You know a massive government program is in trouble when even its hand-picked “working group” of insiders starts crying foul. This is exactly what happened to the increasingly troubled California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHRSA) earlier this month.

Already suffering under the weight of critical activist groups, multiple state audits and a growing number of skeptical legislators, the rail authority took one on the chin from its own High-Speed Rail Independent Peer Review Group.

Created by Proposition 1A in 2008 (and not to be confused with the Ridership Peer Review Group, which was created much later), the Independent Peer Review Group consists of eight members (two positions are open) appointed by various state officials such as the state treasurer and the secretary of the Business, Transportation and Housing Agency.

Though formed way back in early 2009, the group didn’t release its first report until November 2010. The report was generally critical of the effort to build 800 miles of bullet trains at a cost of at least $43 billion.

Questions

On May 2 of this year, they fired off a six-page letter to CHSRA Executive Director Roel of van Ark that listed a whole lot of questions and criticisms. Though buried in the letter, the most important of these observations dealt with the project’s exploding cost.

“We believe the Authority is increasingly aware of the challenge of accurate cost estimating,” wrote Peer Review Group Chairman Will Kempton, the current CEO of the Orange County Transportation Authority and a former Caltrans director in a May 2, 2011 letter obtained by the Palo Alto-based Californians forResponsible Rail Design. “However, as the Authority stated, ‘[o]verall capital costs are trending upwards’.”

What’s more, Kempton says his group “does not yet see the establishment of a state-of-the-art cost estimating and budget management system that would permit immediate incorporation of actual experience as it emerges.” Since a mere 15 percent of the design plans have been completed so far, “this does not furnish a solid base for confidence in cost estimates, either for the estimated amounts or for the range of variation likely to be experienced.”

For that reason, Kempton urged the authority to “make every effort to state and qualify its estimates accordingly so that the public will understand that the $43 billion total is still avery preliminary estimate that could ‘trend upwards’.”

Translation: the $43 billion cost estimate stands nowhere near reality.

Another chilling finding from the Working Group was the rather cavalier way in which it states that, pretty much no matter what, the bullet train will not make any profit in its first years and will require some sort of public subsidy.

Support from Taxpayers

In fact, Kempton says the group believes it is “unreasonable” not to provide some kindof “support” to the project in its earliest years. “If the Legislature’s intent was that the entire project, at all stages, be financially profitable including payback of State bonds and all investment, then we agree with the Authority’s position that neither this project, nor any other HSR system (with the possible exception of the Tokaido Line in Japan and the Paris to Lyon TGV line) could meet this standard,” Kempton wrote. He apparently (and conveniently) forgot that profit at all stages was exactly the line fed to Prop. 1A bond voters back in 2008.

Kempton and his group also noted that rail authority staff is much too small to deal with so many contractors, right-of-way acquisition is going to be way more expensive than can be known at present and, of course, the authority needs to keep working on that ridership model — you know, the one that UC Berkeley transportation engineers said was bunk.

And Kempton also offered an unsubtle reminder that the rail authority needs to get some kind of final business plan — which should include a reasonably accurate cost estimate — by October 14 of this year. That so many years have gone by without such a document exemplifies the madness that hangs over the project, which will be either the largest capital works project or boondoggle in California history.

At this point, the latter looks most likely to be the case.

– Anthony Pignataro

It was an unseasonably cool and rainy Sunday afternoon, and there were about two dozen of us standing under the entry porch of the Governor’s Mansion on Sunday. Usually just two or three tourists show up these days, and the tour guide couldn’t believe the size of the crowd. “Is this how it’s going to be all summer?” the guide asked us.

The reason for the sudden crowd was obvious. The mansion, located at 16^th and I streets and used for about 64 years from governors George Pardee to Ronald Reagan, appeared on last week’s new list of 70 state parks and historic buildings that will have to close some time in the near future because of budget cuts. The closings, which constitute a quarter of the state’s 278 parks, will save an estimated $11 million in the fiscal year 2011-12, and another $22 million in 2012-13.

Indeed, as we walked through the old Governor’s Mansion — derided as a “firetrap” by Nancy Reagan, who lived there with her husband just three months before finding more modern lodgings — we found that much of it was never opened to the public in the first place. Though equipped with a full basement and five above-ground floors (the highest being a small room), just two floors are open to public visits. The third floor ballrooms and billiards room remain completely empty, still awaiting restoration despite the fact that the mansion has been part of the state parks department since the Reagans vacated the building in 1967.

Other Closings

As for the other parks slated for closure, the parks department released a substantial list. The early state capitol building in Benicia made the list, as did the mansions of former Gov. Leland Stanford and Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California. The eerie Mono Lake Tufa State Nature Reserve is on the list, as are the gorgeous Redwood forests at Hendy Woods in Mendocino and Grizzly Creek Woods near Eureka. Even the old Shasta ghost town made the list.

Of course, closing state parks is not exactly a new threat. In 2009, then-Gov. Arnold “The Lovenator” Schwarzenegger proposed closing an astonishing 220 parks to save money. That threat disappeared when a budget deal laden with gimmicks finally passed.

Indeed, our guide acted as though the latest announcement was no different than those given fairly regularly over the last few years. “We have no idea when they would close us,” the guide told us. “They said we’d be closed last year, and we’re still here.”

That this would be a threat to rally Democrats against the anti-tax Republicans seems pretty clear from the Parks and Recreation Department’s May 13 press release announcing the closures. The money quote comes from John Laird, the State Resources Agency Secretary: “Hopefully, Republicans in the legislature will agree to allow California voters to decide whether we extend currently existing taxes or make deeper cuts to our parks.”

Nothing galvanizes the left like a frontal assault on parks and historic buildings. They are sacred places, shrines to either history or nature that must be protected at all costs. Indeed, Democrats in the Senate have already killed Republican proposals to keep the parks open — simply because they won’t play ball on taxes.

But the ironic thing here is that closing parks is totally unnecessary and, in fact, rather stupid. That’s because non-profit organizations are completely capable of running historic sites and parks.

For instance, there’s the aircraft carrier USS Hornet in Alameda. Though unquestionably a historic location — the ship recovered the Apollo 11 command module after it’s 1969 trip to the moon — it is today run as a museum by the non-profit Aircraft Carrier Hornet Foundation.

Ironically, it was Schwarzenegger who put this into practice last summer, though with typically feckless results. Seeking to augment the finances of struggling Fort Ross State Historic Park — the location of an early Russian trading post — Schwarzenegger signed a deal with the new non-profit Renova Fort Ross Foundation. This would have been great, except that the parks department failed to realize they were signing on with a Russian company under fire for disclosure law violations in Switzerland.

Due Diligence

Fort Ross was the right idea, but the state needs to do far more due diligence on their potential non-profit partners. The state seems to understand this, and parks officials noted the possibilities of non-profits taking over state parks in the May 13 statement.

“With this announcement, we can begin to seek additional partnership agreements to keep open as many parks as possible,” said State Parks Department head Ruth Coleman. “We already have 32 operating agreements with our partners — cities, counties and non-profits — to operate state parks, and will be working statewide to expand that successful template.”

That’s great, but why didn’t the state just do that to begin with?

— Anthony Pignataro

There’s something truly exhausting — no, dispiriting — about reading the latest state Legislative Analysts Office (LAO) report on California’s immense high-speed rail undertaking. Released at noon on May 10, the document runs just 28 pages but utterly dismantles the current, hugely expensive effort to build 800 miles of bullet train tracks.

Those following CalWatchDog.com’s reporting on the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) over the last year have seen it all before: considerably understated costs; “highly uncertain” and “unrealistic” assumptions on financing; inadequate staff; lack of oversight from the Legislature. But reading confirmation of our reporting brings more of a hollow feeling than any satisfaction.

Building a high-speed rail system that stretches from San Diego to San Francisco is being billed as an environmental godsend that will get people out of airliners and cars and still run free of taxpayer subsidies. The reality, as the non-partisan LAO has pointed out, is that no one really knows how much the network — the largest public works project in California history — will cost or how many people it will carry when completed.

As the LAO painstakingly points out, these two monstrous questions result from a variety of problems. Let’s start with the money.

Though high-speed rail planning has been going on for decades, the effort really accelerated in 2008, when voters passed Proposition 1A, which allowed the state to float $9 billion in bonds to get the thing going. At a time of annual state budget crises, those bonds are more trouble than they’re worth.

We estimate that, should the state sell all of the $9 billion in voter-approved high-speed rail bonds, the state’s total principle and interest costs for repaying the debt would be $18 billion to $20 billion. This would require annual debt service payments of roughly $1 billion for the next two decades.

Federal Funds

It gets worse. So far, the high-speed rail authority has gotten $3.6 billion from the federal government. But the most recent authority business plan assumes the feds will ultimately fork over $17 billion to $19 billion in bullet train money.

“Given the federal government’s current financial situation and the current focus in Washington on reducing federal spending, it is uncertain if any further funding for the high-speed rail program will become available,” reported the LAO.

Clearly, the rail authority has been bending over backward to the feds to secure funding — sometimes, in ways the LAO finds appalling. For instance, they particularly dislike the recent decision to build the first bullet train segment in the sparsely populated Central Valley — a decision made at the behest of federal rail officials.

The report states:

This decision by HSRA, however, represents a big gamble that additional monies will eventually become available from the federal government or other sources to connect the Central Valley line to other major urban areas of California. The authority acknowledges that operation of the Central Valley segment by itself is infeasible because the potential ridership of a high-speed rail line within that segment alone would be insufficient to operate the system without a substantial subsidy.

It goes on like that, but I think you get the point. Even the LAO’s recommendations are surprisingly negative, and billed only as “increasing the odds that high-speed rail will succeed.”

LAO Recommendations

First and foremost, the LAO wants the Legislature to “reject HSRA’s 2011-12 budget request for $185 million in funding for consultants to perform project management, public outreach, and other work to develop the project,” and instead give them just $7 million.

The LAO also wants all federal funding agreements renegotiated, a new first segment that isn’t in the Central Valley and updated cost estimates sent ASAP over to the Legislature. They even suggested blowing up the rail authority, then putting the whole project under the purview of CalTrans. (Senator Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, recently suggested making the rail authority part of the Business, Transportation and Housing Agency.)

Figuring the rail authority would just love to do all that, I contacted spokesperson Rachel Wall. But she said her office received the report at the same time as the public, and couldn’t offer a comment beyond a boilerplate statement issued under executive director Roelof van Ark’s name.

“The LAO suggestions will be thoroughly reviewed in the context of our mandate to operate under the provisions of Proposition 1A,” part of the bland statement read. “I hope to work with the Legislature to come up with solutions that benefit all Californians and allow us to move forward with the successful completion of the state’s high-speed rail system — and we hope that this report at least encourages healthy discussion towards that goal.”

-Anthony Pignataro

California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 is in every sense of the word a landmark piece of legislation. Known by its legislative moniker AB 32, the law is, by far, the most sweeping and hard-hitting experiment in climate change of any of the nation’s 50 states.

Beginning this year, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) will implement a host of new regulations governing greenhouse gas emissions across the state. The goal is that by 2020, carbon dioxide emissions in California will be back down to 1990 levels; and by 2050, down 80 percent from that.

This is, to say the least, controversial. Leaving aside the issue of whether such a law could lead to a quantifiable difference in climate change, these new regulations will hit a massive number of businesses across the state with varying degrees of force. Some, like those operating diesel-burning trucks, will be hit especially hard with requirements for expensive new engines.

That fact has gotten a lot of press pretty much since the law passed. But the law is apparently controversial for another, less known reason. According to the state Legislative Analysts Office (LAO), the 2010-11 Resources trailer bill (known as SB 855) included a provision “requiring a zero-based budget [ZBB] be submitted by April 1, 2011 for all AB 32 expenditures across state government in order to reevaluate the base funding requirements of AB 32 program implementation.”

Budget Realities

At a time when our esteemed state officials seem completely unable to dig themselves out of a $25 billion budget deficit, this seems completely reasonable. Forcing officials from even such a protected domain as CARB to justify all of their expenditures is eminently fair and rational. And it’s not just CARB that’s spending AB 32 dollars.

According to a spreadsheet provided by the LAO, nine state agencies are currently employing 182.5 people and spending a total of $37.7 million to implement AB 32. The largest of which is, of course, CARB, which accounts for $32.9 million and 155 staffers.

Now the LAO is not generally known for putting jokes into its usually sober, always non-partisan analyses, but I couldn’t help but laugh out loud when I read the following paragraph from a brief “Summary of LAO Findings and Recommendations” the agency posted on Monday:

Funding for AB 32 implementation in the budget year was approved by the Legislature earlier this year in the budget process, presumably based on the assumption that the Administration would make a good-faith effort to comply with the statutory requirement (and be on time) and that the Legislature would make any necessary adjustments to the AB 32 budgets after having evaluated the ZBB report.

Oh man. Not sure which Legislature and administration the LAO has been watching lately, but the ones we have now don’t make a lot of “good faith efforts” to comply with anything. And don’t even get me started on how often they’re “on time.”

No Zero-Based Budget

In any case, as you’ve no doubt figured out by now, there is, as yet, no zero-based budget for AB 32 funds. A spokesperson for Cal-EPA — the department that oversees CARB — didn’t respond to my request for comment by press time. But according to the LAO, Cal-EPA Secretary Linda Adams sent a letter to Senator Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, on April Fools Day saying Gov. Jerry Brown “has been unable to devote sufficient attention to completing a careful review of the important report.” The LAO adds that Brown apparently will submit a zero-based budget for all AB 32 money, but “it is uncertain when the report will be submitted and whether it will be submitted in time to provide the Legislature an adequate review period.”

Though Brown is a hardcore supporter of AB 32, the LAO is apparently not as forgiving as Adams. The LAO recommends:

Given that the administration has failed to comply with the statutory requirement for a ZBB, we recommend that the Legislature reverse, for now, all AB 32-related expenditures in the budget year that it has previously approved. Such action should serve to encourage the Administration to submit the ZBB report in a timely enough manner to allow for thoughtful legislative evaluation of the report in the continuing budget process and to take necessary actions based on its review.

— Anthony Pignataro

You’d think that an agency spending millions of dollars on public relations would know to discuss one of its most controversial issues in public, where outside experts and members of the public can steadily review any and all findings. But the California High-Speed Rail Authority isn’t like that.

At issue is the authority’s Ridership Peer Review Committee. Executive Director Roelef van Ark set it up in November 2010 to work over the proposed project’s rather controversial ridership projections of 88 million to 117 million passengers riding each year by 2030. What’s more, the authority says their 800-mile bullet train network will draw away 12 million of the projected 33 million air passengers, as well as 50 million of the supposed 911 million auto drivers, by 2030.

These numbers have drawn considerable fire. In fact, last summer the University of California, Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies concluded that the authority’s ridership model was “flawed at key decision-making junctures.”

In response to criticisms like the Berkeley study, van Ark convened the Peer Review Committee. Made up of five transportation experts from around the world, the committee appears on paper to be just the thing to revamp the rail authority’s ridership model. Except, of course, that it has an entirely different job.

“Skeptics use ridership issue to cast doubt on the project, as it is difficult to challenge or disprove,” van Ark said in a PowerPoint presentation given during the Peer Review Committee’s first meeting, on January 10 of this year, and obtained by CalWatchDog.com. “We need to build credibility to ensure successful future for the project.”

From that first meeting, van Ark made clear that the committee would do no more than “refine” and “enhance” the existing ridership model, according to the PowerPoint presentation. “Model has been an appropriate tool to support environmental and planning-level analysis to date,” read one slide. “New model enhancements will support investment and operating/design decisions.”

A Lot of Questions

How they will go about doing this is unknown. The panel is supposed to meet quarterly, and then release a final report after about two years. But their interim work is masked in secrecy because both the authority and the committee members themselves are loath to talk about their work.

Indeed, when I first contacted Peter Kavadeles, a representative of Ogilvy Public Relations — an outside PR firm contracted by the rail authority — and asked whether the peer review committee had released any kind of report on their actions, he emailed back an “off the record” message that they had not.

When I responded that such a message was odd, and that I would need some kind of “on the record” response to my question, he followed through a few hours later with the following quote from rail authority deputy director Jeff Barker: “The Ridership Peer Review Committee has not yet delivered any report to the Authority.”

I ran into more roadblocks when I tried to contact the committee members directly.

“Our official findings and reports will be delivered directly to the High Speed Rail Authority as our work is complete,” Chairman Frank Koppelman, a professor emeritus at Northwestern, emailed me in a message strikingly similar to that of the other members I contacted. “All of the panel members are contractually bound by a confidentiality agreement with HSRA. If you have questions about reports completed to date, please speak with the High Speed Rail Authority directly. I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.”

Indeed, the same confidentiality agreement that binds all rail authority planning and engineering contractors also holds true for the peer review committee members. Reads the confidentiality clause in the committee members’ contracts:

All financial, statistical, personal, technical and other data and information relating to the State’s operation which are designated confidential by the State and made available to the Contractor in carrying out this contract, shall be protected by the Contractor from unauthorized use and disclosure.

Funny Numbers

The contracts, which were obtained by Californians Advocating Responsible Rail Design (CARRD) — a Palo Alto-based citizens group — also show the committee members are being extremely well paid for the work. Koppelman, for instance, will make $400 per hour for a maximum of 16.5 days, which comes out to $49,600. The other members will receive slightly less, between $225 and $350 an hour.

For all of these reasons, CARRD activists feel the peer review committee is nothing more than a star chamber that will whitewash already bad data. “You can’t make this model work,” said Elizabeth Alexis, an economist and member of CARRD. “The demand is just not there — not even close. People don’t understand the magnitude of how far off the numbers are.”

– Anthony Pignataro

The debate over whether to build an 800-mile network of bullet trains crisscrossing the state at speeds approaching 220 miles per hour is one of the most contentious we have today. Its projected cost of $45 billion (some analysts say double that) makes it the largest public works project in state history.

At a time when the project is facing unprecedented criticism, State Sen. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, has introduced SB 517, which he hopes will bring some measure of rationality to the project. The state of the project, Lowenthal’s chief of staff recently told me, has “disappointed” the senator, who is among the Legislature’s strongest high-speed rail supporters.

Since its creation, the High-Speed Rail Authority has operated pretty much on its own. Five of its nine members are governor-appointed, with the rest appointed by legislative leaders. As such, in recent years the authority’s board has run afoul of a scandal or two — accusations that two members were in violation of the state’s ban on holding “incompatible offices” as well as revelations that a few board members weren’t keeping accurate records of their travel expenses. (The state Fair Political Practices Commission recently ruled that they did not violate state law.)

“The senator has been consistently disappointed with the level of detail in the [authority’s] business plan,” said John Casey, Lowenthal’s chief of staff. “He’s found it not to be really serious.”

Lowenthal helped pass the original $10 billion bond measure a few years ago that really jump-started the high-speed rail effort. According to Casey, Lowenthal feels the rail authority in recent years simply hasn’t been effective. His bill would take the whole authority and place it under the direct control of the state Business, Transportation and Housing Agency.

“The bill would require the secretary to propose an annual budget for the authority upon consultation with the authority,” reads the bill text. “The bill would require the members of the authority appointed by the Governor to be appointed with the advice and consent of the Senate. The bill would provide for the members that are appointed to have specific background or experience, as specified.”

What’s more, the bill would place the Business, Transportation and Housing Secretary on the rail authority as an ex-officio member. And it would “enact various conflict-of-interest provisions applicable to members of the authority and its staff, as specified, and would prohibit a person from serving on the authority in certain circumstances,” according to the bill text.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that the rail authority isn’t too keen on Lowenthal’s effort — though apparently not because Lowenthal failed to capitalize “authority” in his legislation and thus give the panel sufficient respect.

“The Board has previously opposed proposals to place the Authority within Business, Transportation, and Housing, and remains consistent in that position,” Board chairman Curt Pringle wrote in an undated but often incoherent letter to Senator Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, chairman of the Housing and Transportation Committee. “It is our position that Senate approval of the majority the positions [sic] does not maintain the balanced nature of the Board.”

Pringle’s main argument though is that now is not the time to be fiddling with the accountability of the board, given its very sensitive need to find private financing for the cartoonishly expensive bullet train system they’re designing.

“An overhaul of the Board during these next two years of securing private investment and beginning construction would send the wrong signal to those critical partners,” Pringle wrote.

Oh, absolutely — if I were ponying up a few hundred million for bullet trains, I’d want to make sure the governing body was as controversial and secretive as possible.

In any case, there isn’t yet a published analysis of the bill, but it’s due for a hearing in the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee on April 26. Of course, all of this may be moot — and by “all of this,” I mean the whole decision to build a bullet train system in California.

The May issue of Popular Science has a glitzy image of a futuristic mag-lev train on the cover, announcing that new “supertrains” that are capable of 700 mile-per-hour speeds are coming soon — allowing travelers to move from New York to Los Angeles “in 41 minutes” without leaving the ground — and making the so-called “bullet trains” that are in California’s proposed system seem suddenly rather creaky and obsolete.

-Anthony Pignataro

Because of California’s disastrous unemployment rate — 12.2 percent at last count — the State Unemployment Fund is in a precarious position. It actually went insolvent two years ago, and pays out benefits today only because of federal loans. Assuming the Legislature continues to do nothing to fix the mess, it will rack up a $13.4 billion deficit by the end of this year. Also, the state has until September to start paying interest on those federal loans, and has to pay them off by November.

Failure to pay back the loans and interest will cost California employers more than $6 billion in additional federal taxes in 2012. According to the state Legislative Analysts Office, approximately 30 other states have similar fund deficits.

I learned about this sorry state of affairs from reading the state Auditor’s new report (No. 2010-112) on the Employment Development Department (EDD). Put simply, the agency charged with getting people out of work into jobs is a mess.

This, at a time when the Great Recession and subsequent jobless recovery have seen the numbers of unemployed in the state more than double, from about 1 million in mid-2007 to 2.2 million today. And though the whole world’s economy has been a mess for the last few years, EDD’s troubles apparently go back even further.

A Decade of Deficiencies

“This report concludes that over the last 10 years the department has consistently failed to perform at a level the United States Department of Labor considers acceptable regarding its timely delivery of unemployment benefits,” Auditor Elaine Howle wrote in the report’s introduction. “The department’s attempts to resolve its performance deficiencies have had mixed results.”

The biggest problem is that the agency is just ridiculously slow. For years, the department apparently knew that its phone system was inadequate to handle calls from the increasingly irate jobless wanting to speak to a human being about benefits, but only put in a new system in December 2010. The department still takes four or more weeks to determine if an applicant actually deserves to get unemployment benefits, which means a month goes by before people who actually warrant benefits receive a dime. This has apparently been a problem since 2002, according to the Auditor’s report.

What’s more, while hiring additional staff to process the myriad claims did improve response times, many of the other corrective actions taken by the department — such as increased training for managers and improvements to IT systems — resulted in “negligible” and “minimal” results, states the report.

“In reviewing the corrective action plans the department submitted for federal fiscal years 2008 to 2011, we found that it has not fully implemented certain key corrective actions and that the impact of others has been minimal or remains unclear,” the Auditor determined. “We also found that its corrective action plans have not consistently included milestones that directly relate to specific corrective actions, nor have they included sufficient information to effectively gauge the corrective actions’ impact on the department’s goal of achieving the acceptable levels of performance related to the timeliness measures.”

In its defense, the last couple of years have been abysmal for the EDD. Until 2008, it paid out about $5 billion in unemployment benefits every year. But in 2009, the agency paid out an astonishing $20.2 billion in benefits, according to the official EDD response to the Auditor’s report. The next year was even worse, with $22.9 billion in payouts for 2010.

Four Recommendations

The Auditor ended up making four recommendations, all variations on the same theme: plan better for a future that will, in all likelihood, be pretty bleak for a huge portion of California’s population. That the department agreed with all four recommendations says a lot about how bad things have gotten there.

It also puts yet another nail in the coffin of former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s alleged “legacy.” Every time a new jobs report would come out — each progressively worse than the previous one — Schwarzenegger would repeat his promise to create “jobs, jobs, jobs” as though it were some sort of mystical chant, all the while ignoring the rot that permeated the state agency set up to help people out of work.

-Anthony Pignataro

The April 5 edition of Capitol Morning Report included an intriguing entry. In honor of the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth (Feb. 6, 1911), Assemblyman Curt Hagman, R-Chino Hills, is holding an essay contest. It’s quite simple: in 1,000 words or less, you have to explain the importance of one of Reagan’s quotes or speeches.

This could be from any time in Reagan’s life — his two terms as California governor, his two terms as U.S. President, his time spent as president of the Screen Actors Guild, whatever. First prize gets $500 and second prize nets $250, with all the money coming from Hagman’s campaign coffers.

To be fair, this is one of the best uses of campaign contributions I’ve seen. Hell, I even considered entering it, though I don’t live in the 60th Assembly District, which is mandatory for all entrants. And the quote I would have written about probably isn’t what Hagman’s office is looking for: “We were not trading arms for hostages, nor were we negotiating with terrorists”, from page 512 of “An American Life: The Autobiography,” by Ronald Reagan, 1990.

I’ve always been fascinated by doctrinaire Republicans like Hagman. They are government officials who venerate Reagan, another former government official, when explaining their distrust of government.

“President Ronald Reagan once said, ‘A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth,’” Hagman wrote in a July 15, 2009 op-ed on ChinoHills.com. “The President’s words are just as true today as when he said them many years ago given California’s inability to eliminate any outdated bureaucracy to help solve our $26 billion budget shortfall.”

Reagan himself raised taxes as governor of California and never eliminated a single program or department as U.S. President. Yet Republicans trip over themselves as they drop to one knee at the mere mention of his name (which, by the way, now adorns one of the largest aircraft carriers ever built as well as a hundred other structures around the world).

Indeed, the Reagan Legacy Project’s ultimate goal is a building named for Reagan in each of the nation’s 3,141 counties.

It is a most fitting tribute: naming all levels of our government, perhaps the most bloated and sprawling in history, after the so-called champion of small government. Though it’s not quite as spectacular as the tribute the men who brought us Spiderman and Strawberry Shortcake are paying to former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“The man who was recently in charge of the world’s eighth-largest economy will be turning himself into a cartoon character,” reported Entertainment Weekly, the new go-to news source for all things Arnold, in its April 8 issue. “And not just any cartoon character, but the Governator, a sunglasses-wearing superhero with an Austrian accent who’ll be at the center of an ambitious, kid-friendly multimedia comic-book and animated TV series codeveloped by no less a hero make than Stan Lee [Andy Heyward, who produced the Shortcake, Care Bears and Inspector Gadget cartoons is also involved].”

A name on a building is one thing, but getting your likeness used in a comic and cartoon series is virtual immortality. Never mind that Schwarzenegger didn’t really do anything as governor — comics are about fantasy.

Now if Stan Lee really wanted to go off the deep end, he would have set the comic in 2005, during the height of Schwarzenegger’s term of office, rather than after Arnold left office. Imagine that for a moment: a superhero striding the Capitol halls, thwarting disaster with a wave of his hand. Even Arnold doesn’t buy that.

“There were times people were upset with me for not being able to do certain things as governor,” Schwarzenegger told EW. “They felt I was the Terminator. They thought I was going to take care of things like in the movies…. I tried to tell them that it was more complicated than that.”

This, of course, is an older, more mature Schwarzenegger than the one who held up a broom at a Sacramento campaign rally in October 2003 and promised to clean up state government.

Words like that seem hollow now, but only if you think about them. It’s much easier to just repeat the words and ignore the deeds (or lack thereof) and then it’s very easy to imagine Ronald Reagan as a pivotal figure of history or Arnold Schwarzenegger as a superhero.

-Anthony Pignataro

MARCH 30, 2011

The promise of California’s proposed high-speed rail network is unambiguous: the 800 miles of bullet trains across the state will run clean, make money, put people to work and get people out of their cars. “California’s high-speed rail system will be profitable, will attract private investment, and will create tens of thousands of jobs in the state at a time when they are needed most,” high-speed rail authority executive director Roelof van Ark said in a March 11, 2011 press release.

But think again if you believe rail advocates are united behind van Ark’s dream. In fact, a number of long-time rail activists feel that California’s bullet-train fixation is actually harming other trains across the state that are already carrying passengers.

This fear is especially acute considering the $2.4 billion in Federal Railroad Administration funds that are currently up for grabs. Earlier this month, Florida decided to ditch its high-speed rail dream and give back the above funds, which Washington announced was now available to other states that applied before a new April 4 deadline. Wasting no time, van Ark announced his intention to grab as much as he could.

“Today’s federal funding announcement is another opportunity for California to aggressively compete to make true high-speed rail a reality in the United States,” he said on March 11. “Additional funding may allow California to extend next year’s construction segment and operate initial high-speed rail passenger service.”

Not so fast, says Paul Dyson, president the volunteer group RailPAC, which has advocated for rail since 1977. On March 22, he wrote to Governor Jerry Brown, asking that he divide up the grant application among various rail car and track and signal improvement projects across the state.

“It is a mistake to direct all available resources to the High-Speed Rail program alone,” Dyson wrote. “The infusion of funds to the state corridors will provide immediate employment to construction workers as well as laying important building blocks upon which the state rail system will thrive whether true high-speed rail is built or not.”

Chatting over the phone a week after he wrote his letter (he still hasn’t heard back from Brown’s office), Dyson elaborated on various intercity rail needs that are suffering from lack of funds. Most notably, he said there’s just a single track at the rail station in Van Nuys.

“It’s 2011!” Dyson said. “That is completely absurd. These projects are not headline catchers, but they are desperately needed upgrades.”

att Rocco, a Caltrans spokesman, said his agency did submit various intercity rail projects for the state’s grant application. Of course, officials have neglected such projects in favor of high-speed rail before. In late 2009, when $1.1 billion in federal rail funds were at stake, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ignored intercity rail improvements and chose instead to apply only for bullet-train money.

Dyson finds this appalling for a number of reasons, most notably the fact that the California High-Speed Rail Authority has evolved into an utterly feckless waste of money.

“Given the gross incompetence of the High-Speed Rail Authority and its Board, given the incredible waste of public funds such as the over-engineering of the Los Angeles to Anaheim branch line, given the extraordinary propensity of the CHSRA’s consultants to alienate every community with which it comes into contact, and given the current political and financial climate wherein it will be very difficult to obtain the large amounts of public funds needed to complete the HSR project, we have to design our policy for passenger rail on the assumption that whatever High-Speed infrastructure we build may be the last that is ever built,” Dyson wrote to Brown. “Therefore, for the time being at least, we should put our funds into existing lines that connect with a future HSR system.”

Dyson is hardly alone in his criticism of the high-speed rail authority. “The California High-Speed Rail Authority has consistently demonstrated that it cannot properly implement and manage the project,” wrote Santa Cruz attorney Gary A. Patton — on behalf of the San Francisco-based Community Coalition on High-Speed Rail — to Brown on March 18. “There shouldn’t be any surprise about this. The Authority is structurally and institutionally incapable of managing what is the biggest public works project in the history of the state.”

Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO Arthur Leahy apparently disagrees. On March 25, he wrote to van Ark outlining $544.6 million worth of Los Angeles-area intercity rail projects in the High-Speed Rail Authority’s grant application. Whether it makes a difference will be known soon enough: the rail authority board takes up the grant application at its March 30 hearing.

— Anthony Pignataro

The promise of California’s proposed high-speed rail network is unambiguous: the 800 miles of bullet trains across the state will run clean, make money, put people to work and get people out of their cars. “California’s high-speed rail system will be profitable, will attract private investment, and will create tens of thousands of jobs in the state at a time when they are needed most,” high-speed rail authority executive director Roelof van Ark said in a March 11, 2011 press release.

But think again if you believe rail advocates are united behind van Ark’s dream. In fact, a number of long-time rail activists feel that California’s bullet-train fixation is actually harming other trains across the state that are already carrying passengers.

This fear is especially acute considering the $2.4 billion in Federal Railroad Administration funds that are currently up for grabs. Earlier this month, Florida decided to ditch its high-speed rail dream and give back the above funds, which Washington announced was now available to other states that applied before a new April 4 deadline. Wasting no time, van Ark announced his intention to grab as much as he could.

“Today’s federal funding announcement is another opportunity for California to aggressively compete to make true high-speed rail a reality in the United States,” he said on March 11. “Additional funding may allow California to extend next year’s construction segment and operate initial high-speed rail passenger service.”

Not so fast, says Paul Dyson, president the volunteer group RailPAC, which has advocated for rail since 1977. On March 22, he wrote to Governor Jerry Brown, asking that he divide up the grant application among various rail car and track and signal improvement projects across the state.

“It is a mistake to direct all available resources to the High-Speed Rail program alone,” Dyson wrote. “The infusion of funds to the state corridors will provide immediate employment to construction workers as well as laying important building blocks upon which the state rail system will thrive whether true high-speed rail is built or not.”

Chatting over the phone a week after he wrote his letter (he still hasn’t heard back from Brown’s office), Dyson elaborated on various intercity rail needs that are suffering from lack of funds. Most notably, he said there’s just a single track at the rail station in Van Nuys.

“It’s 2011!” Dyson said. “That is completely absurd. These projects are not headline catchers, but they are desperately needed upgrades.”

Matt Rocco, a Caltrans spokesman, said his agency did submit various intercity rail projects for the state’s grant application. Of course, officials have neglected such projects in favor of high-speed rail before. In late 2009, when $1.1 billion in federal rail funds were at stake, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ignored intercity rail improvements and chose instead to apply only for bullet-train money.

Dyson finds this appalling for a number of reasons, most notably the fact that the California High-Speed Rail Authority has evolved into an utterly feckless waste of money.

“Given the gross incompetence of the High-Speed Rail Authority and its Board, given the incredible waste of public funds such as the over-engineering of the Los Angeles to Anaheim branch line, given the extraordinary propensity of the CHSRA’s consultants to alienate every community with which it comes into contact, and given the current political and financial climate wherein it will be very difficult to obtain the large amounts of public funds needed to complete the HSR project, we have to design our policy for passenger rail on the assumption that whatever High-Speed infrastructure we build may be the last that is ever built,” Dyson wrote to Brown. “Therefore, for the time being at least, we should put our funds into existing lines that connect with a future HSR system.”

Dyson is hardly alone in his criticism of the high-speed rail authority. “The California High-Speed Rail Authority has consistently demonstrated that it cannot properly implement and manage the project,” wrote Santa Cruz attorney Gary A. Patton — on behalf of the San Francisco-based Community Coalition on High-Speed Rail — to Brown on March 18. “There shouldn’t be any surprise about this. The Authority is structurally and institutionally incapable of managing what is the biggest public works project in the history of the state.”

Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO Arthur Leahy apparently disagrees. On March 25, he wrote to van Ark outlining $544.6 million worth of Los Angeles-area intercity rail projects in the High-Speed Rail Authority’s grant application. Whether it makes a difference will be known soon enough: the rail authority board takes up the grant application at its March 30 hearing.

— Anthony Pignataro