Kenny objected to the idea the state could treat prospective federal funding and private-sector investment as dependable and likely sources of money. What does the 2014 business plan point to for future funding? More money from the federal government and private-sector investment.

As the kids say, epic fail. In the sequester era of declining discretionary domestic spending, the chance that Congress will play for one state’s hugely expensive infrastructure project is distant at best. The chances for private investment are even worse. As the LAO pointed out in 2010, such investments are very unlikely without a revenue or ridership guarantee. But such guarantees are illegal under Prop 1A, the 2008 state ballot measure that gave $9.95 billion in seed money to the bullet-train project.

Incredibly, the Fresno Bee wrote a 1,000-word story that never mentioned the financing angle. The Los Angeles Times at least mentioned the angle, though it never specifically noted that the state still has a business plan that Judge Kenny will find deficient.

Want to let state know your view of bullet train? Here’s how

I look forward to leaving a pungent voicemail. Your means of commenting:

— Online comment form through the Draft 2014 Business Plan website at:
www.hsr.ca.gov/About/Business_Plans/Draft_2014_Business_Plan.html

— By email at 2014businessplancomments@hsr.ca.gov

— Voice mail comment at 916-384-9516

Back to the MSM coverage of the biz plan. Maybe the LAT reporter just assumes that it’s impossible for the state to meet Kenny’s hard-financing requirement, so he doesn’t dwell on the angle. But how can the Fresno Bee not even mention this? Bizarro.

By Chris Reed

When the Los Angeles Times broke the story in April that the California High-Speed Rail Authority had quietly changed the rules to de-emphasize the importance of technical competence among bidders for the first segment of the bullet train, new authority CEO Jeff Morales and board Chairman Dan Richard pushed back as hard as they could.

It was a huge story by any standard. Given the engineering challenges posed by the bullet train, the initial decision that only the three bidders judged the most skilled at engineering and project management be eligible made absolute sense. We’re not talking about building, oh, a bridge. We’re talking about building a super-fast train on sometimes difficult terrain.

But Morales and Richard insulted the LAT’s coverage, trashed a subsequent editorial that I wrote and pretended to hold the high ground, asserting the flap was much ado about nothing.

Why rail authority’s hardball flopped

It didn’t work. Most coverage last week of the authority’s decision to award the $985 million contract for construction of the initial 29-mile segment in the Central Valley to the Tutor Perini consortium highlighted the fact that Tutor Perini was judged the least qualified of the five bidders, but won out because it was the cheapest.

As I noted in a Sunday follow-up editorial, the problem with this approach is that Morales and Richard  …

” … have never given a persuasive explanation as to why the decision was made to de-emphasize engineering and project management competence without a public hearing and board approval. … Instead, they’ve launched a public-relations offensive, including a complaint about a critical U-T San Diego editorial that the authority said ignored the ‘careful and transparent development of its bidding process.’

“This claim would only be true if the authority had held a public hearing on the rule change. As such, it isn’t spin. It is myth.”

‘Careful and transparent’: Classic rail authority buncombe

As the editorial notes, this approach was no surprise. It’s what the rail authority does:

“The November 2008 proposition authorizing $9.95 billion in state bond funds for the project was sold to voters with grossly false claims about the project’s long-term cost, ridership and job creation. Voters were also told it was likely to win tens of billions of dollars from private investors — even though rail authority officials knew such investment would require ridership or revenue guarantees they couldn’t legally provide.

“The saga of Tutor Perini thus amounts to one more pathetic chapter in California’s bullet-train follies.”

Bullet-train beat reporters reject spin

And that’s how it was treated by the reporters who have done an increasingly good job covering the follies of the CHSRA laughed off the criticism. Consider this delicious lede by San Jose Mercury-News reporter Mike Rosenberg:

“SACRAMENTO — State bullet train leaders on Thursday approved the start of construction for California’s $69 billion high-speed rail line, choosing the cheapest but least qualified firm to build the first leg.”

“Cheapest but least qualified”! How reassuring!

I look forward to Morales’ and Richard’s next round of faux indignation over the coverage of the fiasco they are shepherding.

By Chris Reed

Mankind has been building bridges for more than 3,000 years. A bridge built in the 13th century BC in Greece is still in use.

Building durable bridges over water is not a modern accomplishment. The Roman Empire liked to build simple arch bridges over rivers and put up hundreds and hundreds all over Europe. Quite a few are still in use.

But building more complex bridges over water, such as the suspension Brooklyn Bridge completed in 1883, is also old hat. It’s not rocket engineering, as Sergio Garcia would say. It’s daunting to outsiders but no big deal to those in the biz.

Except if you’re the genius engineers working for the state of California, who somehow managed to botch the $6.4 billion east span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge by neglecting basic practices meant to reduce water corrosion on giant steel beams and by tolerating flawed welds and an abnormally high number of broken bolts.

Let’s probe and probe and probe some more

State lawmakers increasingly sound like they’re in a let-the-heads-roll mood over the fiasco, the Sacramento Bee reports:

“Sen. Anthony Cannella, R-Ceres, a member of the transportation committee and an engineer, said the opening date must be delayed if safety remained in doubt. … Cannella and state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, chair of the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee, called for a comprehensive investigation . …

“He said that the state attorney general, federal officials, or his own committee should conduct the probe. It should require California Department of Transportation executives to testify under oath and compel them to produce internal documents that show who made decisions that led to the current problems, who dissented in those decisions and why, DeSaulnier said.

“‘With the level of personal exposure right now (for Caltrans officials) … there is always the concern that there is documentation that gets lost or destroyed,’ he said.”

State can’t do simple project — but it can pull off an unprecedented one?

So the state government botches an engineering project as rudimentary as a bridge, and now we’re supposed to believe it is up to the challenge of building a bullet train system that costs $68 billion, more than 10 times as costly and a thousand times more difficult?

Sheesh. Why don’t we wait until the winter and just the burn the money in alleys where homeless people sleep? At least it will keep them warm and achieve something constructive.

If you think the state can rise to the occasion, perhaps it’s time you changed or increased your medication. Or maybe you just missed the story about the incredible complexity of the bullet train project.

Or the story about how the geniuses running the California High-Speed Rail Authority quietly rewrote the bidding rules to favor the least competent bidder for construction of the initial 29-mile segment in the Central Valley.

Yeah, that makes sense: Give the toughest project to the bidders with the least expertise. Sheesh again.

Look on the bright side: Watching debacle unfold will be fun

I’m beginning to reach the tipping point on the bullet train. Rationally, of course, I don’t want it to go forward. It’s going to be such a waste of money that could be spent much better elsewhere (or returned to taxpayers). But both ideologically and on schadenfreude grounds, I now am very open to the idea that it will be great fun for critics to watch the bullet train proceed and be the mega-debacle it’s very likely to be.

It will once again remind voters how inefficient and incompetent government is, especially on ambitious projects. But even more satisifying will be how the fiasco will hang like a permanent shadow over the reputations of Jerry Brown, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Karen Bass, John Perez, Darrell Steinberg, Dan Richard and the editorial boards of the Los Angeles Times, the Sacramento Bee, the San Jose Mercury-News and the San Francisco Chronicle. On the bullet train, they’re chumps one and all.

By Chris Reed

Friday’s news that state Controller John Chiang had fired the second contractor hired to upgrade the state government’s computer payroll system for incompetence and poor work — a few years after the first contractor was fired for the same reason — is an amazing commentary on the disconnect between the genius of California’s private sector and the stupidity of Sacramento.

This is where the information technology revolution began! And we have a payroll system built on punch-card computers from the 1970s? And after nearly a decade of trying to fix it, we’ve made no progress???

“This is the home of Silicon Valley; it’s so embarrassing,” said Debra Bowen.

But that wasn’t Bowen in her present role as California’s secretary of state. That was what she said in 1999, when she was a state senator commenting on another computer debacle.

In April 2012, I whined about a Sacramento Bee report which (my description) warned that “the California Public Employees’ Retirement System was having so many problems with its new $514 million computer system that some retirees are getting notices that their health insurance policies are being canceled because of CalPERS’ nonpayment of premiums.”

Computer debacles the Sacramento norm

As I detailed then, this was nothing new:

“In 1994, a state audit found the Department of Motor Vehicles wasted nearly $50 million on a computer ‘modernization’ project that would actually have yielded a slower computer system than the relic it was to replace.

“In 1999, Gov. Gray Davis canceled an $18 million state program to integrate computer systems tracking welfare and social services recipients because it offered no hope of progress – the fifth failed effort at the same task that decade. The state ended up paying fines of nearly $1 billion for delays in meeting a federal mandate to have a functional computerized system to track child support payments.

“In 2005, a Sacramento Bee report found that efforts to implement reforms of the state prison system were impossible to evaluate for their effectiveness because the state Department of Corrections – despite huge budget increases – had never set up a central computer database to track individual prisoners and employees as it was directed to do in 1992. This poor tracking led to more violence in overcrowded prisons and to arguably higher recidivism because of an inability to evaluate which prisoners would respond to programs meant to help them integrate back into public life.”

This next paragraph involves the project where Chiang fired the contractor Friday:

“In 2009, efforts to furlough state employees and reduce their pay were called impossible by experts in and out of state government because the state payroll system relied on decrepit computers using half-century-old programming language. The ’21st Century Project’ upgrade of the system – originally bid out to a contractor at $69 million – now seems likely to cost $500 million.

“In 2011, a state audit lambasted a planned statewide computer system meant to link courts in all 58 counties. The audit said the system could end up costing $1.9 billion – seven times the original $260 million estimate.”

Do you, yunno, see a pattern here?

I see this as part of a larger continuum in which California Democrats and much of the media who constantly and at times correctly rail against the private sector for corruption, cutting corners and being amoral completely absolve the public sector when seeing similar epic fiascos. Why? Do even Democrats believe the cheap jokes about “government work”? Apparently.

It’s 2013, and even after spending more than $250 million, California has a payroll system based on computer programs from the 1970s. The same California where computer geniuses have changed the world with their hardware and software breakthroughs since the 1970s.

Write your own punchline.