How does a massive rail project that was never on track go even further off the rails?
Through a stunning show of incompetence by Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state officials who oversee California’s high-speed rail failure.
The state auditor has already investigated the project 10 times, going back more than 15 years. Any project in the private sector that functioned this way would have been shut down long ago.
Just days after Newsom took a sad victory lap for high-speed rail — where he posed in front a motionless freight train — news emerges that state officials bumbled their way into a huge new cost for taxpayers.
California will pay a construction company $537 million to settle a lawsuit over delays and change orders in the rail boondoggle, The Post reported.
The contractor, Selma, Calif.-based Dragados Flatiron Joint Venture, told another news outlet that revisions, design changes, and land acquisition issues — 597 change orders in all — wildly drove up costs.
This coincides with news last week that Newsom and legislators are pushing a bill, AB 1608 by Lori Wilson (D-Suisun City), that would authorize concealment of embarrassing high-speed rail records.
What self-serving arrogance.
It is galling, and likely illegal, for state officials to block taxpayer access to the records of projects paid for by the public.
State officials sold California voters on high-speed rail in 2008 with a $9.95 billion bond toward a $45 billion “bullet train” project connecting LA and the Bay Area.
Eighteen years later, the project has not a stick of track to show for it, and cost estimates have soared to well over $100 billion.
The latest $537 million cost bump is just another sign: The project — long a national punchline for its wheel-spinning — is a financial train wreck going nowhere.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
