The fairy tale of the high-speed rail project – Orange County Register

In fairy tale, the story is told of a troll that lives under a bridge and tries to get a meal ticket for anyone who wants to cross it.

California greatly improved on this scam by first earning a meal ticket from taxpayers who were forced to pay for the bridge’s construction, and then relentlessly spending money on it even though the bridge wasn’t real. where to go. For example, Governor Gavin Newsom’s new budget proposal calls for an additional $4.2 billion to complete a 119-mile stretch of the California high-speed rail project in the Central Valley.

Voters approved nearly $10 billion in bonds in 2008 to build a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles and were promised it would be built without tax increases and operate without need public subsidies. The Railroad Authority is expected to acquire all the necessary land lots before construction begins, and the completed rail line is expected to take passengers between the Bay Area and LA in less than three hours. . The cost of the project is estimated at 33 billion USD.

Talk about a fairy tale.

The California High Speed ​​Rail Agency seems to have given up on convincing anyone that the purpose of the project is transportation. Its latest press release describes the bullet train as “35 jobs in progress and over 7,000 construction jobs created to date.” No one is going anywhere on the train anytime soon, unless you count the vacation trips of the consultants, who continue to be in charge of the railroad agency’s “planning” for the rest of the project.

Newsom’s new budget proposal, announced Monday, aims to get $4.2 billion in “final spending” to “get the job done in Central Valley,” where building High-speed train construction has been underway for seven years. Some of the money will be used to do more work on the 119-mile stretch between Merced and Bakersfield. Some of the money will be used to write high-tech fairy tales about how the high-speed rail project will one day reach San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as Anaheim.

This continues the fight that was suspended last September, when the governor clashed with legislative leaders over that same $4.2 billion. The remaining amount is nearly $10 billion authorized by voters in 2008. Newsom’s revised budget in May called for all of that money to be given to the railroad to begin electrification work. Merced-to-Bakersfield segmentation. But some lawmakers say it would be better to go with less expensive diesel engines and spend some money on improving transportation in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

Newsom denied that, insisting that electrified railroads were essential.

So plans continue for the $13.8 billion, 119-mile stretch of railroad between Merced and Bakersfield, even as the waste and mismanagement of the project are included by critics. both state audits recorded on a regular basis. Last April, two of the project’s contractors criticized the railway agency for not obtaining the land needed for construction, causing planning problems and delaying another two years. In December, Fresno Bee reported that more than 200 pieces of needed property in the Valley had yet to be purchased.