Political Quotes

“Two points. The first is, I understand the gentleman's opposition on procedural grounds as far as the differences in outlays and what have you. But when you go back home and talk to your district and say you are trying to do something for safety, as we are in this case, and you say: Well, the reason we can't do this is the procedural aspect of outlays versus the actual amount of money going in and the amount of money being cut, and so on and so forth, and you go through all the rubric and the matrix that we use around here and all the buzz words on the floor to try to explain things, the eyes of the people back home glaze over, rightfully so, because they say: Those are your rules, not ours. Why don't you just get something done. What they are asking to get done is rail safety. And that is what this amendment does. I just want to end with one quote. Back in 2010, the head of the FTA--at that time, the administrator was Peter Rogoff--chastised local transit agencies for promoting rail construction for so many new rail lines. He said on one hand, agencies were unable to maintain the rail lines they already had. The FTA had recently at that point estimated that rail transit systems suffered from close to a $60 billion maintenance backlog--and the backlog was growing even then.…”