Should California turn to Zuckerberg and Ellison?
See if you can figure the link: Local transportation officials want an electrified Caltrain running though Silicon Valley.
Downtown San Jose anxiously awaits a BART subway stop.
California’s high-speed rail planners want to ensure service from San Francisco to San Jose to Merced.
The common denominator: they’re three of 51 “key” infrastructure items identified by Gov. Jerry Brown.
In each case, California is looking for the feds to foot the bill – about $100 billion in state improvements, if Brown got everything on his wish list.
As this week’s Oroville Dam drama showed, the bill is coming due for years of California infrastructure neglect. Meanwhile, our nation-state has ambitious plans.
Like it or not, the land that wants to go it alone – defy the Trump Administration, secede from the nation if need be – needs Uncle Sam right now.
The parallel is Love Story, starring Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. as Oliver Wendell Barrett IV. Our hero detests the authority figure in his life and marries defiantly (co-starring Eric Holder as Jenny Cavilleri). Yet our hero has no choice but to seek financial relief from said ogre (Donald Trump, in the role he was born to play).
Not that I expect Brown to roll into the nation’s capital in an MG TC roadster, but there’s more to the California-Washington relationship than showy defiance. A state run by Democrats has to adapt to a hostile terrain back East — GOP president, GOP Congress, a supermajority of GOP governors — or the end result will be getting trains and other infrastructure projects untracked.
Unless California can find a new sugar daddy.
Most days, my commute takes me past Stanford Stadium, home to quality football and one university’s clever thinking. In the fall of 2004, Stanford sought a replacement to its outdated stadium. The university had this smart idea: keep the project in-house, raise $300 million from within the university’s community.
In other words, Stanford relied upon individuals of wealth to pay for a big infrastructure project.
Maybe that’s California’s next move: while waiting for federal largesse, turn to the Bank of Silicon Valley.
Actually, it’s not a formal lending institution I have in mind but the generosity of this generation’s “Big Four” of NorCal tech magnates: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
They’re fourth, fifth, ninth and tenth, respectively, on Forbes’ list of the 400 wealthiest Americans in 2016. Their combined wealth: $180.8 billion (before a post-election market surge that raised each company’s stock by 3.6 percent or more).
At a time when the Trump Administration is looking to private investors to drive transportation projects, these four could make an enormous difference here in California. For example, electrifying Caltrain. The $647 million price tag is barely one-third of one percent of their estimated wealth.
There’s a consistency to this power quartet underwriting that particular effort. Their offices are seven Caltrain stops apart on the San Francisco Peninsula. Improve the line and perhaps those firms can take the next step to improving the Bay Area’s infrastructure – lightening up on their San Francisco commuter buses that are adding the region’s pothole woes.
OK, so this likely won’t fly – at least, not until these gentlemen reset their philanthropic sights and the state deems sponsoring infrastructure a charitable activity.
But if you have a small set of individuals with more money than imaginable and a state with more building needs than fathomable, maybe it’s worth tying to wed the two.