Today’s editorial in the Daily News (Los Angeles) takes after the California High-Speed Rail Authority (High-Speed Rail Plan Should Slow, May 20, 2011, at p.A 14).
It rehearses the now-familiar arguments that the Authority lacks experience in building major projects, that its choice of the middle of nowhere in the Central Valley as the site for the construction of the first high-speed link is out of it, and reemphasizes that the authority’s estimated cost of $43 billion, will likely balloon to $67 billion.
Our favorite passage:
“The feds, [who] just put a rush on the project, said that their $3.6 billion allocation must be spent soon, so the authority hastily decided to build the first leg of high speed rail from Borden to Corcoran in the Central Valley. No one objected perhaps because much of the population of Corcoran is prison inmates.” (Emphasis added.)
Don’t you just love it?
Oh, we almost forgot. Those are the folks whose decision to lay out the route and take your property for it are “well-nigh conclusive.”