High Cost Rail - Part 68 Ship Sinking????

I'm no sailor but I know there are two ways for a ship to sink.  It can slide slowly into the watery depths succumbing to some slow leak or it can go BANG and sink like a rock.  It's still not clear if, or how, High-Cost Rail will sink into the Sacramento morass, but today's revelations about various rats departing the poop deck point in that direction.  Apparently, in addition to the resignation of the CEO of the High-Cost Rail Authority, a deputy director, the press secretary and a board member have resigned according to a Fresno Bee reporter's tweets.  The SacBee reporting on the CEO's scamper notes:

His resignation, announced at a board meeting in Los Angeles and effective in two months, comes at a critical point for the project, with rail officials bidding for Legislative approval to start construction in the Central Valley this fall. Public opinion about the project has fallen sharply, according to a recent Field Poll, and the Legislature is highly skeptical.

Minutes after van Ark's announcement, Tom Umberg announced that he is stepping down as chairman of the rail board, though he will remain a member of the board. Umberg is to be replaced next month by Dan Richard, an adviser Gov. Jerry Brown appointed to the board last year.

One sure way to get any capital project to come in way higher than budget (which is now $98 Billion with a "B") is to have constant turnover in the ranks of the planners.  Bear in mind also that the $98 Billion still offers no provision for any earthquake warning system interface to the train control system nor does it account for floorspace for TSA-like screening at the stations.  Good work, Roelof!

Comments

[Joe]

From the SacBee Capital Alert blog we learn to no one's surprise:

Less than 24 hours after the chief administrator of California's troubled high-speed rail project resigned, Gov. Jerry Brown this morning defended the $98.5 billion project and said he will push it forward.

The resignation of Roelof van Ark, the chief executive officer of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, and an announcement the same day of the planned installation of Brown adviser Dan Richard as chairman of the rail board, were viewed by many as an effort by Brown to recast the project ahead of legislative hearings this year.

"I'm putting my own stamp on state government, slowly but surely," the Democratic governor told reporters after an event in Elk Grove.

He said Richard "knows his material."

The Legislature is highly skeptical of the project, and public opinion has turned against it, according to a recent Field Poll.

"We're pushing forward," Brown said. "We're going to build, but we're not going to be stupid ... We're going to be very careful and build incrementally as we go."

He said, "A lot of people want to turn off the lights. I'm not one of them. We're going to build, we're going to invest, and California is going to stay up among the great states and the great political jurisdictions of the world."

Boy does our guv have an odd viewpoint on what constitutes a "great political jurisdiction". Get back to the budget and the unfunded pension liabilities before you claim greatness!

[jennifer]

Good luck with those tax hikes...

[alittlebird]

Well this is certainly ridiculous!

http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ContentRecord_id=e2265894-22a0-4fff-abc8-a151fc583aec

[Joe]

I happened to pick up the Stanford Daily on Monday and found this excerpt in an article talking about recent setbacks on high-cost rail:

In a Jan. 12 press release, California assemblywoman Cathleen Galgiani emphasized the roles both Van Ark and Umberg played in the initial conception of the project.

“Mr. Van Ark and Mr. Umberg have worked with stakeholders to address everything from whether ‘wind speed’ from the train will affect bee pollination in agricultural areas, the importance of respecting sacred sites and Native American burial grounds near the Grapevine, the value we place on involving small emerging business enterprises during the engineering and construction contracting process, building the first public private partnership of this scope in California and navigating the political turbulence associated with building the nation’s first high-speed rail system,” Galgiani wrote.

This Galgiani woman is one of the biggest jokes in the whole High-cost Rail project. She has virtually no background to assess a rail proposal since, per Wikipedia, "Prior to working in the Legislature, Galgiani spent eight years as a physical therapy aide at San Joaquin General Hospital and Dameron Hospital in San Joaquin County."

[jennifer]

It gets better----

"Behind the scenes, the Authority asked the peer revivew group to work with them and discuss issues rather than publish their comment on the draft business plan. Perhaps the timing of the release with the Audit Report then planned to come out would have been too difficult."

http://www.examiner.com/transportation-policy-in-san-francisco/independent-peer-review-asked-to-stall-comments-on-the-draft-business-plan

[jennifer]

High-speed rail tapped state funds for unusual lobbying contract

By Mike Rosenberg
[email protected]
© Copyright 2011, Bay Area News Group
Posted: 02/02/2012 05:34:00 PM PST
Updated: 02/02/2012 09:05:54 PM PST

In an extremely unusual use of taxpayer money, the leaders behind California's $99 billion high-speed train quietly hired a lobbyist to sway the Legislature -- the same politicians who appointed them to build the project in the first place.

Documents filed this week show the California High-Speed Rail Authority last year paid $161,103 to one of the country's biggest public relations firms to lobby the state's politicians as they consider spending $2.7 billion to launch the polarizing bullet train project.

Rail officials paid the lobbyists by issuing debt that will total about $300,000 with interest. It must be paid back through California's impoverished general fund budget.
High-speed rail officials defended the spending as a "vital need" when their staff was too small. But both Democratic and Republican lawmakers and even die-hard bullet train backers decried the lobbying as a wasteful and unethical use of taxpayer funds, saying it essentially amounts to the state spending money to lobby itself.

"That is appalling to me. I've never heard of such a thing," said Quentin Kopp, who helped launch the rail authority and was its longtime chairman before retiring in March. He said he never approved the expenses and that the state should go to court to keep the money. "That's nonsense, absolutely nonsense. It's embarrassing."

Government agencies often hire lobbyists to represent their interest to outside agencies; for instance, cities and states often contract someone in Washington to push for legislation or ask for federal funds. But in this case, experts, lawmakers and legislative staffers could not remember a major state agency tapping state funds to lobby other members of the state government.

"I think it's inappropriate," said state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, a Concord Democrat who heads the Senate's transportation committee and whose support for high-speed rail is waning. "They are spending government money; they should act like a government agency."

Although the amount spent to influence lawmakers is relatively small in the context of Sacramento's culture of lobbying, the stakes couldn't be much higher. High-speed rail officials are trying to persuade the Legislature to match federal funds to begin construction on the $6 billion first stretch of tracks in the Central Valley. Gov. Jerry Brown came out swinging in favor of the project in recent months, but many lawmakers remain skeptical.

Though the Fair Political Practices Commission says it doesn't have rules on this sort of lobbying, some lawmakers say the practice isn't right.

"It just doesn't pass the smell test," said Assemblyman Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, who also is losing confidence in the project. "That's not a good use or a valid use of the taxpayers' money. I would not approve of that nor condone it."

In a statement issued Thursday, outgoing rail authority CEO Roelof van Ark said his agency hired the firm as "government affairs consultants who provided information about the authority" and the project. He called it a "vital need" and said the agency has since hired a legislative executive to do the work in house.

"All the major transportation entities in California get state and federal funds and have legislative representatives in Sacramento, including VTA (Valley Transportation Authority) and BART," van Ark said. "And the authority may require such services from time to time."

However, VTA and BART are not state agencies and did not pay for the lobbying through the state budget. The rail authority signed Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide to a $9 million contract in 2009. The lobbying began in January 2011, according to documents that the secretary of state requires lobbyists to file, though the activity was never mentioned in the rail authority's budget or in the Ogilvy contract.

In July, after public outcry about the size and ineffectiveness of the PR contract, the rail authority said it was firing Ogilvy, while Ogilvy said it was quitting. But documents filed with the secretary of state Tuesday show the rail authority kept paying Ogilvy to lobby through the end of December.

Kopp and several lawmakers said they had no idea about the lobbying until this newspaper revealed the arrangement to them this week. While the point of Ogilvy lobbyist Don Wilcox's job was to be seen in Sacramento, rail officials sent their executives or board members instead to advocate for the project in key situations.

The documents don't shed any light on what Wilcox was doing. The rail authority's filing said only that he was paid to visit "various legislative offices regarding" proposed bills and the budget. In a separate filing, Ogilvy listed a few high-speed rail-related bills for which it advocated.
DeSaulnier, Hill and state Sen. Doug LaMalfa, a Republican leading the crusade against the bullet train, said they were never lobbied by Ogilvy on high-speed rail. Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, said his staff got a visit from Wilcox about once a month.

Part of the spending may be in dispute. The rail authority's filing said it paid $120,732 last year for lobbying, but Ogilvy says in its documents that it charged the agency $166,103.

The rail authority declined to answer questions for this story beyond van Ark's statement. The nine rail board members are appointed by the governor and Legislature.
Wilcox did not respond to requests for a comment.
The lobbying revelation is the latest in a series of hits to the agency's credibility. In December, rail leaders backtracked on their projections that the bullet train will create 1 million jobs, after this newspaper reported the project would create only 20,000 to 60,000 jobs during a typical year.

Since voters approved the San Francisco-to-Los Angeles rail line in 2008, the railroad's cost has tripled, expected ridership counts have dwindled and the start date of full service has been pushed back 14 years.

"It's been one deception after another," said LaMalfa, who introduced a bill to put the project back on the ballot.