This article is from Cal-Tax Digest, published
by the California Taxpayers' Association.
Cal-Tax Home Page | About Cal-Tax | Subscribe

The attractive brochures urge Californians, however ungrammatically, to whet their imaginations:

"Avoiding congested freeways, crowded airports and over-booked planes, imagine a sophisticated new high-speed train system uniting California, with convenient links to other transportation systems serving every city, every state, every country in the world."

A video brings the same message. From grating sounds and quick visuals of people suffering massive plane and traffic congestion, the scene shifts to blue skies and fluffy, worry-free and apparently smog-free clouds. Then we hear the soothing words of the commentator, "Imagine speeding the length of California at over 200 miles per hour without ever leaving the ground."

Imagination seems, however, to be getting minimum propulsion from these promotional efforts, which have cost the California High-Speed Rail Authority nearly $2 million over the past year and a half.

The authority has been trying to set the public pulse pounding over a project that would dwarf in cost what was spent in building the California Water Project of Pat Brown's day, even allowing for inflation. In the authority's vision, in 15 to 20 years bullet trains patterned after those of Japan and Europe would zip between Sacramento or San Francisco and Los Angeles Union Station in a mere two hours and 40 minutes. They would carry passengers over an entirely new roadbed in sleek new cars that don't pinch your elbows the way plane seats do and don't require the boring hours of dodging semis on Interstate 5.

Alas, however, the call to bring us men and women to match our mountains seems to have fallen on deaf ears in circles of power. Not a single prominent California politician now in high office or lusting for it has stepped forward to crusade for intercity bullet trains. They are approaching it with the caution of a bomb disposal team.

As a result of the sluggish reaction in high places, boosters are applying the brakes on the bullet train. The financing package will not be presented to voters on the November 2000 ballot as once envisioned. Instead, the nine-member California High-Speed Rail Authority sent a draft of its "business plan" to the Legislature early this year.

The plan pegged the cost at $25 billion to realize the tantalizing vision of riding trains that are in a big hurry. A quarter of a cent sales tax spread over a minimum of 20 years is proposed to pay for the package.

The High-Speed Rail Authority voted unanimously in Los Angeles on November 17 to take a go-slow approach and ask the 2000 session of the Legislature for just a relatively small appropriation. The plan going to the governor and the Legislature was also expected to ask to extend the board for another two years. Created by the Legislature in 1996, the authority is scheduled to sunset June 30, 2001 if the Legislature or voters have not approved, by December 31, 2000, a financial plan to build the high-speed rail system.

To keep the project alive on an incremental basis rather than going for a ballot measure at this time, the board would ask for just $25 million in the 2000-01 fiscal year. The amount would be for environmental impact studies of the routing and to retain a small staff, which numbers only five at present. (November 1999)

Although Richard Silver, director of the Rail Passenger Association of California and executive director of the Train Riders Association of California (TRAC), says his groups strongly favor high-speed rail, he concedes that selling it to voters will be "difficult at best" because of the cost.

Bud Lembke is co-publisher of three newsletters: Political Pulse, Education Beat and Corridors, which covers California transportation. This article is updated (see editor's notes at end) from an article published November 21, 1999 in The Sacramento Bee. (Reprinted with permission.)

 High-speed rail has to compete for state financing with numerous other capital improvement projects that have been delayed for years. The governor's commission on public works has called for spending $5 billion, just for starters, in rebuilding California's housing, park, water and transportation systems.

Said Mr. Silver of the $25 billion project for high-speed rail, "It's going to be real difficult to convince the voters of making that large a commitment for a benefit that is really unknown to the average person because they just haven't come in contact with it."

The task of convincing voters belongs to two experienced political campaign and public relations firms. Townsend Raimundo Besler & Usher, a Democratic-oriented firm, and McNally Temple & Associates, which works the Republican side of the street, got the $2 million contract for what is called "a public education campaign."

They have farmed out some of the "outreach" work to several other regional public relations firms up and down the state.

Jeff Raimundo, a partner in the Townsend firm, concedes that selling the project is a big challenge.

Thus far, the two firms have proceeded along several conventional avenues: pamphlets, video, a newsletter, a Web site (www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov). They have also conducted polls and focus groups and identified 7,000 "stakeholders" who can influence public opinion at the local level.

The firms working for the authority point optimistically at polling results. In July 1998, only 38 percent of those contacted by phone had ever heard of the proposed high-speed rail projects for California. In another survey taken in March 1999, that had grown to 47 percent.

Fifty-nine percent said in the March survey that they would respond favorably to the idea of increasing taxes to pay for building a high-speed rail system. Improving local public bus and transit got the same support, but 72 percent would favor more taxes for improved maintenance on city streets and roads. The consolation prize went to building more freeways, which was backed by only 44 percent.

M. Mehdi Morshed, the executive director of the authority and previously the chief of staff to the State Senate Transportation Committee for more than 21 years, is cautious about his agency's plunging into an all-out selling campaign.

"We don't think that we should really be doing that until at least the governor and the Legislature have a chance to look at it and decide whether or not they want to proceed," Mr. Morshed said.

Governor Gray Davis is certainly not going to rush into a crusade mode for something that costs $25 billion. He called the bullet train a "Buck Rogers" idea last March.

"I do not want the priority of this administration to be a high-speed rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco," Governor Davis said at a luncheon in Sacramento with reporters. "Instead I want to facilitate the commute of hundreds of thousands of Californians."

High-Speed Rail Authority official Morshed thinks some of the "selling" obstacles can be overcome when the authority gets the green light for an election. He maintains that commercial airlines will be overloaded in 20 years by a California population surge from the present 34 million to 45 million.

"If you're going to carry all those people on airplanes, the airlines will have to double their fleets and (airport) facilities," he claimed.

He maintains that the long-distance airlines would be happy to unload their commuter business within the state on high-speed rail.

As for Southwest Airlines, which has expanded beyond its former bread and butter of short hops, Mr. Morshed sees a possible deal emerging some day: contracting for one or more airlines to run the bullet trains. He said the trend is already emerging in Europe for airlines to handle ticketing and baggage for the trains, which serve as feeders for the planes.

Mr. Morshed's deputy director, John Barna, pointed out that intercity highways as well as airports will be hard-pressed to meet the population crunch.

"Is there a will in this state to expand Interstate 5 and Highway 99 to handle that kind of intercity travel?" he asked. "The way we look at it, we end up being a complement to both air and auto travel."

Two different boards, first a commission and then the current high-speed rail authority, will by June 30 have spent $12.5 million over the last five years on studies of this visionary project.

The vision is not new. Two former high-ranking Amtrak officials were involved in a scheme in 1981 to connect Los Angeles and San Diego by high-speed rail. A Japanese businessman who had a lot of money and was enthusiastic about exporting Japanese bullet train technology lost a piece of his fortune. It collapsed because the $1 billion estimated cost was eventually regarded as unrealistically low. The coastal cities of San Diego County also mounted fiery opposition on environmental grounds.

That experience of trying to build high-speed rail in California with private funds made it clear that state financing is the only answer. But in Texas, attempts have failed to package public-private financing for a much less ambitious high-speed rail project connecting Dallas, San Antonio and Houston. Venture capital just wasn't there. With Southwest Airlines mounting a heavy lobbying effort, the $6.8 billion proposal collapsed in the Texas Legislature. An attempt in Florida to connect Miami, Orlando and Tampa by high-speed rail also floundered and suffered an apparently mortal blow early last year when incoming Governor Jeb Bush opposed the $6.3 billion public-private partnership as too costly.

Michael Tennenbaum, a big-time financier who lives in Malibu and was named by then-Governor Pete Wilson as chairman of the High-Speed Rail Authority, contends that Californians have a can-do spirit.

"The people of California are a lot more future-oriented than they're given credit for," he said. "We've put in a university system and a water project. We've done a lot of things in this state that were related to the future."

Editor's Note: The authority on December 15 gave final approval to a report that included actions described by Mr. Lembke. It also was reported that the go-slow approach could result in the first high-speed train pulling out of a California station in 2016. The authority's deputy director, John Barna, was quoted in the San Jose Mercury News as saying: "We don't think we have enough information to sign off on $25 billion." The Associated Press reported that the authority estimates the system would carry more than 42 million riders and generate $900 million in revenue a year, more than $300 million of it profit. Still, a "substantial" investment of tax dollars would be needed to build the system.

In a later development, Assemblyman Dean Florez, a Kern County Democrat, introduced a bill in January that would make the High-Speed Rail Authority a permanent agency and give Governor Davis the power to appoint most of its members. "The governor told me that if we would put in legislation to give him appointments (to the authority), he would look more favorably on high-speed rail, Mr. Florez told the Bakersfield Californian.