GILROY
– A statewide bullet train that could stop in Gilroy, Morgan
Hill or bypass both and tunnel under Henry Coe State Park could
derail in the planning stages unless the California High-Speed Rail
Authority gets more money soon.
GILROY – A statewide bullet train that could stop in Gilroy, Morgan Hill or bypass both and tunnel under Henry Coe State Park could derail in the planning stages unless the California High-Speed Rail Authority gets more money soon.
California’s high-speed train project is running short of cash and staff may not have the resources to keep its office manned or complete an environmental study, its executive director said Tuesday in Sacramento.
“We are just this much short of basically closing the door,” Mehdi Morshed told board members of the California High-Speed Rail Authority.
The electrically powered bullet trains would cost an estimated $30 billion to establish and could get riders from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two-and-a-half hours, reaching speeds of 220 mph.
Meanwhile on Tuesday, a state Senate committee voted to postpone a public vote on nearly $10 billion in bonds that would help pay for the first leg of the rail project, and environmental groups urged the board to include the Interstate 580 corridor – instead of the south Santa Clara Valley – as a possible route for the speedy trains.
The bullet train has the potential to remake the South Valley. Part of the project’s intention is to cluster development along its corridor instead of sprawling into open space.
Gilroy lawyer Joseph Thompson has taken every opportunity to critique the philosophy behind the bullet train, which he has called “Soviet.”
“While carriage of passengers by rail is desirable, creating a public-sector Frankenstein is a cure worse than the illness,” Thompson wrote on March 10 in his official response to the train’s environmental impact report. “Private-sector solutions, like our existing railroads, … are what our government should be creating and encouraging. Mistakes like Amtrak, BART, Lite Rail, etc. only burden the taxpayers with ill-considered socialist philosophy.
“If you put enough UPS, FedEx and Postal Service tonnage on HSRA’s trains, then you would not need to ask taxpayers for a dime,” Thompson added.
Thompson, based in Gilroy, is one of the few South Valley residents who have officially commented so far on the bullet train’s draft EIR, released two months ago.
Neither the Gilroy or Morgan Hill governments have taken an official position on the bullet train.
But, Gilroy Mayor Al Pinheiro expressed disappointment this morning that the bullet train might not happen.
“It would be nice to be open to the future and see if that could be a possibility,” he said.
City Administrator Jay Baksa said Gilroy’s council discussed the matter briefly at a recent retreat but have not done so in a full session since Tom Springer stepped down as mayor last year. Springer himself opposed the rail plan, but the City Council never took a position.
Morgan Hill Community Development Director David Bischoff said his city’s staff wants to respond to the EIR, but he did not know what view they would take.
Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage supports the high-speed train, which might stop in his home town of Gilroy, but he has not submitted a comment on the draft EIR. Gage chairs the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority.
“I have discussed it with some of the legislators because I would like to see it come though the Pacheco Pass route,” Gage said Tuesday.
A Pacheco train would give another option to commuters who drive the pass every day from relatively cheap homes in Los Banos to jobs in San Jose, Morgan Hill and Gilroy.
Nevertheless, Gage and his staff aren’t optimistic that voters would approve a $10 billion bullet-train bond.
“Realistically, it’s a long shot,” said Edwin Chan, Gage’s transportation aide.
The EIR claims that high-speed rail will be the cheapest, cleanest, most energy efficient, safest and most reliable way for Californians to move between cities by the year 2020, when the population is expected to rise by 31 percent. By then, the report predicts, current roads and airways will be too crowded to accommodate transportation.
Expanding highways and airports to meet these demands would increase sprawl and air pollution and would ultimately be two to three times more expensive than the proposed 710-mile rail network, the report claims.
Morshed said work on a draft environmental impact report on the 700-mile project cost about $750,000 more than anticipated and that the Department of Finance denied the authority’s request for a budget augmentation.
He also said budget cuts will leave the authority with only two full-time staffers, forcing it to close its Sacramento office at times and leaving it strapped to oversee consultants and respond to requests from the public for information.
The Schwarzenegger administration has proposed $1.1 million to fund the authority in the fiscal year that starts July 1, but Morshed said he couldn’t guarantee the authority would be able to complete the environmental review on time.
Lawmakers are facing an overall budget gap of $17 billion as they struggle with how to finance state programs in the 2004-05 fiscal year.
Morshed has asked the projects’ consultants to slow down and “perhaps stop some of their work so we can save some money in case we need it for finishing the environmental document.”
