CURE: Rail rate complaint process fix would worsen problem

CURE: Rail rate complaint process fix would worsen problem Rail customers told the U.S. Surface Transportation Board this week that proposed changes to the rail rate complaint process for small shipment cases make an already ineffective process more burdensome and costly.
   'The STB has made these latest proposed changes to the small shipment rate case process because their current process, as various chairs of the STB have testified before Congress, is completely unworkable,' said Bob Szabo, executive director of Consumers United for Rail Equity (CURE), a group representing rail customers, said in a statement. 'The current process is too costly, too time consuming and too complex to provide any relief for rail customers. Unfortunately, these proposed changes may be the worst proposals yet for making the small shipment rate case process accessible for rail customers without access to competition.'
   An October 2006 report by the General Accountability Office highlighted the problem when it said the process is 'largely inaccessible and rarely used.' In fact, the GAO found that since the rules were passed in 1997, the STB has not had a rate challenge case go through the process (https://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0794.pdf).
   In a hearing Wednesday the STB heard customers explain that while the intent of the rules was to simplify the process of filing small rate cases against the nation's railroads, it would make the process worse, creating more barriers and further discouraging new cases from being filed, CURE said.
   'Instead of clarifying and simplifying existing rules, the STB has created an entirely new set of rules that have the perverse — and we hope unintended — effect of making matters worse for rail customers,' said Steve Sharp of Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp. a rail customer and member of CURE who testified at the hearing. 'The very fact that the railroads support these new rules, while rail customers are united in opposition should be evidence enough that once again the STB has failed to propose a rule that will protect rail customers from railroad monopoly power.'