High Speed Rail to Nowhere

Said an old lady to the Internal Revenue Service: “I do hope you will give my money to a nice country.”

She shouldn’t worry if she’s a wealthy woman. President Donald Trump’s 2025-26 federal budget for billionaires will make America great again (for them) and bereft of medical care, higher education funding and opportunities plus constant tariff threats which render product producers unable to plan distribution in other countries. His use of tariff threats destroys the world view of our supposedly democratic nation.

The top United States trading partners (in order, for those interested) are China, Mexico, Vietnam (surprisingly), the European Union (meaning Germany, Ireland, Italy, and 24 other European nations), Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Canada, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brazil.

I wonder if he’ll surrender The White House on Jan. 20, 2029, to the next elected president. It’s more likely the bums and miscreants who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to prevent the duly elected members of Congress and new president from exercising their responsibilities will gather again to repeat their criminal conduct.

Your neighborhood scribe who has been gurgitating these columns for over a decade leaves 96 years behind on Aug. 11 with a birthday lunch here and another one the next week in the City of Angels, so his 95-year-old sister in a senior living facility across from the Hollywood Bowl may participate with her children and grandchildren. It has been a long, fruitful journey from City Hospital in Syracuse, New York to an exciting, abundant and productive life in the City By The Bay. I thank our Lord and all my relatives and friends for a life of opportunities and public service.

One of those friends, Maureen Dowling, passed away at 100 last month. Her funeral at St. Stephen’s Catholic Church on Eucalyptus Street evoked memories of her late husband, a historian, who wrote a history book of the Irish in California and established at the United Irish Cultural Center (UICC) the Patrick Dowling Library. If you’re of Irish descent, join the reconfigured UICC.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced months ago a special effort to protect California from Trump on top of his 2024 call of the legislature into special session to halt alleged oil-company price gouging even though motorists all know the cause of our high gasoline prices, to wit, a 58-cents-per-gallon California state gas tax! (Here are some tips: There’s a Marathon station on Skyline Boulevard which sells regular gasoline for $4.26 per gallon; one on 19th Avenue near Lawton with regular gas at $4.06 a gallon; a City Gas station on Mission and Ney streets with $4.03 per gallon for regular gasoline; and a City Gas station on Silver Avenue at San Jose selling it at $4.02 per gallon). The federal tax is 18 cents a gallon.

Steven Greenhut of Pacific Research Institute reminds us Newsom could invoke his own power to reduce the gas tax and stop trying to shut down the fossil-fuels industry, while increasing forest-clearing activity and using money from the high-speed rail project to reduce wildfires.

Incidentally, I finally found a reporter (Chase Smith of the Epoch Times) who wrote on June 4 that no electric track has been laid on the unrealistic Merced to Bakersfield “kickoff” route which is really Coachella to Wasco using a bus to board at Merced and depart at Bakersfield and render voter-adopted Prop. 1A in November 2008 unrealistic because Amtrak for 25 years already has run trains (diesel) near U.S. Highway 99 and the 2008 high-speed rail state bond issue ($9.95 billion) contains a clause prohibiting use of taxpayer money to pay high-speed operational costs! Amtrak carries about 1.5 million passengers per year in the Central Valley. The high-speed CEO before his 2024 retirement projected seven million annual riders on “speed.” Newsom, meanwhile, in the 2025-2026 state budget extended (!) at least $1 billion annually to the High Speed Rail Authority from cap-and-trade revenue for 20 years while Trump has refused to transfer to California the $4 billion in federal funds which Biden had set aside for California high-speed rail (Does anyone hear the word “collapse” in our State Capitol?).

The California High Speed Rail Authority is in default of federal grant agreements, reported the U.S. Department of Transportation on June 4. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) concluded the project has “no viable path to complete its first operational segment by the 2033 deadline required by federal agreement from the Obama era.” The FRA will terminate the two grants amounting to about $4 billion unless the Authority supplies a satisfactory corrective plan this month. The FRA condemned the project as a “waste of federal taxpayer dollars,” noting it began as an 800-mile system first reduced to 500 miles (SF to Anaheim), then became a 171-mile segment, and “is now very liked ended as a 119-mile track to nowhere.” Since 2023, incidentally, The High-Speed Rail Authority’s change orders have cost taxpayers $1.6 billion and are expected to continue.

Union influence and Democratic legislators have kept this boondoggle alive, but with a fresh start giving taxpayers what they were promised for state borrowing of $9.95 billion (Proposition 1A) in November 2008. Remember, as California’s premier columnist Dan Walters pointed out last month, then SF Mayor Gavin Newsom used to oppose the high-speed rail project because the then L.A. mayor, not him, was featured in a video made to inform Californians of the nature of the project. Now, because Trump belittles it, our governor is a lively proponent!

Incidentally, the notion of securing private investment for such project, as occurred in Japan, France, Spain, Germany, Great Britain and Taiwan, was floated last month by those Sacramento geniuses milking remaining dollars from California taxpayers. The European and Asian examples of private investors made sense to me as a state senator and later governing board president of California High Speed Rail Authority in the 1990s and 2008. Not anymore!

It’s a pipe dream, like the bill introduced by State Sen. Dave Cortese, Democratic Senate Transportation Committee chairman from San Jose, who I thought in 2024 would recognize wastefulness of the bowdlerized project and accept my offer to inspect the project’s failure to lay electrified track in the Central Valley. He introduced Senate Bill 545, which requires the Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation by July 2027 to commission a study and submit a report to the Legislature “on funding and economic opportunities to support the high-speed rail capital program or discrete system elements.” The bill is so full of balderdash that I’ll try to shorten your yawning. The idea is that the project can foster “economic growth, business expansion, and long-term investment.” A final report is due Jan. 1, 2028. Talk about political patronage festering! The bill passed the Senate 27-9 and is in the Assembly Appropriations Committee with only Republicans voting “no.” It’s time for taxpayers to stop that $759,000 stupidity when there’s no money to even lay electric track on a corridor already served by Amtrak.

As movie actress Mary Pickford said: “You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.” I prefer Groucho Marx’s observation about a political loafer: “Those are his principles and if you don’t like them, he has others.”

Before I forget, I plead guilty to error last month. U.S. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was never Santa Monica’s mayor; his cousin, Robert Shriver, was once Sana Monica’s mayor as a council member. Remember: An error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.

Don’t work on Labor Day!

Quentin Kopp is a former San Francisco supervisor, state senator, SF Ethics Commission member, president of the California High Speed Rail Authority governing board and retired Superior Court judge.