Speaking of near criminal use of tax dollars......tangent alert.........
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Cost to tout train that may never be: MillionsUnder current plans, the city of San Diego won’t be connected to the proposed California High Speed Rail system until after 2033.
State officials, however, already have spent millions planning for that day.
According to invoices obtained by the Watchdog,
the California High-Speed Rail Authority spent more than $3 million on planning for the Los Angeles-to-San Diego corridor in fiscal year 2010-11, even though the agency announced in November that the segment won’t be included in the first phase of the rail system.
One-third of that – $1 million — was for public relations.
Given that opposition to the high speed rail is growing, there’s a real chance phase one may never be built, let alone phase two. All that money may be wasted.
The Watchdog asked Rachel Wall, spokeswoman for the California High Speed Rail Authority, to explain
why millions were spent on a piece of the project that won’t begin construction for at least 22 years. ”I know that’s how it looks,” she said, but there were logical reasons why the authority spent the money.
First, she said, just because construction isn’t slated to begin for years doesn’t mean there isn’t work to do in the meantime. A project of this size requires a lot of environmental and engineering paperwork. All that takes time.
Which brought her to the second point: The authority wants to get as much work done as possible in case private investors want to jump in and fund some part of the project. At this point, the high speed rail project has no private investors, but officials remain optimistic they’ll join once the project gets going. Wall’s point is that the authority needs to be ready if those investors arrive and want to fund the Los Angeles-to-San Diego segment.
Incidentally,
30 percent of the money budgeted for the San Diego leg in 2010-11 went to public outreach. Once again, Wall said there was a simple reason for it.
“There are 38 million people in the State of California who need to be informed about what high-speed rail is, the project status, where the alignments and stations will be located, and the impacts to communities across the state,” Wall said in an email. “In particular, because Californians voted to support Prop 1A it is incumbent upon our Authority to inform the residents of this state how this project will affect their communities and how the dollars they allocated will be spent.”
The San Diego segment, Wall said, just happened to be at the point in the process where the authority needed to solicit public comment for some planning documents.
This year, spending for the San Diego segment is budgeted to go way down, to $475,000, with 27 percent going to public outreach.
Is this a good use of money? You decide.