Posted on 08/31/2018 12:22:48 PM PDT by Red Badger
California's biggest boondoggle just broke the bank.
Not only is the massive high-speed rail project 11 years behind schedule and billions in the red, managers are now saying they will need to ramp up spending to hit a 2033 deadline.
California’s money pit cost taxpayers $3.1 million a day last year. But that’s small potatoes compared to what they’ll have to shell out over the next four if they want to meet their deadline and budget, estimated most recently at $100 billion in a report last month by the New York Times.
The California High Speed Rail Authority will have to increase its daily spending by nine times.
“It’s a very aggressive spending rate,” Russell Fong, the authority’s chief financial officer told The Los Angeles Times, admitting that future goals may be difficult to achieve.
If the rail authority misses its 2033 target, inflation will likely raise the project’s pricetag by as much as $2 billion a year. That’s because billions of dollars of work would be shifted to the future when costs will be higher. Not hitting the deadline means the state will have to keep employees, contractors and consultants on the payroll much longer than anticipated.
Fong said that the agency’s estimates for future inflation are based on a composite of figures from Moody’s, the California Department of Transportation, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Department of Energy.
Bullet train planners have been under increasing pressure to make progress on the system that many believe has no plausible way of living up to its goal of getting riders across the state in three hours or less.
California voters approved the pricey proposal in 2008. Backers – including several Democratic lawmakers – heralded it as an inventive concept that would connect Californians and transform transit policies down theroad.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Aren’t their huge homeless camps in every city and town in California? So let’s spend billions of dollars on a train.
I say keep the right-of-ways available. The SF/LA corridor is the busiest in the nation I last heard 20 years ago Of course you’ll need a rent a car in SC.
I grew up in Chino in what’s now called the Inland Empire. It was pretty close to Heaven on Earth back then, so it makes me especially sad to see what they’ve done to it.
And I thought the new VA Hospital in Aurora, CO was a disaster.
earthquake warning devices don’t employ illegals who will vote for Dems.................
From Park Place to Boardwalk for HOW much?!
It is always about the spending, not the results
Ping.
Remember, Gov. Brown is on record as saying that he wants to destroy the modern industrial state in order to save the planet.
What better way than to bankrupt it?
Surprise, surprise, surprise.
This bullet train will move more dollars than citizens, if it operates for two centuries.
Willie Green's heart just skipped a beat somewhere!
Oh, wait...their next Governor wants to do Health Care for everyone, for free, including illegals!
Yeah. I could imagine it would.
Everything they touch turns to crap.
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