Gov. Gavin Newsom told the California Legislature the bullet train was so over budget that he would kill 73 percent of the track and still spend 100 percent of the taxes.
Facing another cost spike, Gov. Gavin Newsom stunned a joint session of the Democrat-controlled Legislature by proposing to slash the 520-mile voter-approved and taxpayer-funded system that would have stretched from Anaheim through the Central Valley to San Francisco, while keeping the 119-mile stretch from Bakersfield to Merced.
In his formal appearance as governor in front of lawmakers, Newsom claimed that his priorities are combating the state’s homelessness crisis and improving care for California’s rapidly aging population. Newsom told lawmakers, “Let’s be real” — there “simply isn’t a path” to build a high-speed rail system to connect Northern California to Southern California, because cost over the decade rose from $33 billion to at least $77 billion.
Newsom knows that the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s new chief program officer, Roy Hill, cautioned last March in a 114-page “2018 Draft Budget,” that the likely “High Case” cost to build the 520-mile bullet train had almost tripled from $33 billion in when voters approved the effort in 2008 to $98.1 billion or about $189 million per mile.
Read the full story from American Thinker
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