How appropriate that this HSR turkey gets its head chopped off again this week. The problem is that the heads seem to grow back.

This particular turkey never should have passed a vote of the people via proposition, and now it is saddled with highly paid lawyers on both sides, rather than the people.

This whole thing is just disgusting. My turkey will not be.

If the judge wanted more proof that the Authority is shooting from the hip he might want to see how they came up with the $66B cost they are now projecting (and the ones for $33B and $98B).

Prop 1A wrote specific rules about being able to spend bond money, and the state legislature violated those rules.

This is why it is very dangerous to approve bond measures, especially if the safeguards are subject to the state legislature. The state legislature cannot be trusted (Jerry Hill & Rich Gordon).

The Fresno Bee has a included a copy of the judges ruling in their story about this:

Web Link

HSR has always been a fraud disguised as a public benefit. Follow the money and it goes from your pocket, to the CA Treasury, and into the pockets of Parsons Binckerhoff and assorted partners. Parsons Binckerhoff brought Prop 1a to the ballot, has always been the staff of the CA High Speed Authority in Sacramento, and one of their alums now leads that disgraced agency. It is the epitome of the inside job.

I suspect that the strategy HSR will follow now will be to spend all the Federal grant dollars they have. Since that grant funding likely requires matching dollars from the state, HSR force (Jerry will fall all over himself to help his legacy agency) the state to cough up an additional $3B in matching funds. Without the $10B in Bond dollars invalidated by todays ruling, the state does not have $3B to spare. That means something useful will be cut to pay for the train, which is not. After spending $6B, the CA HSR will then go back to the Legislature and Moonbeam Jerry, argue that they have dug a really big hole with $6B, and now they need an additional $50B to fill it in! A classic public works fraud.

Willful violation of the law by the High-Speed Rail Authority will now be compounded by this judge's ruling. Everyone in the State knows HSR will continue down its track of destructive behavior and prodigious spending as if nothing happened.

To continue spending freely on this HSR turkey is the height of arrogance practiced by Jerry Brown and the California Legislature currently controlled by Democrats.

Can nothing stop these guys?

Another win for the oil companies. As if we needed any more proof of who controls politics in America.

An excellent article, to be sure.

I want to note, however, that these rulings, may well affect the Tutor-Perini contract and the construction of the first 29 miles from Madera to Fresno.

Without being able to use Prop 1A bond funds, only the Federal funds are available; this $3.2 billion in federal funding, consists of two grants.

1. Grant 1, is from the ARRA funding, about $2.4 billion. This $2.4 billion by terms of the grant agreement can only be spent on construction from Fresno south. It cannot be used to fund the Madera to Fresno Tutor-Perini contract, all of which is north of Fresno.

2. This leaves only the FY-2010 grant, about $800 million. The whole cost of Madera to Fresno is about $2 billion. Again, without Prop 1A funds, where is the rest of the $2 billion funding going to be obtained?

I have left out another requirement of the Federal funding and that is matching funds must be provided to those grants. Without Prop 1A funding, there are no matching funds.

Morris Brown
a founder of DERAIL (the original grass roots group against the HSR project)

If this high speed rail project was on the ballot now with the current economic conditions and the increased costs it would lose by a landslide.

Morris - you seem to know the details. What needs to be done to stop wasting money on this project?

A better use of all that money would be to improve LOCAL mass transit for the traffic nightmare we've gotten ourselves into. As in the buses that many of the local high tech companies provide for their workers. But we got sucked in . . .

FWIW, I too was hoodwinked by the original proposition. Never again.

The HSR is depicted in the CA news a the ANSWER for the USA for HSR. IAW the New York Times 11/19/13 Japan wants to enter in to a program with the USA east coast for a magnetic levitation train. Very highly placed people in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania (former governors) have a Northeast Maglev organization that is pushing for this to happen. Japan wants to showcase their technology to compete with France and Germany. It is very expensive to do this in Japan because of the requirement to have tunnels through mountains. Cheaper to go on the USA East Coast on existing rights of way. A lot of horsepower at the federal level is working this issue. I think you have more horsepower on the east coast for a partnership with an acknowledged leader - Japan - in HSR for a USA venture. The biggest cost in CA would be creating a tunnel through the Tehachapi mountains which no one is talking about.

Kill this turkey project. No more welfare state socialism programs to build things the public does not need and will not use in order to put money in a few pockets.

Governor Moonbeam should go to jail for his outlandish support for this criminal fraud masquerading as a "public works" project! Unless we start holding "elected" officials personally liable for such criminal racketeering and blatant betrayal of the Public Trust, this disgusting "politics-as-usual" will never change.

Come on! These mobster "insiders" are outright stealing billions of dollars from the taxpayers of this State. If a child steals a Snickers bar, the State deals with him/her harshly. How ironic that we're being bilked out of billions of our hard-earned cash by the exact same jokers that give people years for the victimless "crime" of smoking an herb!

Only in an insane world, full of insane people, would such a travesty of "justice" be allowed to exist.

-- galen

If you build it they will come.

Lets see here. Aircraft noise complaints about planes flying over head, air travel to and from the bay area will only grow, Surf Air the flight operate operated a sir travel club. A fancy way to hire a pilot with a plane, with a the wealth that is being created, this sounds like a good alternative to the SFO-OAK-SJC mess.

Growth in the Central Valley and the Santa Clara/Silicon Valley, we are sending workers to live in the big valley, we are going to need more freeways. A freeway from Gilroy to Los Banos, the over to 99, route 84 needs to be run from East Palo Alto to 580.

Reading about the HSR which it seems in the process of being built, the freeway idea is even being planned.

Suggest you all go to Google / Northeast Maglev - great information and a video. WOW - this is the real deal - and Japan wants to help finance it to showcase it as a product. Now this is the way to run a railroad - looks like a winner. It rides 4 inches above the track using magnetic levitation - even explains the technology. This has nothing to do with rails so is independent of the HSR that was sold to us.

Let's just vote on it again.

MagLev:

I have traveled to Shanghai China, which has a mag lev train from town to the international airport. I have not ridden it, but as I was cruising in a car on the adjoining modern highway at 70mph, the train passed us by, going at least twice the speed.

I know nothing about the economics Of Shanghai's mag lev rail operation. I do know it is a finite service, I do know that the Chinese government operates and finances things differently than is the case in the States, and I do know that HSR, as proposed, is not mag lev. If it were, the costs of this boondoggle would be magnitudes greater than has already been presented, which is over the top.

Put a fork in the CA HSR turkey. I enjoy thoughtful discourse about how things could be, I find tiresome conversations about how to a square a proverbial circle. Too may people are spending too much time trying to salvage what we have discovered since the vote is a bad idea.

HSR is a nice idea in theory, but the only HSR in the world, so far, that has been truly profitable is the Shinkansen in Japan. Most barely break even, even with government subsidies, and some, like France's TGV, are losing money big time. Other countries, like Germany, have scaled back their HSRs.

This is a no-win situation.

I've ridden the Shanghai maglev, and it is indeed very fast and quiet. But it must lose a bundle of money every day, since it was basically empty except for me and a few other western tourists. Like our HSR, it seems it is more about their Government Officials making a boastful statement rather than economically trasporting people. Every car had a speedometer readout to show just how fast it was going. No other information was displayed (arrival time, schedule, etc.), just the speed.

For part of its route, the Shanghai maglev travels over a marshland that reminded me of our baylands. I wonder if the baylands area just beyond the power towers was ever considered as a possible Peninsula route for HSR.