High-speed rail costs off the tracks
Federal report estimates Central Valley portion of track could cost up to $10 billion
LOS ANGELES — California’s bullet train could cost taxpayers 50 percent more than estimated — as much as $3.6 billion more. And that’s just for the first 118 miles through the Central Valley, which was supposed to be the easiest part of the route between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
A confidential Federal Railroad Administration analysis, obtained by the Los Angeles Times, projects that building bridges, viaducts, trenches and track from Merced to Shafter could cost $9.5 billion to $10 billion, compared with the original budget of $6.4 billion.
The federal document outlines far-reaching management problems: significant delays in environmental planning, lags in processing invoices for federal grants and continuing failures to acquire needed property.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority had originally anticipated completing the Central Valley track by this year, but the federal risk assessment estimates that that won’t happen until 2024, placing the project seven years behind schedule.
The report, the most critical official assessment of the project to surface so far, is labeled a “confidential-draft deliberative document for internal use only,” and was presented by senior Federal Railroad Administration executives to California rail authority board Chairman Dan Richard and Chief Executive Jeff Morales on Dec. 1 in Washington.
This analysis puts the state on notice that it could face bigger cost overruns than it ever anticipated and much longer delays than have been made public, a troubling critique by an agency that has been a stalwart supporter and longtime financier of the nation’s largest infrastructure project.
Morales cautioned in an interview that the numbers in the analysis are only projections and estimates that do not account for intervention by the rail authority, and he asserted that the construction in the Central Valley will cost less than the risk analysis indicates.
The estimates, he said, are based on a lot of assumptions that the authority wants to ensure are correct.
“The point of doing this analysis is to identify the challenges and work through them,” he said. “They are not conclusions and not findings.”
The Federal Railroad Administration is tracking the project because it has extended $3.5 billion in two grants to help build the Central Valley segment. The administration has an obligation to ensure that the state complies with the terms, including a requirement that the state has the funding to match the federal grants.
The railroad administration’s analysis shows that the state authority could lose $220 million in one of the federal grants this year if it cannot submit paperwork by June 30, to meet the Sept. 30 deadline of the Obama administration’s stimulus act.
To hit those milestones requires spending $3.2 million per day, a very high rate of construction spending. But Morales said the rail authority’s construction progress and spending rate ensure that all of the grant funds will be used. So far, the authority has spent $2.2 billion of the grant, leaving $300 million to spend.
Federal Railroad Administration spokesman Matthew Lehner did not answer specific questions about the risk analysis but said that it “is a standard oversight tool used on major capital projects —
not just California.”
Lehner said that he’s confident the state can meet its deadline, “with continued focus and hard work.”
Other recent documents, however, paint a dark picture of California’s ambitious transportation project and help explain some of the performance problems.
Audit reports last year, for example, found that the rail authority lacks consistent management processes, takes on unnecessary contract risks, does not have orderly records and is short on clearly defined responsibility for its top officials.
And an internal report obtained by the Times notes a just-completed survey in which employees complain that morale is low and has declined in each of the last three years. Employees interviewed by the Times say turnover is consistently high, leaving staff overworked. The rail authority’s senior deputy, its chief administrative officer and its top information technology executive recently left.
Rail authority spokeswoman Lisa Marie Alley said the authority takes the issue seriously and that it is “currently making changes that we expect will help in that regard.”
About 80 percent of all bullet train systems incur massive overruns in their construction, according to Bent Flyvbjerg, an infrastructure risk expert at the University of Oxford who has studied such rail projects all over the world. One of the biggest hazards of such mega-projects is a government agency that is attempting to do something highly complex for the first time.
The California system is being built by an independent authority that has never built anything and depends on a large network of consultants and contractors for advice. Engineering and construction experts have warned that early cost and schedule problems will be difficult to reverse and that early cost increases will likely drive up the final cost of the project.
Proponents of the project, including many veteran transportation experts, have said that California’s massive economy can handle higher costs for the project — even more than $100 billion — by increasing sales taxes or making firm commitments for additional future funding from the state’s general fund.
That theory may have to be tested soon. The federal analysis shows that the state might have to come up with another $2 billion to complete the 118 miles of construction in the Central Valley, based on the new cost projection.