The estimated cost of California’s High Speed Rail system connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles has been going up every year since it was launched. In February the latest estimates put the total cost at $105 billion. Very belatedly, the state has decided that what the project needs is a dedicated inspector general who can identify corruption in the system and try to bring the spending back under control.
After a decade of cost, schedule, technical, regulatory, personnel and legal problems, the California high speed rail project will be getting an inspector general soon as part of a deal between Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature.
The new investigative position is intended to intensify oversight and improve performance of the $105 billion railroad project. Enthusiasm for the change is high, but whether it will fix everything is uncertain, even among state leaders.
“There is nothing but problems on the project,” said Speaker Anthony Rendon, a Lakewood Democrat. “The inspector general provides oversight and some sense of what is going on with management. That has been missing for a long time.”…
Fred Weiderhold, a West Point civil engineer who served for 20 years as Amtrak’s inspector general, said if he were taking the California job, he would want to start with a staff of at least 50 people, half auditors, 30% investigators and 20% inspectors and evaluators.
“It is a daunting job,” Weiderhold said about the California project. “You have to follow the money. I guarantee you that on any project this large you will have fraud, product substitution and waste.”
With a hundred billion dollars being funneled to union workers it’s a sure bet there will be plenty of fraud and waste to uncover. It’s a little hard to believe though that the bluest of blue states is going to come down hard on that fraud when it implicates their union cronies. I guess we’ll have to wait and see on that. But even if they do, it won’t solve the problem of general mismanagement and a lack of planning.
“The project is not proceeding according to a robust plan, which results in waste and other inefficiencies,” said Bent Flyvbjerg, a business expert in mega projects at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and IT University of Copenhagen. “Given the political divisions, the cost growth, the schedule delays and the lack of a sound future revenue source, this project is going to the graveyard of famous boondoggles.”
The governor’s budget includes another $4.2 billion for the project which would be used to complete the segment of the project between Bakersfield (pop. 379,000) and Merced (pop. 84,000). However, Democrats in the California Assembly aren’t going for it. They don’t see the need to pour money into a segment of the line that is unlikely to serve many people. I’ve been to Merced and it’s a nice town with a great looking theater which first opened in 1931. But how many people are desperate to get there at 200 mph when they can drive there in a couple hours already?
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Even if they do get the Central Valley portion of the line done, the big question is where the state will get the very substantial amount of money required to connect the Central Valley portion of the line to LA and San Francisco.
A more basic question is whether the state can ever afford to make the costly connections to the coasts, involving lengthy mountain tunnels near seismic faults. Bakersfield to Los Angeles is priced at $50 billion and San Francisco to the Central Valley tie-in at Chowchilla $22 billion, according to upper end estimates in the 2022 draft business plan.
“There is a very significant outstanding question of where that money will come from and how to proceed at this point,” said Kerstein.
Legislators are worried that the 171-mile system would remain isolated.
“The idea that you would spend all your money on a train that doesn’t connect to anything and just hope that you’re going to get more money, I find a really frightening business proposition,” said Friedman.
The section of the line that would connect to San Francisco includes two proposed tunnels, one of which is 13 miles long. Work on those tunnels hasn’t even started.
I’ve taken a bullet train in Japan from Tokyo to Kyoto and back and it’s fantastic technology. So if there was a similar train connecting Orange County to the Bay Area in 2-3 hours I’d be a customer. The problem is that California’s plan has been a fiasco from the start. Even now there is literally no explanation of where the needed funds will come from and thus no completion date that anyone can point to. In other words, the problem isn’t the idea of a bullet train it’s with the execution which has nothing short of a disaster so far.
Maybe the new Inspector General can help whip things into shape and bring the project costs down. But even if that happens it’s hard to see how a project this haphazard can end in anything but failure. I genuinely wish that wasn’t the case but objectively I don’t see much reason I’ll ever get to ride this thing unless I’m willing to drive two hours to Bakersfield to hop the train to Merced. But I’ll give the High Speed Rail Authority the last word. Here’s there latest quarterly progress video.
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