California’s troubled high-speed rail project needs an additional $1 billion per year from the state legislature to survive, officials said Monday, after the withdrawal of $4 billion in funding by the Trump administration.
The Los Angeles Times reported that high-speed rail wants funds from the state’s cap-and-trade program, which was created to reduce carbon dioxide emissions while funding projects to fight climate change:
As federal funds for California’s high-speed rail project remain suspended, state lawmakers urged the Legislature to approve a $1-billion-per-year investment pulled from cap-and-trade revenue while linking the future of the project to job opportunity across the state.
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The state’s cap-and-trade program requires major polluters to buy credits for carbon dioxide emissions and allows those companies to buy or sell the unused credits at auctions, generating billions in state revenue. Earlier this year, Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed setting aside a large chunk of those funds for high-speed rail.
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The plan to connect the state by fast train is billions of dollars over budget and decades behind schedule. The route from Southern to Northern California was originally proposed for a 2020 completion date, but so far, no stretch of the line has been finished and construction has been limited to the Central Valley.
As Breitbart News noted, the latest report by the high-speed rail authority said that the rural portion of the train would only be completed in 2032 and would operate at a loss, with an additional $87 billion needed to connect the broader San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles area by 2038. The total cost of the original high-speed rail project, which was meant to be finished in 2020 for $33 billion, has reached well over $100 billion.
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy released a federal report on the project in June that concluded there was “no way forward” for the high-speed rail project, and that it was a waste of money. President Donald Trump pulled $4 billion from the project in July — after pulling almost $1 billion in 2019, which President Joe Biden restored, spending another $3.1 billion under then-Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.
The project was plagued from the beginning by technical problems, environmental challenges, and right-of-way issues. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) himself had acknowledged after taking office that the original project “would cost too much and, respectfully, would take too long.” He canceled the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco route — but retained the portion of the project that is to run through the Central Valley, with low demand.
(A separate, privately-run effort to connect Southern California with Las Vegas, Nevada, is more viable; it received billions in federal funding from the Biden administration, which Trump has not withdrawn.)
California has faced two consecutive years of major budget deficits after wiping out a record-breaking $100 billion surplus, which had been fueled partly by federal spending in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Newsom has flip-flopped several times on the project, opposing it when Gov. Jerry Brown (D) championed it, then supporting it when he ran for office, only to dump part of it, then to embrace the reduced project again.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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