Rail Shippers’ Lobby Geared Up

Journal of Commerce
May 20, 2009

June could be a key time for Congress to act on rail antitrust legislation and perhaps on changes in how economic regulations enforce competition among carriers, said a top official for an activist rail shippers’ lobbying group.

Robert Szabo, a Washington, D.C. attorney and executive director of Consumers United for Rail Equity, said he looks for a bill aimed at stripping railroads of antitrust immunity to reach the Senate floor next month for debate and a vote, while a House version moves to subcommittee and full committee votes about the same time.

Szabo said those bills could move ahead soon after Congress returns from its May 25-29 Memorial Day recess.

That would fit with what Sen. Herb Kohl, D.-Wis., said about his Railroad Antitrust Enforcement Act that cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee in March. Kohl told Journal of Commerce May 19 he expects it to reach the Senate floor “shortly after the holiday.”
The House competition subcommittee had a May 19 hearing on its rail antitrust bill, and both it and the full Judiciary Committee would have to vote on the bill. But Szabo thinks that when they get back from the recess “they intend to move fairly quickly through the markups.”

He told JoC that a separate competition bill, to redirect the Surface Transportation Board in how it regulates rail competition issues of service and rate-setting, is still being crafted in closed-door meetings by staff of Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.

Rockefeller has mostly been absent from the Senate since a mid-April injury that required immediate knee surgery and physical therapy afterward.

But staff continues to craft that bill, he said, at times showing parts of drafted legislative language to various groups and trying to “fine-tune what they have to see if they can make different folks happy … they continue to try to get it together for action maybe in June.”

Railroads oppose the antitrust bills, which could upend the current system of moving all regulatory issues involving railroads first through the STB and then only to an appeals court to hear any challenges to the board’s rulings. With them falling under regular antitrust treatment, they would be subject to lower court challenges over anticompetitive complaints even before an issue goes to the STB.

The rail industry is also urging Congress to develop an overall rail policy rather than legislate measures separately.

Szabo said the bills can move forward separately or be combined before they clear Congress. But he said shippers need three things: removal of railroads’ antitrust protections, plus “legislation that corrects the misapplication of deregulation” by the STB and its predecessor agency, and “an enhanced STB going forward so this issue doesn’t have to go back to Congress periodically.”