California Democrats have spent nearly two decades insisting that the state’s high-speed rail project needs just one more appropriation, one more redesign, and one more permit to succeed. But a new report from the project’s inspector general should finally end this charade.
California High-Speed Rail Inspector General Benjamin Belnap has warned lawmakers that the rail authority could exhaust existing funding by December 2027 unless it is granted new money. Belnap concluded that the authority has failed to make that danger clear in its latest business plan.
That is quite an indictment of a project California voters approved 18 years ago.
In 2008, they authorized nearly $10 billion in bonds to help build high-speed rail. The authority’s business plan put the cost of the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco backbone at about $33 billion. It expected billions more from Washington and private investors and assumed the full system would be in place by 2020.
Eighteen years later, California has spent $18 billion, and not a single mile of track has been completed.
The San Francisco-to-Los Angeles vision has receded into the invisible distance. The authority is now concentrating on a 171-mile Merced-to-Bakersfield segment. Even that truncated project was estimated at roughly $36 billion under the authority’s reduced-scope plan, more than the entire Los Angeles-to-San Francisco line was supposed to cost when first put to voters in 2008.
Even that number is suspect. Belnap found that the authority’s $36 billion reduced-scope estimate excludes billions of dollars more in possible financing costs and omits hundreds of millions that it assumes other government agencies will pay. The inspector general says financing alone could add between $3.6 billion and $6.6 billion.
Nor is 2032 a sure finish line as Democrats would like Californians to believe. The authority’s risk analysis found that the appropriate completion schedule for Merced-to-Bakersfield now extends to September 2034, something Belnap says the business plan failed to disclose adequately. Oh, and they haven’t even finalized the location for the Merced station yet, let alone begun the permitting process for it.
California has promised the project $1 billion annually from the state’s greenhouse gas emission fund, but construction costs arrive faster than those annual payments. According to documents the authority provided the inspector general, it could run out of cash in December 2027 and would need $9.5 billion between fiscal 2027-28 and 2031-32 just to maintain its construction schedule. All told, the full San Francisco-to-Los Angeles project is now estimated to cost $130 billion. The state has stopped even pretending to say when it will be completed.
“I watched as a mayor and then a lieutenant governor and now a governor as years became decades on high-speed rail,” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) complained three years ago. “People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build things.”
DEMOCRATS TRY TO DODGE WOKE ONE
They should. Newsom and California Democrats want the country to view their state as a model of competent progressive governance. The high-speed rail demonstrates the opposite. The project has consumed billions, repeatedly shrunk its ambitions, and blown through deadlines. The inspector general now adds the egregious failing that its managers are not even being honest about when the money could run out.
There comes a point when another bailout is not perseverance but a refusal to acknowledge reality. California reached that point long ago. Before Democrats ask taxpayers for billions more dollars or ask that voters entrust them with governing the rest of the country, they should answer one simple question: When will Democrats admit the California high-speed rail has failed?