California High-Speed Rail Authority CEO Brian Kelly worked over the summer to reassure anxious state lawmakers that a new management team could revive the troubled bullet-train project. He also proceeded to push out key officials overseeing contract and property decisions.

Yet the changes haven’t stopped a new wave of bad news in September for the project, which was once envisioned as a statewide network of high-speed rail but has been downsized to a 119-mile link between Bakersfield and Merced expected to cost in the range of $20 billion. 

A Los Angeles Times report outlined the huge problems still facing the rail authority’s land-acquisition efforts after seven years in the Central Valley. Not only does the agency need to buy about 300 more properties to be able to build the train, the Times reported that consultants believe at least an additional 488 parcels will need to be bought to deal with complex issues related to easements on sites with infrastructure owned by Pacific Gas & Electric and other utilities as well as AT&T, railroads and irrigation districts.

This adds new doubts about the rail authority’s projection it could finish construction of the Central Valley route by 2026.

One project manager, after warning of severe delays, told the Times that “I am going to ride this train, but I am afraid it is going to be my ashes in an urn. I told my kids to take my ashes on the bullet train.”

The Times also noted that the rail authority had been forced to buy larger lots than it needed to accommodate the rail route to such an extent that it now owns hundreds of properties – including “toxic waste sites, vacant lots and rental homes” – that it must manage. The list includes at least 466 acres of cultivated agriculture fields.

San Jose area critics push for costly elevated lanes

There was also bad news for the project from Northern California. At a rail authority board meeting held in San Jose, trustees voted unanimously to approve a route connecting the San Joaquin Valley with San Jose after the Central Valley initial segment is built. Yet testimony at the hearing showed the intensity of opposition to building any new rail route that didn’t minimize disruptions to the neighborhoods and communities it traveled through.

According to a Fresno Bee report, speakers complained to the rail board that early promises that elevated rail lines would be built had given way to plans for regular, surface rail lines. But since elevated rail costs two to four times more per mile, choosing it would make project costs explode – and Gov. Gavin Newsom has already said there’s not nearly enough funding likely to be available to complete the $78 billion statewide project advocated by his predecessor, Jerry Brown.

That argument didn’t move San Jose resident Danny Garza. According to the Bee, he said that not building elevated tracks in his neighborhood was “a bait-and-switch” given past guarantees of minimal impacts. “Please don’t use our neighborhood to balance your budget,” he told the board.

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo told trustees that his city could drop its support for the project if the rail authority didn’t use “best practices”  to “provide our community with the safety it deserves.”

The section of the proposed route in the San Joaquin Valley also drew complaints, according to the Bee. Rick Ortega, general manager of the Grassland Water and Resource Conservation Districts, said the staff report “contains no design detail on how the authority intends to mitigate impacts through the ecological area.” The Grassland Environmental Area is a 160,000-acre site mostly in Merced County that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has repeatedly said must be preserved because of the crucial ecological importance of its wetlands.

Ortega also said elevated tracks were necessary – or that the rail authority should change its planned route.

Board members said the staff would consider the complaints, but offered no promises about the nature of possible mitigation efforts, according to the Bee.

Three months after canceling a $929 million federal grant to the troubled California bullet train project, the Trump administration has unexpectedly given its go-ahead to the state to approve environmental documents that are needed to complete planning for the long-delayed project.

In May, after the funding was canceled, the relationship between the federal and state government seemed so bumpy that bullet train officials worried that Washington would try to sabotage the project by delaying approval of necessary paperwork. Instead, on Monday, the Federal Railroad Administration fulfilled a long-standing state request and moved environmental reviews of pending plans for the project’s full Los Angeles to San Francisco route from the federal to the state level. According to the Los Angeles Times, previously the agency had only approved segments from Bakersfield to Fresno and from Fresno to Merced.

“This action is an important milestone for the high-speed program,” said Brian Kelly, chief executive of the California High-Speed Rail Authority. “We’ve lost valuable time waiting with the FRA’s disengagement, so I am very thankful for this action and I am hopeful this step is the beginning of a more collaborative and cooperative relationship prospectively.”

But while state officials were relieved by the federal decision, funding obstacles still remain. The state only has about one-quarter of the $80 billion-plus it would take to link Los Angeles and San Francisco – and that’s for a plan that doesn’t use high-speed rail for segments from San Francisco to San Jose or from Los Angeles to its northern exurbs. This downscaling has led some longtime backers of the project, such as former state Sen. Quentin Kopp, to renounce it as a betrayal of promises made to state voters in 2008 when they approved $9.95 billion in bond seed money for what was then envisioned as a $43 billion statewide train system.

The lack of funding was behind Gov. Gavin Newsom’s February decision to pull back from predecessor Jerry Brown’s commitment to building a statewide system. Instead, Newsom said all $20.5 billion in available funding should be used to build a high-speed route between Bakersfield and Merced in the Central Valley. 

Speaker wants changes to Newsom’s focus on Central Valley

But it now appears that even that scaled-back plan will face opposition from some key Democrats in the Legislature. On Thuesday, the Times reported that Democratic Assembly members from the Los Angeles and Bay areas – including Speaker Anthony Rendon – have for weeks discussed shifting the state’s rail focus. They hope to take up to $6 billion that Newsom wants to use in the Central Valley to improve rail service from Pasadena to Anaheim and commuter rail in and out of San Francisco. They believe a shorter, scaled-down version of the Central Valley route is viable with funding in the $14 billion range.

“I like the concept,” Rendon told the Times. “Any project that doesn’t have a significant amount of service to the largest areas in the state doesn’t make much sense.”

The prospect of taking state bullet train money for the Los Angeles area was first raised publicly in April by several members of board of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Any reduction in the scope of the Central Valley route proposed by Newsom is likely to face bitter opposition from the area’s politicians, who see the bullet train as crucial to improving the economy in one of the state’s poorest regions. They were enthusiastic about Newsom’s comments during last year’s campaign that a bullet train would be ideal to connect Silicon Valley workers with relatively inexpensive housing in the Central Valley.

In a sign of frustration over the state’s transportation priorities, several board members with the high-profile Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority have made the argument that it makes far more sense to use money that Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to spend on a bullet train route in the Central Valley on Los Angeles-area projects instead.

Newsom made international headlines in February when he pulled back from predecessors Jerry Brown’s and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s commitment to have the California High-Speed Rail Agency build a statewide high-speed rail network. Instead of continuing to try to secure all the funds needed for the $77 billion project, Newsom said the state should focus on completing a 110-mile segment from Merced to Bakersfield that is expected to cost $12.2 billion.

Five L.A. Metro board members – Hilda Solis and Kathryn Barger, both Los Angeles County supervisors, Inglewood Mayor James Butts, Los Angeles Councilman Paul Krekorian and Glendale Mayor Ara Najarian – think that’s a bad idea.

At a recent Metro board committee meeting, Solis said that “many, many projects” in the Los Angeles region would be more helpful in meeting state transportation goals.

In a motion they crafted for the Metro board’s consideration, they wrote that the Central Valley segment “has little value for public transportation and limited greenhouse gas reductions. Regional rail transit improvements in the Los Angeles region would be more cost effective with more substantial mobility benefits.”

The Curbed Los Angeles website reported that the five decided not to ask the full Metro board to endorse the motion, evidently after being reassured that the state would help fund some of the local projects that Solis had praised. But the sharp criticism from five board members of Metro – one of the nation’s largest transportation agencies, serving 10 million people in a 1,400-square-mile region – is a powerful reminder that even with Newsom’s scaled-back version, the state’s bullet-train project faces considerable skepticism.

Cost, viability of Central Valley segment questioned

The Central Valley route faces two of the same key criticisms that the statewide project did under Brown.

Its initial cost estimate of $6 billion has more than doubled, just as the statewide plan’s cost soared from $34 billion to $77 billion.

Under Proposition 1A, the 2008 ballot measure providing $9.95 billion in bond funding for the project, every segment is supposed to generate enough revenue to be self-supporting, with taxpayer subsidies banned. But assumptions that linking Merced, population 83,000, with Bakersfield, population 380,000, will lead to ridership that is heavy enough to cover the cost of bullet-train operations is tough to square with the fact that presently, there are only six conventional train trips daily between the cities with an average ticket price of $27.

Questionable assumptions about ridership have been common from the state rail authority. For example, in 2015, the Los Angeles Times reported that the authority projected annual ridership of up to 31 million passengers after the Los Angeles-San Francisco route was complete. That’s about the same number of annual riders as Amtrak, which operates in 46 states.

On Wednesday, the rail authority is expected to release more detailed plans from the Newsom administration for the Merced-Bakersfield segment.