WASHINGTON — The Transportation Workers Union charged Tuesday that the plan to break up Amtrak was originally drafted by a longtime lobbyist for private railroad interests who was once employed by a conservative member of the Amtrak Reform Council, reports the Buffalo News.
Charles Moneypenny, a Transportation Workers Union official, said the Amtrak Reform Council’s breakup plan was drafted for the Discovery Institute seven years ago and matches all the major proposals approved by a narrow council majority in December. Moneypenny is a labor member of the Amtrak Reform Council.
Rep. Jack F. Quinn, R-Hamburg, chairman of the House Transportation Subcommittee on Railroads, and other Republicans are considering the reform council’s proposal to break up and sell off Amtrak to private companies that will get government subsidies to run the rail system.
Moneypenny said the Discovery Institute is a “right-wing, industry-funded think tank” headed then and now by another Amtrak Reform Council member, Bruce Chapman.
The man who wrote the report calling for the breakup of Amtrak, Moneypenny said, is Ray Chambers, who represents private “companies who’d like to get in on the action providing some of the rail service in this country.”
The ARC proposed that private companies that take over Amtrak receive $100 billion over the next 10 years. ARC member Chapman told The Buffalo News that Moneypenny “leads a rich fantasy life. If this was a conspiracy, I wish it were more successful.”
Chapman said Chambers “is an adjunct fellow of the institute and did write a report on Amtrak in 1995, and I had a role in that, and I am very pleased about that.”
“There are some similarities to the ARC recommendations and the proposals we advocated seven years ago,” Chapman said. “But the attempt (by Moneypenny) to show there is a financial link is bogus.”
Moneypenny said both reports called for privatization of Amtrak, selling off the tracks of the Northeast Corridor, and a new federal agency to award routes.