Brown’s revised budget

Good morning! And since it’s Friday the 13th, good luck.

Gov. Jerry Brown will release his revised budget today.  

Although the state’s economy has been growing, last month’s personal income tax revenues missed their mark by $1 billion. So expect Brown to renew calls to limit new spending. 

Capital Public Radio has more. 

ICYMI: CalWatchdog looks at the problem looming in the state’s budget.

In other news:

• Is the rise of Donald Trump hurting the chances of Republicans hoping to replace Barbara Boxer in the U.S. Senate to advance past the June primary? CalWatchdog has more. 
• A panel on Thursday approved a $15 million plan to protect anchor rods on the Bay Bridge from further corrosion. The bridge was completed in 2013, but the state has spent millions since then to fix it. The San Francisco Chronicle has more.

• “California ballot: Is a new law that allows activists to yank measures working?” asks The San Jose Mercury News. 

• The Assembly approved a measure on Thursday that rewards drivers of plug-in hybrid vehicles by continuing to grant access to HOV lanes. But critics say the move only helps wealthy drivers who can afford those vehicles and perpetuates traffic in those lanes, hurting carpoolers. The Sacramento Bee has more. 

Assembly: 

• Gone ’til Monday.

Senate: 

• Gone ’til Monday.

Gov. Brown:

• Releasing his revised budget at 10 a.m. in Sacramento. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New followers: @DonnaWares @JuriSense 

Such questions are inevitable after the latest Sacramento Bee report questioning progress on the state’s current big infrastructure project:

An independent report … sharply criticized official tests of high-strength steel rods that secure the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, concluding the analysis was flawed and that some bridge parts should be replaced.

The report said assessments by the California Department of Transportation and its expert advisers – that the bridge is safe and durable – were based on “unscientific” and “erroneous and misleading” evidence.

The critique was authored by Yun Chung, a retired metallurgical engineer who has studied the matter since some threaded rods on the eastern pier of the span snapped in March 2013. Chung said Caltrans’ test protocols, data analysis and conclusions about the reliability of the suspension span “could not be supported.”

Chung proposed replacing most of the suspect bolts and rods with others whose qualities remove vulnerability to cracking.

Douglas Coe, an engineer under the employ of the California Department of Transportation, spent years working on the retrofit of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco.

When the 25-year Caltrans veteran told his supervisors there were cracks in thousands of welds made at a Shanghai factory, and the quality-control firm that was supposed to have conducted inspections of the factory had not properly done so, he was taken off the Bay Bridge project.

In an appearance last week before the state Senate Transportation and Housing Committee, the Caltrans official who dismissed Coe told lawmakers that he decided the engineer could “no longer operate as a member of the team.”

But there was no attempt to squelch Coe’s warnings about the defective welds and related issues concerning the Bay Bridge project, insisted Tony Anziano. Anziano was the project manager for the eastern span retrofit who kicked Coe off the team, reassigning the engineer to a bridge project in the Contra Costa County city of Antioch.

Meanwhile, Brian Kelly, secretary of the California State Transportation Agency, told committee members that accusations against Caltrans officials overseeing the bridge date back six years – three years before he assumed the agency’s top job.

Yet, not until recently, Kelly confirmed, has he gotten around to ordering an investigation to ascertain whether Anziano and other Caltrans officials retaliated against Coe and other engineers who blew the whistle on shoddy work on the $6.4 billion bridge retrofit.

Aside from being well overdue, the investigation initiated by Kelly is problematic because the CalSTA secretary delegated it to the California Highway Patrol, which is a branch of CalSTA, along with Caltrans.

Conflict of interest

Kelly apparently does not see a conflict of interest in having CHP investigate Anziano and other Caltrans officials that oversaw the Bay Bridge. But the conflict is obvious from Kelly’s decision at the investigation’s outset that it would be administrative, rather than criminal.

If an investigatory body independent of Caltrans were tasked with looking into charges of retaliation against Coe and other whistleblowers on the Bay Bridge project, it almost certainly wouldn’t rule out criminal charges before it had even interviewed the first witness.

Especially when there are allegations that Caltrans officials overseeing the retrofit of the Bay Bridge’s eastern span violated California’s Public Records Act by covering up evidence of shoddy work.

Indeed, Coe told an investigator retained by the transportation and housing committee that Anziano told him “not to record his concerns in writing, either on paper or email, but rather to communicate orally” so the concerns would not be found out under a public records request.

The investigator concluded that as many as nine engineers, including Coe, were either fired, demoted or reassigned (as Coe was) to quiet their criticism of the Bay Bridge Project.

Following last week’s hearing, Caltrans Director Malcolm Dougherty told reporters he had seen no evidence of “criminal activity.”

Nevertheless, Senate Transportation and Housing Committee Chairman Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, said he will turn over the committee’s findings to state and federal prosecutors and let them determine if there has been an criminal wrongdoing by Caltrans managers or officials.

By Chris Reed

The latest revelations about the Bay Bridge’s construction shortcomings point straight to incompetence as the big issue. This is from the Mercury-News:

“OAKLAND — When very large, high-strength steel rods on the new Bay Bridge snapped in early spring, worried commuters suddenly saw bolts everywhere and wondered why some hold and others fail.

“And rightfully so. Steel fasteners clamp together everything from office furniture to spaceships, and questions about their strength are natural.

“Metallurgists have been studying the same thing for more than 50 years.

“But as the broken bolts on the Bay Bridge demonstrate, not every industry pays the same level of attention to the answers.

“Where weight-conscious aerospace and auto designers write highly customized specifications for critical components that absolutely cannot fail, bridge engineers often bulk up on parts and rely on safety in numbers.

“As a result, Bay Bridge designers used ‘off-the-shelf’ industry standards for the bolts — including 32 that later snapped — which is the equivalent of ‘going down to Home Depot,’ said Detroit auto materials engineer Cory Padfield, who is writing a textbook for the American Society for Metals that will feature the busted Bay Bridge bolts as a case study.”

I don’t buy the Merc-News story’s assumption that this is a problem of the bridge-building “industry.” If so, why does the Bay Bridge debacle seem so unusual? If that premise were true, these stories would be common.

Instead, it’s simpler and more accurate to see this as a huge project that’s gone bad because of incompetence — state government incompetence.

Anyone who contemplates this debacle and doesn’t worry about its implications for the bullet train is daft. As I wrote two months ago …

By Katy Grimes

Today, it appears the California Senate will confirm Malcolm Dougherty as director of Caltrans. He has been serving as acting director. This will be done after only one Senate hearing, where instead of asking Dougherty to answer for the giant problems in his agency, lawmakers were silent or complimentary.

What timing. I hope senators are paying attention today. Because yesterday, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission announced  the opening of the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge may be delayed a few more weeks or even months. The latest delay of the 10-year construction project is due to the discovery of more than 30 faulty giant bolts holding the bridge together — apparently they need to be replaced before the bridge can open to the public.

Under construction for more than a decade, the Bay Bridge project has not only taken much longer to build than planned, cost overruns have escalated the total cost to build it to a whopping $6.4 billion. But that’s not the half of it.

The seismic event which caused the bridge to falter, the Loma Prieta Earthquake, took place 24 years ago. I remember that day well because I was pregnant then, with my now 23-year-old son. I made frequent business trips back and forth to San Francisco on that bridge, and was grateful I was not on the bridge that day.

Bridge pork — at taxpayer expense

Then, there was the $10 million public relations contract awarded to San Francisco-based PR firm, Words Pictures Ideas LLC. The contract was eventually cancelled by Brian Kelly, acting secretary of the Business, Transportation & Housing Agency, which oversees Caltrans. When the Sacramento Bee did an expose` on the dreamy PR contract, Kelly ordered the project’s cancellation in a letter to Dougherty.

“In that letter, Kelly said ‘the contract calls for some services, at the public’s expense, that appear to go beyond those necessary to inform the public about the project, its status, and its impact on public safety and mobility,'” the Bee reported.

Words Pictures Ideas already had an apparently lucrative contract with Caltrans before receiving the Bay Bridge deal. It is worrisome that the agency, which may have done very good work for Caltrans, received a rubber stamp for the bridge PR contract.

Where was Dougherty? Doesn’t the buck stop with the agency head?