joe boardman. thank you. welcome and you are recognized. >> thank you, mr. chairman, mr. cummings, members. i appreciate being here today. and joyce, i'll be on your board so the questions will come from me for the future for o.l.i., but i'm glad that you are there-durable' bring the energy to a very important problem of safety for railroads. i appreciate the work you have done here. angela cody, sitting over in the corner, mr. chairman, who is the one who wrote that article, and i have already blamed her for this hearing this morning, she's already asked me for another interview, and i understand now no good deed goes unpunished in this process. what aid like to really start with and talk about this morning is that i have been an amtrak customer as a state commissioner of transportation and even before that and i was thinking about this in my own company, i used amtrak as the backbone of what we provided in transportation to the social service agencies where we had contracts, because part of the high cost for social service agencies was to transport especially a long dis

we have joe boardman, the president and ceo of amtrak as a witness. we have joan mcdonald, chair of the northeast corridor infrastructure operations advisory commission and also commissioner of the new york state department of transportation. we have richard geddes, adjunct scholar of the american enterprise institute. we have mr. perry offutt who is the managing director of morgan stanley and mr. john tolman who's vice president national legislative representative, the brotherhood of locomotive ending nears and trainmen. i want to welcome all of our witnesses. we're trying to get to as many as we can. they're going to call a vote in a few minutes. so if you have a lengthy statement, it will be submitted by unanimous concept to the record. -- concept to the record. we'd like to have you summarize, and when we finish with everyone, we'll go to questions. thank you so much for joining us, and we'll turn first to karen hedlund, and she is the deputy administrator of fra. welcome, and you're recognized, ma'am. >> chairman pica and ranking member, thank yo