In his first State of the State speech, Gov. Gavin Gavin Newsom captured the sentiments of many Californians regarding the high-speed rail plan voters approved in 2008: “There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency. Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A. I wish there were.”
Three years later, the bullet train – now scheduled to chug from Merced to Bakersfield – still lacks oversight and a realistic plan to reach California’s coastal metros. The only real change has been its price tag, which has soared to $113 billion and counting. The estimate was $77 billion at the time of Newsom’s speech.
A down side of the state’s astounding $97.5-billion budget surplus is it allows lawmakers to avoid tough decisions. Legislators in the Bay Area and Los Angeles had resisted releasing billions of dollars in transit funds to a future rail plan that’s unlikely to relieve the state’s traffic congestion even as their local transit systems struggle for cash.
To break the logjam, lawmakers last week just threw money at everything. As part of a budget trailer bill, the Legislature agreed to send the remaining $4.2 billion in bullet train bond funds authorized as part of Proposition 1A to help complete that Central Valley rail segment – and also to boost other transit spending by $3.65 billion.
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A large portion of that funding won’t improve mobility, but will go toward Caltrain electrification, but that’s how it goes in climate-change-obsessed California. As a sop to Newsom’s concern about accountability, the Legislature also created an independent inspector general’s office to oversee costs and spending – something that should have been done years ago.
California has a solid track record of using inspector generals to point out waste and inefficiencies, but a terrible record at reforming projects once those problems are identified. The problem here is the project itself – especially now that the latest iterations don’t conform to travel time and cost promises made in the original ballot measure. It’s time to cut off the spending.