Showing posts with label High Speed Train. Show all posts
Showing posts with label High Speed Train. Show all posts

Monday, November 11, 2013

California: After The Transportation Money’s Gone…

In its assessment of California’s budget for the current fiscal year, which began July 1, the Legislative Analyst says this about state highway spending:
“Proposition 1B, a ballot measure approved by voters in November 2006, authorized the issuance of $20 billion in general obligations bonds for state and local transportation improvements…. The budget appropriates $258 million of Proposition 1B funds for various transportation programs. This appropriation level is significantly lower than the appropriations made in recent years because the majority of funds have already been appropriated.” (Emphasis added.)
Caltrans reports that as of August 31, the Legislature has appropriated $14.2 billion of the $15.6 billion in Proposition 1B that were given to Caltrans for dispersal. Nearly $1 billion of the funds left are earmarked for transit projects. Of the $14.2 billion lawmakers have determined how Caltrans will spend, $13.4 billion has been spent.
Of the remaining $4.3 billion in the bond, $2 billion went directly to cities and counties for road repair. Another $1 billion went to the Air Resources Board for pollution reduction efforts like subsidies to purchase cleaner-burning deisel trucks.
The Legislative Analyst’s overview doesn’t say that coupled with the exhaustion of Proposition 1B funds, state gas tax collections are declining.
More Californians are driving – as any commuter will attest – but they’re driving less distances and they’re behind the wheel of increasingly fuel-efficient vehicles.
Gas tax revenue is the primary funding source for California street and highway maintenance and construction. Twenty counties, however, have boosted local sales taxes by one-half cent to pay for local highway and road improvements.
There’s been no increase in the gas tax in 20 years. And the federal Highway Trust Fund, which supplies California and other states with transportation dollars, has been broke since 2008.
An even-numbered election year like 2014 is unlikely to be the time elected officials decide how best to extract more money from their constituents — even if for needed transportation improvements.
Perhaps the Legislative Analyst might begin a 2015 discussion of the problem with a 2014 publication on the state of the state’s transportation funding.
A possible title:
Now What?

Monday, November 4, 2013

California: High-Speed Rail Faces Inevitable Complaints

Here’s the first rule all new council members learn: The sewer plant has to go somewhere. And the neighbors are never going to be happy about it.
Substitute “high-speed rail line” for “sewer plant” and you see one of the main problems the $68 billion construction project is facing.
A lot of folks who should know better don’t seem to realize that.
Take, for example, a recent Associated Press story about the troubles the rail project is facing in the Central Valley. The folks quoted in the story included a Fresno man who’s losing his restaurant to the project, a Hanford engineer whose home is on the proposed rail line, a raisin grower who will have to sell some of his farmland to the project and a Chowchilla almond farmer whose groves are endangered.
Of course these people are upset and want to see the project stopped. All the talk in the world about the benefits the rail project will bring to the state, their communities and the people of California, valid though it may be, doesn’t take away from the fact that they will lose their business/home/field/orchard.
The NIMBY position, which is behind a bunch of the complaints, charges and lawsuits that have bedeviled the high-speed rail project, stems from a perfectly logical question: Why should I have have to pay the price and deal with the inconvenience of this project?
Or, to put if more bluntly, “It’s not fair.”
That’s a cry that’s heard at every city council, school board, planning commission and board of supervisors meeting in the state whenever a major — or not so major — project comes up for a vote.
But if a project benefits the larger public, it has to go somewhere, despite the inevitable screams from the people affected by it.
No one’s saying that the high-speed rail plan isn’t a controversial subject. Although prep work on the first section from Madera to Fresno has begun, actual construction has been on hold while the state tries to deal with a Sacramento Superior Court decision earlier this year that questioned whether the current plan is the same as the one that was approved by voters when they overwhelmingly approved a $10 billion bond measure in 2008.

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