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Peter Lyford represents District 10, which includes communities in Penobscot and Hancock counties, in the Maine Senate. He is the Senate Republican lead on the Legislature’s State and Local Government Committee and the Environmental and Natural Resources Committee.
One of the toughest jobs we have as legislators is to determine which bills deserve to be enacted. A lot goes into that decisionmaking process, such as whether these bills benefit the state as a whole or just a small part of it or its people. How much it will cost can also be a major factor for some legislation.
Fortunately, these kinds of questions are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to setting public policy. It shouldn’t be easy because if it were, lawmakers could easily disregard due diligence and cause a lot of damage in a short amount of time. That is why transparency and accountability are so important to the legislative process.
Slow and steady you could say, in a “The Tortoise and the Hare” kind of way.
Some of the bills we consider are undoubtedly contentious. Others easily gain bipartisan support because they just make sense. Then we have some that really deserve consideration but have too many hurdles to become law.
One bill that checks that box in particular is LD 860, which seeks to identify the rail lines between Portland and Bangor as a major corridor and fund a feasibility study to see if we can make passenger rail work. This bill checks other good policy boxes, too, such as being environmentally beneficial through mass transit and providing residents and tourists alike with more options to traverse our beautiful state.
So while it would probably make good policy, that doesn’t mean we can or should do it. To quote Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “… ay, there’s the rub.”
LD 860 seeks to require the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority to apply for funding through the Corridor Identification and Development (Corridor ID) Program in order to identify the rail systems that connect Portland, Lewiston, Auburn, Waterville and Bangor as a priority rail corridor. It sounds easy. However, it’s far from it.
Maine’s current rail system is a mixture of privately owned railways and state-owned tracks run by different operators. From CSX (formerly Pan Am Railways) and Amtrak to Canadian Pacific and Maine Northern Railway, today’s track system is a mashup of different owners, several freight operators and one passenger rail service operating on 1,072 miles of track.
According to the 2023 Maine State Rail Plan published by the Maine Department of Transportation (DOT), total rail volumes in 2019 reached approximately 4.5 million tons of goods valued at $4.4 billion, and 574,692 passengers traveled largely through Amtrak’s Downeaster rail service from Brunswick to Boston. However, much of that volume traversed Maine through its primary line operated by CSX, one of the two Class I rail operators in Maine.
Through the enactment of LDs 227 and 991 in 2021, Maine DOT conducted two economic studies, the first of which involved commuter and passenger train service between Portland and Lewiston/Auburn. The purpose of the second study was to determine the potential demand and viability of new passenger rail service between those communities and Bangor.
According to the studies, the cost to extend passenger rail service to the Lewiston/Auburn area ranged from $264 million to $349 million. Extending rail service to Bangor was much more costly, with estimates of up to $902 million. More concerning, however, was the fact that projected ridership levels would make the project ineligible or uncompetitive for the valuable federal dollars needed to make it happen. In addition, the state would have to come up with as much as $350 million in matching funds for both projects.
Ay, there’s the rub. Since the Corridor ID program is a competitive discretionary grant program that would provide only capital funds if the project were even competitive, it would not cover the estimated $6.7 million to $16.2 million required annually to operate it. That would require a subsidy.
With two studies already in hand, we should look to improve our multimodal transportation system and find ways to fund it. We know the destination — it’s up to us on how we get there.
