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.

The 1,000-plus invitees heard several speeches hailing the vision of the project and the smarts of those overseeing it. Brown won kudos for bringing in veteran transportation executive Dan Richard as chair of the California High-Speed Rail Authority board. Both men were praised for shifting from a $98 billion project to a $68 billion “blended” plan in which high-speed rail would link with regular rail at Fresno in Northern California and in northern Los Angeles to the south. Previous plans had a bullet train going from downtown San Francisco to downtown L.A.

But now Brown, Richard and the rail authority face a daunting challenge if they want to sustain the plausibility of their narrative of a well-managed project making steady, smart progress: a use-it-or-lose-it scenario for a majority of the estimated $6 billion the state has in hand for its completion.

The groundbreaking came two years after state officials first promised to begin construction. Under federal law, about $2 billion of grants and $2 billion of matching state funds must be spent by the end of September 2017. That means an average of $3 million to $4 million of work will need to be completed every calendar day to avoid forfeiting unused federal money.

That’s from the Los Angeles Times.

$3 million-plus a day for 1,000 straight days

It might not seem difficult for overseers of a $68 billion project to spend $3 million-plus a day for 1,000 days straight. But the rail authority’s latest update on its progress in obtaining the 526 parcels necessary for building the project’s initial 29-mile link between downtown Fresno and Avenue 17 in Madera shows why that could be a problem. As of the end of 2014, only 101 parcels had been obtained — less than 20 percent.

Construction can’t proceed without land to build on.

This August 2014 Fresno Bee story illustrates why the state has struggled to move more quickly. A key takeaway from the piece is that holdout landowners have done better by refusing all initial offers from the state in eminent domain proceedings.

This practice is likely to become the norm. The closer the September 2017 federal deadline gets, the more leverage holdout landowners will have to demand more than the state is offering.

This doesn’t bode well for the budget projections of the rail authority, much less the project’s construction schedule.

Will federal bureaucrats delay CA deadline?

But the state may have an ace in the hole. The Federal Railroad Administration has repeatedly established deadlines for California’s use of $3 billion-plus in stimulus funds for its project and then delayed them. While media coverage of the groundbreaking repeatedly depicted the September 2017 as firm and unwavering, that view is undercut by the FRA’s previous actions on the project.

It’s also undercut by the Obama administration’s precedent of using executive orders to reshape existing domestic laws in a way without modern precedent. Both the Affordable Care Act and the No Child Left Behind Act have been unilaterally modified by the White House without congressional assent.

If the president were willing to act unilaterally to revamp the two biggest domestic policy initiatives passed by Congress in the 21st century, his successor might be willing to go it alone on a less significant federal initiative.