California’s Bullet Train Boondoggle

The state’s high-speed rail project sunk more than $677 million on environmental paperwork, benefiting well-connected contractors.

In 2008, California voters approved funding for a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles. A group of contractors donated tens of thousands of dollars to support the ballot measure. A state program manager projected that the initiative would create more than 100,000 construction jobs.

Eighteen years and more than $15 billion later, not a single mile of high-speed track has been laid. The state hasn’t even laid track on the rump Merced-Bakersfield line that it wants to open in the 2030s. In a recently resurfaced video from his time as lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom said the full project was unlikely to “materialize in our lifetime.”

The bullet train, like almost every effort to build things in California, was killed by environmental regulations. The state’s high-speed-rail website contains more than 130,000 pages of environmental-review-related materials. Stacked together, they stand 40 feet tall and weigh 1,300 pounds. All this has cost taxpayers more than $677 million and served as a meal ticket for consulting firms that backed the 2008 ballot measure.

California law typically requires an entity to perform an environmental review when its building project requires a state permit. In practice, that applies to many major efforts in California. These reports create delays, new expenses, and burdensome requirements, some of which have nothing to do with meaningful environmental protection.

We wanted to find out how much environmental paperwork the bullet-train project has generated. To do that, we had multiple AI systems scan the reams of reports linked on the California High Speed Rail Authority’s website, and asked them to catalog the files, establish each one’s page-count, and sum those numbers.

Both systems tallied more than 130,000 pages. To verify the results, we reviewed one of the AI systems’ spreadsheets, which included each document’s web link, title, and page count. Remarkably, across more than 27,000 pages of cross-referenced files, the AI system didn’t make a single page-count error. A California High Speed Rail Authority spokesperson told us that the authority “does not maintain a running page count of all environmental documents,” but did not deny the 130,000-page figure.

Some of the bullet-train reports include ridiculous measures. One proposed that biologists count bumblebees, one by one. Another outlined when a contractor was allowed to break down woodrat stick huts. Still others contemplated using dogs to sniff for lizard scat or spending $119.4 million on an overhead tube partly to limit the train’s “acoustic impacts on waterfowl and shorebirds.”

Such measures have prompted a flurry of expensive change orders. Contractors have requested $480,000 “to dig small burrows for mammals by hand”; $352,490 for lizard surveys and reports; and $290,000 to implement the state’s environmental-requirements-tracking software. In one case, California’s high-speed rail agency revised its draft environmental report after the state proposed a regional mountain lion as a candidate for protected status.

Environmental reviews are one reason that costs continue to spiral. Another is poor oversight. A November 2018 state audit, for example, found that a contractor received a $3 million amendment from the rail authority. The authority, however, could not demonstrate that it had independently verified the contractor’s claims. Instead, it had lifted part of its report “directly from the contractor’s amendment request.” In June 2018, the authority unanimously approved amendments worth more than $142 million.

Who benefits from all this? Politicians and contractors. The scheme is straightforward: the contractors back the bullet-train boondoggle and shuffle money to politicians, and California directs millions of dollars to the firms to perform endless environmental reviews. It’s a massive gravy train.

Three contractors, HNTB, AECOM Tech, and Parsons Brinckerhoff (later acquired by WSP), were among the biggest donors to a committee supporting the 2008 bullet train ballot measure. They donated $63,000, $75,000, and $76,500, respectively.

The firms have also sent wads of cash to California Democrats and their pet causes. Newsom’s gubernatorial campaigns received $5,000 from AECOM’s PAC, $18,500 from WSP, and $26,000 from HNTB’s PAC. Governors Jerry Brown and Newsom solicited payments worth $55,000 and $75,000, respectively, from AECOM for charitable purposes. HNTB’s PAC donated to California rail advocate Scott Wiener’s campaign.

Their efforts seem to have paid off. AECOM, WSP, HNTB, and Parsons Brinckerhoff were paid $38 million, $61 million, $86 million, and $101 million, respectively, to perform high-speed-rail-related environmental reviews, according to data obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. One former HNTB employee, Ian Choudri, has become the bullet-train project’s chief executive.

California voters were promised a high-speed rail system delivering riders from San Francisco to Los Angeles in under three hours. Nearly two decades later, they face the prospect of a train transfer and an hours-long bus ride between Bakersfield and Los Angeles.

The main beneficiaries of this program are not California residents but consulting firms that bankrolled the ballot measure. For them, the point of California’s bullet train is not to move people, but to move money, for as long as possible—with taxpayers footing the bill.