While the project to build a rail stop to serve T.F. Green Airport is not a sure thing, planners have returned to the drawing board.

01:00 AM EST on Thursday, February 26, 2004

Governor Carcieri's capital budget outlines a $169.5-million financing plan for an Amtrak station in Warwick, but is not intended to signal that the long-delayed project is finally going forward, according to Carcieri's spokesman, Jeff Neal.

Designed under the Almond administration, the plan is for a train station on Jefferson Boulevard about a quarter-mile west of T.F. Green Airport. The station would be combined with a 4,000-car parking garage, dedicated mainly to the rental car fleets serving the airport.

Carcieri's budget, like Almond's before it, relies on a tax on out-of-state car rental customers to pay most of the debt. The rental companies are opposed to taxing their customers so heavily, especially if the revenue is going into an automated people-mover connecting the train station to the air terminal.

Transportation Director James Capaldi said yesterday the administration hopes to take that issue off the table soon by gaining authority to build the people-mover with annual federal grants that are usually reserved for maintaining "off-system bridges," those not on federal or state roads.

U.S. Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee recently amended the 2004-09 transportation appropriation bill to allow such a reassignment of federal bridge grants. If the House adopts the language, Capaldi said, the state would be able to transfer about $36 million in federal grants to pay for the people-mover.

That hope of "new" federal money notwithstanding, Carcieri's capital budget considers the chance that the train station project, as designed, will fail.

In that event, his budget says, the state Department of Transportation "is prepared to design and construct a stand alone station" to be financed entirely with already secured sources of federal and state money.