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Brief of diving:
- The California High Speed Rail Authority faces a financing gap of $ 6.5 billion to complete the initial segment of 171 miles between Bakersfield and Merced, California, said the office of the Inspector General of the ‘State in a report of February 3.
- The OIG report also said that it is “more and more unlikely” that the authority could finish this segment until its target date of 2033.
- The California project could also face a federal investigation, which President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he would begin. “The train that is being built between Los Angeles and San Francisco is the worst project I think I have ever seen,” he told journalists.
Divide vision:
The ambitious California project to link Los Angeles and San Francisco by high-speed rail began in 2008 with the approval of voters of a measure of good to help finance it. According to a spokesman for the California High Speed Rail Authority, they are 171 miles of the high -speed railway project in active design and construction. “Of approximately $ 13 billion spent on the project, $ 10.5 billion have been funded exclusively by the California state,” the spokesman said in an email. The authority estimated the total cost of creating the 171 mile line between $ 28.5 billion and $ 35.3 billion in their 2024 business plan.
The authority pledged about two years ago to begin the service along the Merced-Bakersville line between 2030 and 2033. The OIG report notes that the programming changes of the project “have already used a third of the time of excess ”allowed in the plane.
The federal financing provided for the project during the Biden administration was not reduced to expectations, explained the authority in his written response to the OIG report. The purpose of the authority was to obtain $ 8 billion from the 2021 Infrastructure Act, but a total of $ 3.3 billion was awarded. The authority said that the Congress did not fully fund the authorized levels of grant programs that he was planning to trust.
Trump’s first term as President, from 2017 to 2021, was not kind to the California project. In 2019, the Trump administration canceled a $ 929 million federal grant and sought to recover about $ 2.5 billion in federal funds already received by the railway authority.
Some republican members of the Congress have expressed their support for other high-speed rail projects, such as the Texas Central Texas project to connect Dallas and Houston and the Las Vegas-Southern California line in Dallas and Brightline West, which is in Construction. But Amtrak and high -speed railway projects may suffer from the current administration reduction and current congress costs, according to transport experts and public policies in the Holland & Knight law firm.
The California high -speed railway authority led Trump’s latest comments in a post of February 4 in X: “Ignore the noise. We are busy building. “”
