Amtrak's "Board of Death": Member #1

Mr. David Laney, a Dallas lawyer, was the chairman of the Amtrak "Board of Death". He was the only member of the board who had received Senate approval to serve on the board. As a "Bush Pioneer" in 2000, he had raised over $100,000 for George W. Bush's presidential campaign. As the former head of the Texas Transportation Commission, his main claim to transportation fame was apparently defeating some clean air standards to get billions of federal dollars flowing out of Washington to fund Texas roads. He also reportedly used to do a lot of tax shelter work. Polite and charming, he would self-deprecatingly refer to himself as a "recovering road man" at rail meetings. But I don't think he ever really recovered enough. On September 8, 2005, he published his one and only posting on his prestigious law office website -- a presentation about the future funding of highways and how that would affect Texas. The next day, under his orders to do so, Amtrak announced roughly $5,000+ annual fare increases on most of the Amtrak daily job commuters on the Northeast Corridor, blasting a huge percentage of them off the rails, and forcing most of the rest into family budget crises. While many other Amtrak routes were seeing even double digit ridership gains in 2006 as gas prices rose, the total Northeast Corridor ridership dropped because of the job commuters who could no longer afford to ride the trains to work. The trains were emptier. Commuter revenue was flat or down. Some people quit their jobs, and others moved out of state to keep them. It was a huge social and economic tragedy. Mr. Laney ultimately admitted to me in private conversation that the fare increase was forced down Amtrak's throat by unnamed political forces in Washington outside the company. Yet he had little idea what the effect was, and didn't realize he had managed to drive NEC train ridership down in a time of rising gasoline prices. He also fired Amtrak's president, David Gunn, apparently because Mr. Gunn was an obstacle to dismantling Amtrak -- something the Bush administration had apparently ordered Mr. Laney to try to do. That firing is what led to a confrontation with an angry Congress and the hearing testimony in this video. Having met with Mr. Laney for an hour and a half in December, 2006, I left feeling sorry for the man. He seemed tired and harried. I'd heard that he was disappointed to have been given the Amtrak gig in the first place, having been angling for a spot running the nation's highways instead. Yet I got the feeling he didn't enjoy sneaking around trying to break up his own company in plain sight while pretending that wasn't his intention at all. I got the impression he just wanted to go home to Texas, put his cowboy boots back on, and have a beer. Poor man. Mr. Laney, along with Mr. Floyd Hall, was the last of the four members of the Amtrak "Board of Death" to leave the company in November, 2007. In the end, Amtrak survived. Mr. Laney, should you happen to read this, personally, I forgive you for f*#king up the Northeast Corridor, but I can't necessarily speak for a few thousand other lives that were devastated. Thanks for finally meeting with me (after I chased you for a year! ;-), and I hope you have a pleasant retirement in Texas. -- Rick Booth

YouTube | March 25, 2008