For years, I have chronicled the California high-speed train project’s fraud, waste, and abuse.
The last time I covered it was in mid-2019 after the Trump administration nixed continued funding of this boondoggle.
Earlier this year, we reported that the US Department of Transportation (DOT) cancelled millions in grants for the high speed rail project that California Governor Gavin Newsom has substantially scaled back.Newsom has tried fighting this move, arguing that California needed these funds to complete a more limited-scale project than the Los Angeles to San Francisco route originally planned. However, the Trump administration did not buy the argument, so it has officially ended the Obama-era agreement.
The New York Times has finally decided to cover California’s quest to construct the nation’s first high-speed rail system. Their findings will surprise nobody who is a regular reader of Legal Insurrection, an independent conservative or has an ounce of understanding of human behavior.
…[T] the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.A review of hundreds of pages of documents, engineering reports, meeting transcripts and interviews with dozens of key political leaders show that the detour through the Mojave Desert was part of a string of decisions that, in hindsight, have seriously impeded the state’s ability to deliver on its promise to create a new way of transporting people in an era of climate change.Political compromises, the records show, produced difficult and costly routes through the state’s farm belt. They routed the train across a geologically complex mountain pass in the Bay Area. And they dictated that construction would begin in the center of the state, in the agricultural heartland, not at either of the urban ends where tens of millions of potential riders live.
The paper notes that there is currently no identified funding source for the $100 billion it will take to extend the rail project from the Central Valley to its original goals, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The publication is likely starting to bail out the Democratic lawmakers and politicians who foisted this project on its citizens with fantasies about speed, jobs, and energy savings.
In fact, Democrats in the California legislature are begging for an end to the $105 billion project, of which about $10 billion has been spent.
“There is no confidence in the project,” said Speaker Anthony Rendon, a Los Angeles Democrat. “We had an end date of 2020 and now we don’t have an end date.”In his negotiations with the Legislature, Newsom has offered several billion dollars of sweeteners to the urban centers to get the $4.2 billion. So far, the Assembly has not bitten.Newsom’s office did not respond to a request for comment.Against this backdrop, Rendon and a majority of Democrats in the Assembly want to essentially detonate Newsom’s plan for the rail.Asked in a recent interview what he could not accept, Rendon said, “I think this strict adherence to the current project is not really what we’re interested in.”
I suspect the project will be terminated entirely when the Democrats can find a way to blame this epic failure on Republicans. Given how few GOP members there are with any political power in this state, Trump will somehow end up with the blame.
Meanwhile, there are some real gems in this piece. For example, a French company tried to come to California’s aid in the early 2000s. It left for the less politically dysfunctional country of Morocco.
The state was warned repeatedly that its plans were too complex. SNCF, the French national railroad, was among bullet train operators from Europe and Japan that came to California in the early 2000s with hopes of getting a contract to help develop the system.The company’s recommendations for a direct route out of Los Angeles and a focus on moving people between Los Angeles and San Francisco were cast aside, said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF.The company pulled out in 2011.“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.”
Let’s place this story under the ever-expanding list of “Legal Insurrection was right” files.
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