Audit finds high-speed rail rush raised costs
SACRAMENTO — Pushing to break ground on California’s high-speed rail project before critical planning for the Central Valley line was in place drove up its cost by $600 million, with that “flawed decision” potentially increasing the price tag by another $1 billion, state Auditor Elaine Howle said Thursday.
And more financial problems are looming for high-speed rail. The state could lose $3.5 billion in federal grant money if the first segment of the line is not completed by December 2022 as planned, Howle warned in a report. The auditor’s office said to meet that deadline, the pace of construction must double over the next four years.
The completion date for the entire San Francisco-to-Los Angeles bullet-train line has already been pushed back to 2033 and the cost has shot up to $77 billion. That is more than twice the price tag of $32 billion that was pitched to voters nearly a decade ago.
Construction on the first part of the line, a 119-mile stretch from Madera to Bakersfield, began in 2015, before the state had acquired much of the needed land. That “directly resulted in delays to the construction schedules,” Howle said.
The auditor’s report comes as the project’s
biggest champion, Gov. Jerry Brown, prepares to leave office in the coming weeks. Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom has been less enthusiastic about highspeed rail than Brown, saying he would focus on completing the portion from the San Joaquin Valley to the Bay Area before deciding whether to make a push to Los Angeles.
The California High Speed Rail Authority said it would adopt all of the auditor’s recommendations, which included deciding how much land the state should buy before breaking ground on future segments.
“Our concurrence with all of the recommendations for process improvements in this audit report does not signal agreement with all of its conclusions about the impact of past decisions by the authority,” Mike Rossi, a rail authority board member, said in a statement.
Howle said the rail authority needs to improve its oversight of contracts to control soaring costs. Auditors found “significant problems” with how the agency reviews invoices and contracts.
The audit released Thursday was done at the request of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee. Assemblyman Jim Patterson, R-Fresno, a critic of the rail project, said the report shows that high-speed rail is “dead in the water.”
“There will never be a completed track from the Bay Area to Los Angeles,” Patterson said. “This project cannot be revived in its current state, and this audit is further proof that the best we can hope for is a rump railroad running from Bakersfield to Madera.”