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By Dr. Adrian Herzog, URPA (circa 1998)
Twenty years ago, many of the leaders of URPA were active members of NARP, and tried as best we could to work within that organization. However, our warnings and our analyses were largely ignored by the NEC-and-Amtrak management-centered leadership of NARP. In the mid 1980's, URPA, the United Rail Passenger Alliance, was founded, not as a national organization, but an umbrella organization for like-minded local groups.
Why should rail supporters send contributions to Washington from states like Minnesota, New Mexico or California when they received no support for their trains from the national leadership? Instead, we asked our supporters to support strong independent local rail passenger organizations in these and other states, keeping what little money that could be raised by them at the local level for use at the local level. No local organization has ever sent money, or asked their members to send money to URPA in Jacksonville. Instead, URPA acts as a clearing house of information about Amtrak from various sources. URPA is supported entirely through voluntary contributions of time, effort, and a small amount of cash.
Again, no cash from any rail passenger association, or for that matter from any membership organization, flows to URPA, for the precise reason that, if we were to have such support, we would be legally accountable to those supporters. Membership organizations have boards that are accountable by law to the membership. URPA is not and never will be a membership organization. It operates by invitation only. URPA depends on contribution of staff time and some financial resources from those that participate directly.
Using only volunteer staff, URPA occasionally develops a "white paper" on various topics related to rail passenger service. These papers are circulated within URPA, and shared with local groups such as RailPAC, Minnarp, and others that interact with URPA. These "white papers" are also quietly circulated on Capitol Hill and within Amtrak itself. For example, see "Towards an Amtrak-free National Network." Since URPA is not a direct membership organization, I urge you to try to reform NARP, to make it a truly national organization, but at the same time to strengthen your local organizations. The years leading up to 2003, when Amtrak must become self-sufficient, will be a critical time for the American long distance passenger trains. If indeed the end of Amtrak "as we know it" is at hand, the question now becomes, "What comes Next?"
As you build up your local organization, begin to build bridges to one another directly. You don't need NARP or URPA to communicate amongst yourselves. Only by having an alliance of strong local organizations, not chapters of a national group, can we be effective at the local level. RailPAC is allied with URPA, but when we develop local policy for local issues in California we do so without any interference from URPA in Jacksonville. When we address more global issues we often use URPA as an umbrella for our ideas, but long before these ideas show up in an "official" URPA document the details will have been worked out by networking between the local groups involved.
Is there any requirement to be "allied" with URPA? No. Any rail passenger advocacy group, a local NARP chapter, or even the national leadership of NARP can network with this group. In fact, what makes your group an "ally" of URPA is simply a question of how you approach the problem of rail passenger service. If you believe that everything should be done through Washington at NARP or Amtrak, you are not yet an URPAN. But, if you share information with other groups without contacting NARP first, you are on the way to becoming one. We do not want to replace NARP, or even challenge it; we just want to develop our ideas independently. Your ideas may be better than any developed by URPA or NARP, but how can anyone know if you don't share them?