The 12 year saga of the California High Speed Rail Authority and its attempt to build a true high speed train to connect northern and southern California, has been shaken to its core. At the 4.5 hour Assembly Transportation Committee oversight hearing of May 27th   was painted a complete reversal of the unlimited support for […]

The Assembly Transportation Committee High Speed Rail oversight hearing of Tuesday (11-12-2019) exposed a regional funding war.  The project’s leadership, Brian Kelly (CEO) and Board Chair Lenny Mendonca, are pushing the present “spend all existing funds in the Central Valley (CV) agenda”.  Governor Newsom, who “flip/flops” with his position on HSR depending on the season […]

The High Speed Rail Authority, under the direction of Governor Newsom is claiming to bring more transparency to the project. Indeed the Authority’s new website has a full page titled Transparency and Accountability claiming dedication to this mandate. But actions speak much louder than words. Representative Jim Patterson has just released a letter stating the […]

In Governor Newsom’s State of the State address, he clearly and correctly stated many reasons why the present HSR project was not achievable and he proposed to continue on with a much-reduced project. Rather than build a SF to LA to Anaheim HSR train, which would surely cost at least $100 billion, and is short […]

Chair Jim Frazier in the almost four hour November 29 Joint Audit committee hearing on High Speed Rail made headlines by asking for the firing of Authority Chair Dan Richard. I see a whole lot of “grandstanding” by Frazier here.  He is attempting to make HSR Authority Dan Richard a scapegoat, while excusing himself, Chair […]

Last Thursday, the California State Auditor released its much anticipated audit of the High Speed rail project. Opponents of the project had pushed for an audit for several years, but had always in the past been rebuffed with no support to authorize any audit from the State’s Democratic controlled transportation committees, in both the Assembly […]

Spending gas taxes on public transit isn’t a misuse, it’s what California voters wantis the title of the LA Times editorial promoting opposition to Proposition 6 (the gas tax repeal). Such an editorial would be expected from the Times editorial board, which still advocates building the $77 billion (and climbing) cost for the High Speed […]

Joe Matthews recently wrote: “Because the gas tax is a small tax increase that does very little. Almost everything said by both sides of the debate is an exaggeration.” A tax yielding over $5 billion every year is not a “small tax increase”.  Apparently a whole lot of California voters don’t think this is a trivial […]

Governor Brown has just vetoed AB-2037 a bill sponsored by State Assemblyman Jim Frazier. The Governor appoints 5 of the 9 voting members of the HSR Board (plus 2 ex-officio – non-voting members). This bill would have simply have made any of the Governor’s appointees subject to approval by the State Senate. The Governor’s veto message is disingenuous to […]

The State budget is being drafted and we will soon know whether the Legislature will continue to fund the High Speed Rail boondoggle. We now know about the huge drop in support of the project to where now only 31% of registered voters want the project to continue. The latest poll reported in the LA Times […]