I'm a resident of San Francisco, California. I love living here. California is a great state, with so much that helps to define it and helps to give it its "Californiaish" qualities. Other contests notwithstanding, voters in this state approved a bond measure for a long-planned hi-speed rail system, which is allowing the project to move forward.
Because the HSR system in California is funded with specifically allocated bonds, it has to this point been more or less immune from the budget woes going on in Sacramento. (Aside from having to avoid PR flak from people who don't understand the minutiae of state budgetary issues and wonder why they're continuing to work on the HSR planning, at any rate.)
Amazingly, the California state legislature has done something that could potentially put the project at risk. And it needs to be stopped.
You probably know by now that California is facing severe problems in terms of our annual budget. Until we pass a new budget, the state has had to resort to using I.O.U.'s to pay its expenses; a number of institutions aren't are obviously reluctant to accept that, though it's pretty clear they don't have a choice.
Until lawmakers pass a budget, most state expenditures (tied to the state's "general fund") are going to have to be paid with I.O.U.'s. So the legislature has been hard at work drafting a new budget, which must be balanced. This means either increasing revenue, decreasing spending, or a mixture of both. California's requirement that any tax increases require a 2/3 vote makes that at Hurculean task for the ruling Democratic party which has a majority, but not the supermajority needed. As Republicans don't want to vote for such a budget, it's good ol' California stalemate.
It's annoying and frustrating, but at least until now, they haven't touched the HSR, the one project I'm most concerned about.
But hey, it's California politics. The San Jose Mercury News has summarized the issue fairly nicely in a new editorial.
Innocently or not, a poison pill for California's high-speed rail project has been slipped into the state budget. Lawmakers have to remove it before a budget is signed into law, or else the project approved by voters will suffer a possibly irreversible setback. At a minimum, it's likely to cost the Bay Area more than $1 billion in federal stimulus dollars expected for the project.
The budget appropriation includes a sentence, apparently inserted by clueless staff members, that calls for further study of different routes through the Bay Area. But all the routes, including the environmentally devastating Altamont Pass option, were thoroughly studied and argued at public hearings. This led to the selection a year ago of the Caltrain route through San Jose and the Peninsula to San Francisco. Some Peninsula residents don't want the trains, but it's not for lack of study.
So, where to start... First, let me just say that yes, there has been extensive analysis done on this very issue. Indeed, you can read a very thorough analysis about the decisions made in terms of route selection, as well as pretty much anything you might have ever wanted to know, straight from the project's Official Site.
So if this was inserted by someone who knew what they were doing, it clearly was not done in good faith, since it's pretty clear that the decision has been made, and months of further analysis wouldn't change things.
Perhaps it is just a well-intentioned but clueless staffer who got that language in there, or maybe someone just wanted to see what they could sneak in the budget. No one seems to know. But it's a move that could cost a billion dollars. The Mercury News continues:
Redoing the work would set the project back a year or more and squander the federal dollars, which will be contingent on a 2012 groundbreaking. The lack of legislative support for the current plan implied by the study requirement could be another crippling blow in future quests for funding.
No one I called in Sacramento seemed to know about this, and so I really just want to help publicize this so someone important may see it and help resolve it.
California politics can be stupid, but this would take it to a whole new level.