

Allison has even more details from the Tri-State Economic and Transportation Benefits Study produced just before Hurricane Katrina devastated the coast line:

But the Tri-State Economic and Transportation Benefits Study calls for a project that’s bigger than just moving CSX’s seaside tracks north; it would create an additional north-south rail corridor, parallel CSX tracks that wouldn’t be replaced, replace some line currently operated by the Canadian Northern Illinois Central railroad, and generally be much more ambitious in scale than the original effort to move some CSX tracks further north.

The Study goes onto to detail the other beneficiaries of the railroad relocation/highway construction. Go to Under the Influence to check it out.

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Mark Tapscott has linked a post by Andrew Roth of the Club for Growth, that follows the money:

While doing some research on this new pig project, I noticed that CSX Corp has given contributions totalling $224,656 to federal candidate campaigns so far in the 2006 election cycle. And it has given a whopping $7.1 million since 1990.

More importantly, it has given $25,000 to Senator Lott’s campaign over the last 9 election cycles. Pay to play, Senator?

There’s a lot of dirt under this rock. More to come…

Hate to rain on the parade, but something doesn’t quite track here. CSX and its own insurance company paid something like $300 million over the last few months to restore a stretch of Gulf Coast-hugging railroad track that was damaged in Katrina. Did they do this, and make lavish campaign contributions, to persuade the federal government to tear up that same railroad and move it several miles to the north in Mississippi? Never mind that to relocate the rail line, CSX will have to go through regulatory hurdles, battle with local landowners for rights of way, deal with multiple local jurisdictions and so on–why would CSX want to replace what is a very direct route across Mississippi for a less direct one?

I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that CSX, which, a spokesman told me, owns the land that Mississippi pols and local developers want to turn into a tony commercial promenade, is a savvy enough political player to ensure that doesn’t lose any money if its line is relocated north. But I’d be willing to bet that all things being equal, the company would rather keep running in the same rails. From the original AP Story:

The plan to tear up the track isn’t real popular with CSX either. They’re negotiating with state and federal officials, and the $700 million price tag was largely determined by the railroad.

“We rebuilt that line across the Gulf Coast as quickly as possible because it’s a critical artery for us,” said CSX spokesman Gary Sease. “It serves our purposes. It meets our customers’ needs. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.”

Doesn’t exactly sound like CSX is lobbying for relocation. So who benefits from CSX moving its line north, away from Mississippi’s beaches? Who wants to build the hotels and develop that promenade? Who wants to use taxpayer money to clear off CSX and leave them with a free hand to develop and profit from the new landscape? Follow the money, Andrew…

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So I found out a good deal about CSX and its Gulf Coast rail corridor this afternoon. A few points of interest:

Originally, or at least in 2003, the plan was to move CSX’s rail corridor to the north (that’s what the notice calling for an Environmental Impact Statement mentioned below was all about), and the main issue cited seems to have been safety–there are a number of road crossings along the rail (although I couldn’t get any stats on accidents)–and traffic congestion (waiting at crossings).

The Environmental Impact Statement, as I understand it, wasn’t completed, although the process of creating one did get under way. Prohibitively high costs of moving the Gulf Coast rail line might have been the reason it was shelved.

In Hurricane Katrina, the line was damaged–part of 100 miles worth of CSX infrastructure damaged, according the company. In a recent filing with Securities and Exchange Commission, it noted,

Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast in late August, had a significant impact on operations in the latter part of 2005. Approximately 100 miles of CSXT’s infrastructure was destroyed by the storm, effectively severing CSXT’s route to and from the New Orleans gateway. CSXT continued service to customers outside of the storm-affected area by rerouting rail traffic through alternative western gateways, including East St. Louis, IL, Memphis, TN, Birmingham, AL, Mobile, AL, and Montgomery, AL. Rerouted traffic added volume to busy corridors and resulted in additional network congestion, which adversely affected overall train velocity and system dwell. Service to local businesses on the Gulf Coast has been restored and previously rerouted Merchandise trains have returned to the New Orleans gateway. Operations should be normalized to pre-hurricane conditions by the end of the first quarter of 2006. (emphasis added)

Since CSX would abandon its line (for about $700 million) and rely on the track of other companies instead, it’s not clear to me that additional network congestion wouldn’t continue to be a problem.

I’ll have more tomorrow…

…and Tim Chapman has more today, noting:

The Senate appropriators claim that the rail line that currently exists and is operated by CSX Railroad was damaged by Katrina and therefore must be replaced. In a Senate appropriations document obtained by Capitol Report, you can see that the Senate appropriators are claiming that “As a result of Hurricane Katrina, the rail line was out of commission for 143 days and has since reopened only on a temporary basis.”

But according to CSX spokesman Gary Sease who returned a call today from Capitol Report, the rail line is in full operation. “It went back into complete and total operation on Jan. 31 this year,” said Sease. (emphasis in original)

Chapman also dug out this page from the Senate Appropriations Committee report, which says that the $700 million will go to something called the Rail Line Relocation Capital Grant Program, which was implemented as part of the Transportation Equity Act of 2005 (see here).
That language is identical to a House measure introduced in 2004 by Roger S. Wicker of Mississippi and co-sponsored by Rep. Chip Pickering (R-Miss.), and a Senate version introduced by Lott and co-sponsored by Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and John Kerry (D-Mass.).

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Here’s a notice that the EPA, along with state and local officials, launched an environmental impact study of the CSX Relocation, mentioned in the post immediately below, in 2003. This article, from Mississippi Coast.org, a coalition of local development councils seeking to bring business into the state, tells us,

The Coast is crisscrossed by the rail lines of the CSX and Kansas City Southern system, which connect the region to major markets across the country.

I’m still digging around…

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Glenn Reynolds has a post up pointing to a Mark Tapscott post about Trent Lott’s tantrum over the temerity of those who question things like a $700 million earmark to persuade CSX Corporation to give up one of its rail lines so a highway can be built there instead. (The full AP report is here.

Reynolds writes of Lott’s annoyance with Porkbusters (the Mississippi Senator said he was “getting damned tired of hearing from them”):

I guess he’s hearing from people he’d rather not. You know, the ones who don’t have their checkbooks out.

This isn’t the first time (see here, for example) that the suggestion has been made that there’s a connection between campaign contributors and pork barrel projects. I suspect that’s more likely to be true in Defense earmarks than Transportation, but I think it’s worth exploring whether this is the case.

So, let’s add to the list of things to do today an attempt to figure out whether that’s the case–whether Lott’s motives have as much to do with contributor service as it does with serving constituents…

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The former chief of staff to Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-CA) – now a lobbyist – is a master at greasing the wheels to get earmarks, for her clients from the Chairman, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Letitia White’s lobbying firm and their clients have contributed 37 percent of the $1.3 million raised by Lewis’ political action committee over the past six years while she has obtained numerous earmarks for her clients, defense contractors and California municipalities. Congress is eyeing reform of this practice as the federal budget deficit swells to unheard of proportions. Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Trent Lott (R-CA); John McCain (R-AZ) and Tom Coburn (R-OK); and Barack Obama (D-IL) all have varying proposals to reform the process. Meanwhile, The Hill newspaper reports that some lawmakers receive earmark requests via e-mail, making the process easier for both parties.

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Earmarks in Appropriations bills have ballooned from 4,000 a decade ago to over 14,000 today. Legislators from both parties are taking aim at these projects and are proposing various degrees of reforms. In a Bloomberg article conservative Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is “threatening to slow the Senate’s business to a crawl by forcing his colleagues to vote on each of the thousands of obscure, sometimes unusual pork-barrel projects.” He asks, “Should we be spending money in ways that are other than in the vital interest of the country?” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is joining Coburn in threatening to bring each earmark to a vote. According to the New York Times, Trent Lott (R-MS) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) have proposed a reform that “would allow senators to object to any earmarks added in the final stages of negotiations and force sponsors to win at least 60 votes to retain them … [and] require that the final version of legislation be available for at least 24 hours before a floor vote and that the sponsor of each earmark be included along with a justification.”

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