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A bill that would expand Pennsylvania’s role in railroad safety enforcement passed a House committee vote with broad bipartisan support Wednesday, three months after East Palestine, Ohio rail disaster near the state border.
The House Consumer Protection, Technology, and Utilities Committee approved House Bill 1028 Wednesday on a 19-2 vote. Members expressed general support for tighter rail safety rules — although several voiced concerns about whether the matter was within the state’s purview relative to federal authority on interstate commerce.
“We believe we have every right under federal law to implement enhanced safety measures,” said Committee Chair Rob Matzie, D-Beaver County, the bill’s sponsor along with Republican co-chair Jim Marshall, also from Beaver County.
Matzie acknowledged that there are those who believe otherwise, but stressed that the matter will continue to be worked through as the bill proceeds.
“Getting it out into the public today will allow for continued dialogue,” Matzie said, adding that “until you schedule something, people don’t come out of the woodwork” with critiques.
While Marshall said elements of the bill have been proposed for several years, the impetus for the current effort was the Feb. 3 Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine. The incident spilled over 100,000 gallons of toxic chemicals and resulted in a burn-off that sent a plume of smoke over the Pennsylvania border, raising concerns about contamination. T esting has not yet shown major problems.
Senate Bill 1028 would create several specific safety benchmarks for trains in Pennsylvania – such as a minimum two-man crew and a maximum train length of 8,500 feet — to be enforced by the state’s Public Utility Commission, which is authorized to issue fines.
The bill also orders the PUC, in conjunction with PennDOT, to develop standards for the reporting and tracking of hazardous materials on trains, as well for the use of wayside detectors — sensors along train tracks that are intended to warn of passing train cars that are overheating due to breakage, misalignment, or other problems that can cause derailment.
Questions have been raised about Norfolk Southern ignoring detector alerts, although the company says its crews acted properly when detectors indicated problems prior to the East Palestine derailment.
The bill would also put into law the right of union representatives to be involved in safety inspections, which Matzie said is in response to reports that workers’ safety complaints are not being followed-up on by rail companies.
The PUC currently has rail inspectors — but as the department explained at a hearing in February, those inspectors act only under authority delegated to them by the Federal Railroad Administration, and their only enforcement power is to refer issues up to the FRA.
The PUC says this is the result of the 1970 federal Railroad Safety Act, which seeks to standardize rail regulations under the FRA’s authority and which – under the federal government’s Constitutional authority over interstate commerce – restricts states’ abilities to act outside of this.
But Matzie and other advocates for tighter regulations believe the PUC has more power than it thinks it does.
During Wednesday’s meeting, Matzie read aloud from the Railroad Safety Act’s pre-emption language, stressing that the law allows states to continue to enforce their own rule if it is “necessary to eliminate or reduce an essentially local safety or security hazard,” is not incompatible with federal law, and “does not reasonably burden interstate commerce.”
Prior court precedents have given states room to use this clause, Matzie said, pointing to the 1993 case CSX v. Easterwood, in which the widow of a man killed by a train sued rail operator CSX for failing to follow Georgia’s state rail rules.
Courts ultimately found that some of Georgia’s regulations were not pre-empted by the federal government, and that the widow had grounds to sue. Pre-emption occurs only when “federal regulations substantially subsume the subject matter of the relevant state law,” the court found.
Some committee members Wednesday questioned Matzie’s confidence that such rulings would give Pennsylvania sufficient legal cover to act when it feels the federal government has not — or what the consequences of that would be.
“That’s why rail is typically federally regulated, I think you’d have a mess” if each state had its own mandate for matters like train length, said Rep. Ryan Warner, R-Fayette County. He added, “I do respect the intent of this legislation” but that it could result in practical and legal problems for interstate commerce.
Warner and Rep. Natalie Mihalek, R-Allegheny County, were the only negative votes on the bill, which now is before the full House for consideration.
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