PLUS ONE AND MINUS ONE FOR JERRY’S TOY TRAIN

By Bob Walsh

The California High-Speed Rail Authority is a misnomer, a very expensive joke and Jerry Brown's pet project. It got both a modest shove forward and a modest kick in the ass today.

The high-speed rail board approved $3.2 billion in funding for two segments of the project. The largest chunk, $2.6 billion, is for the Fresno to Madera leg, 16 miles. (I am confident that everybody will want to spent $2.6 billion to travel not-so-quickly by train from Fresno to Madera. Or not.) The remainder is to electrify a section of existing CalTrain track between S.F. and San Jose that will (hopefully-maybe) eventually connect to the rest of the system. The money must be coughed up to meet federal matching funds. This money comes from $10 billion that the voters approved as Proposition 1A back in 2008 when the proposed total cost was a measly $40 billion. (Even optimistic estimates now put it at $67 billion, and also admit that it will be much slower than the mandated travel times that are actually written into the ballot language.)

While this was happening Stuart Flashman announced that he had submitted yet another lawsuit challenging the legality of AB1889, a quickie rush-thru bill passed thru the legislature last year that re-wrote a large chunk of Proposition 1A. It is his contention that since the original bill was a ballot initiative passed by a vote of the people only another vote of the people can make any significant change to it.

The pro-train mob asserts that AB1889 merely CLARIFIED Proposition 1A rather than making any material changes. Its horseshit of course, but you never know what a California court might say. At one time the California Supreme Court, under Jerry's appointee Rose Bird, determined that a murderer did not intend to kill a man he deliberately decapitated. Black is White and Up is Down if you want it to be badly enough, and have the power to make it stick. The California courts have already ruled that even though the program is clearly fucked up it can continue because it is (not yet) completely, totally and irretrievably fucked up.