A week or so ago, the President of Amtrak disembarked from a train in Depot Town and met with elected officials on the future of regional rail. I, sadly, wasn’t invited to participate, but Ypsi City Council member Pete Murdock just passed along the following letter, about the meeting, from Carmine Palombo, Director of Transportation Programs at SEMCOG.

Last week, I participated in a meeting with members of our federal elected leadership, representatives of the U.S. Department of Transportation and some of our local elected and appointed officials. The purpose of the meeting was to educate and seek guidance from the federal transportation officials on how we can better prepare our applications for new federal discretionary transportation funding in the form of TIGER and High-Speed Rail (HSR) funds.

Discretionary funding is being discussed as a major component in federal reauthorization. As a result, the level of future transportation funding for us in Southeast Michigan may depend on how well our projects address national priorities. The leadership of our delegation, led by Congressmen John Dingell and Senators Levin and Stabenow, will be key if Michigan is to have an opportunity to receive an appropriate share of the funds we already send to Washington. It will also be important for communities and agencies in Southeast Michigan to invest in projects across the entire spectrum of transportation infrastructure – highway, transit, HSR, biking and walking, etc., if we are to be successful, both today and in the future.

Events like this go a long way in educating us on how to respond to new federal funding opportunities and to show the feds that we are serious about competing and educating them about our challenges here in Michigan. Hopefully, we all got something out of the event – the proof will be in a few months when we see how successful we were in receiving some of this discretionary funding.

So, I expect we should hear something about funding by the end of the summer. For the time being, however, it looks as though even the scaled-back Ann Arbor-Detroit line isn’t likely to start rolling until 2012, at the earliest. Or, at least that’s Councilman Murdock’s assessment.

And I know that I’ve said it before, but we really need to establish a grass roots lobbying effort to keep the pressure on our elected officials. There are tens of thousands of people that would benefit from a rail line connecting Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Dearborn, and Detroit, and we should start organizing. This is too good of an idea to let die.