thebigp

Bullet train to nowhere--the ultimate California boondoggle--
PART 3 OF 3
The plan had been that by 2022 the train would start accepting passengers for a 300-mile leg that would run south from Merced to Burbank in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley. To reach Burbank, however, would require tunneling through two east-west mountain ranges, the Tehachapi and the San Gabriel, that separate the San Joaquin Valley from the vast alluvial plain of coastal Southern California. The contemplated 36 miles of tunnels to be blasted through the two fault-pocked and potentially earthquake-prone ranges would be a geology-defying accomplishment.
Three of the proposed routes, which would link the desert city of Palmdale to Burbank, involved tunneling through the federally owned Angeles National Forest, which environmentalists complained would disrupt water tables and wells, threatening wildlife.
Parsons Brinckerhoff, the New York-based main manager for the project, had predicted in 2013 that the total would rise at least 5 percent above the projected $68 billion—a prediction that didn't make its way into the rail authority's 2014 business plan. (Parsons presided over the "Big Dig," a tunnel through downtown Boston whose cost zoomed from a $2.8 billion estimate in 1982 to $14.6 billion by die time it was completed in 2007.) The starting date for the first operational leg of the train wouldn't be 2022 but 2025. The first main phase of the train—from Anaheim to San Francisco—wouldn't be completed until 2029, more than 10 years later than contemplated in the text of Proposition IA.
A review ot the business plan by the California Legislative Analyst's Office pointed out that nearly every single aspect of the proposed funding arrangements for the train was dicey—including the funding for the initial 130-mile segment where work is ongoing. For example, the CHSRA seemed to be counting on the legislature's continuing to funnel cap and trade proceeds in its direction through 2050, some 30 years beyond the expiration of its current cap and trade arrangement—and that's without even anticipating cap and trade auction failures like this past May's. The office also noted that the CHSRA had no concrete idea how it was going to pay for some $43.5 billion out of the total construction costs, which it would need to find by 2018 when the stimulus money dries up.
The Obama administration in May gave the CHSRA something of a break, handing the agency four extra years— up to 2021—to spend its existing federal stimulus grants. Technically, the 2017 deadline remains in place, and had the administration decided to enforce it, the state of California, which has spent only about $1 billion in grant funds so far because of delays, might have had to forfeit most of the rest.
But thanks to some interpretive jiggery-pokery by the Department of Transportation and the Federal Railroad Administration, California will no longer be required to submit invoices for work actually performed in order to receive the federal funds, as most grant recipients are required to do. The May reprieve essentially hands over all the grant proceeds to California in advance, allowing the state .to spend them in a far more leisurely fashion.
Earlier the Obama administration had absolved California from another stimulus-grant requirement- having to supply matching funds on a dollar-for-dollar basis in order to qualify for the federal monies. That would have obliged the state to put up more than $3 billion, which, what with its bond funding tied up at the time and no hope of dipping into state tax revenues, would have been nearly impossible.
The latest change in the grant terms in May—essentially turning the grant into an open-ended cash advance with no federal monitoring of how it is to be spent—enraged congressional Republicans. The rail subcommittee chairman, called this a "blank check" representing a "clear conflict of interest" on the part of train-booster Obama. "Not only do they lack a business plan. but they continue to waste taxpayer dollars without being held accountable.
Times's Vartabedian, having filed a freedom-of-information request, revealed that the CHSRA had apparently scrubbed from its website a pessimistic assessment by the Spanish rail-construction contractor Ferrovial that the train would never be able to operate without the taxpayer subsidies that Proposition lA specifically forbids. The Spanish firm had noted in its bid that of 111 high-speed lines that it had looked at around the world, only 3 were financially viable without government aid.
August, that the relocation of a section of Highway 99 inning through Fresno that is crucial to the construction of the San Joaquin Valley segment is running six months behind schedule and 15 percent over budget. The CHSRA ho is trying to persuade the state legislature to give Caltrans a $35 million increase over the $226 million it had granted the agency for the relocation in 2013.
We're destroying agriculture in the Central Valley," he said. "But over those 130 miles of track, we're taking maybe 4,500 acres out of 6.5 million , High-speed rail isn't a threat to agriculture.'
source--weekly std, charlotte allen, chsra, jon coupal, howard jarvis taxpayers assos., michael kenny, elizabeth alexis, aaron fukuda, citizens for high speed rail accountability, diana gomez, joel fajardo, patty lopez, ralph vartabedian, parsons brinckerhoff, the hill, dan richard,