Dan Walters: Legal traps could stop California's high-speed rail project

The California High-Speed Rail Authority has an obvious financial problem as it seeks to build a statewide bullet train system.

Its latest "business plan" says that it would cost nearly $100 billion to build the backbone of the system, but so far it has only $9 billion in state bonds and a little more than $3 billion in federal money.

The CHSRA also has a political problem.

The Legislature, which first proposed the bullet train bond to voters, is turning sour on its prospects, which means that it may not give the agency any more bond money to spend.

Meanwhile, the latest Field Poll says that voters are now strongly inclined to derail the bullet train.

Finally, the CHSRA has a knotty legal problem.

To make the project more palatable to voters, the Legislature included restrictions and guarantees in the 2008 bond ballot measure, such as a ban on operating subsidies and requirements that financing be lined up and environmental clearances obtained before construction begins.

The ballot measure's fine print is now fodder for lawsuits and criticism from the Legislature's budget analyst.

As laid out in the business plan, the analyst says the project ? especially construction of a 130-mile test segment in the San Joaquin Valley ? may be illegal.

"Proposition 1A identifies certain requirements that must be met prior to requesting an appropriation of bond proceeds for construction," the analyst's office says in a report to the Legislature. "These include identifying for a corridor, or a usable segment thereof, all sources of committed funds, the anticipated time of receipt of those funds, and completing all project-level environmental clearances for that segment.

"Our review finds that the funding plan only identifies committed funding for the ICS (San Joaquin Valley segment), which is not a usable segment, and therefore does not meet the requirements of Proposition 1A. In addition, the HSRA has not yet completed all environmental clearances for any usable segment and will not likely receive all of these approvals prior to the expected 2012 date of initiating construction."

Meanwhile, Kings County, through which that track would run, has filed suit alleging that the bond issue requires construction of "an electrified system" and the initial segment would lack electrification, thus making it usable by conventional diesel trains.

That "independent utility," as it's called, is a requirement of the federal grant, but appears to run counter to the bond issue's requirement.

The suit alleges other violations of Proposition 1A, the 2008 bond measure, including the "usable segment" issue raised by the legislative analyst.

Dan Richard, a member of the CHSRA, said that the legal objections are invalid, but as they proliferate, they may prove that a ballot measure written to ease construction of the bullet train actually made it impossible to build.

Source: http://www.modbee.com/2011/12/12/1983900/dan-walters-legal-traps-could.html

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