We touched on Gov. Gavin's dilemma back in November just after the election. Now, two months in with a budget sort of laid out, many pundits are thinking it is decision time on high-speed, high-cost rail. A certain Brooklyn bartender who has made it to Congress lumps high-speed rail in with a number of other high-cost ideas, but Newsom is perhaps a bit more astute than that. Here is one pundit quoting two others on the prospects for California
However, campaign promises are easily forgotten. As are responses intended to keep local folks happy. This is the same politician, after all, who said in 2015 that if he became governor, he’d probably kill two of Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature projects— high-speed rail and the Delta water tunnels.
Will the real Gov. Newsom please stand up?
I ask because longtime Newsom and Capitol watcher Dan Walters visited Fresno on Monday and told a room filled with Rotarians and their guests: “I have a hunch it is going to die. Newsom is not so enamored of the bullet train.”
Wrote Gabriel Dillard of The Business Journal: “There was a gasp in the room of Fresno community leaders … .”
I called Walters seeking the context of his remarks. He said that he expects only the first segment of high-speed rail to be completed, leaving the Valley with a souped-up version of Amtrak. But he put the odds of the line going from Bakersfield to the Bay Area as less than 50-50.
Click through for the rest of the piece by Bill McEwen especially where he notes some powerful California Dems are starting to get cold feet. The Fresno mayor demonstrates the exact wrong thinking on any giant capital expense when he says "we’re too far into it, I think, for the state just to walk away". Figure less than 10% of the total final cost has been spent–that is a sunk cost and better to not sink the whole state.
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