Yesterday, the California State Auditor released a new report critical of the state’s high-speed rail project. The report title itself was fairly damning: “California High‑Speed Rail Authority: Its Flawed Decision Making and Poor Contract Management Have Contributed to Billions in Cost Overruns and Delays in the System’s Construction.”
From a federal perspective, the key takeaway is this: the decision by the Obama Administration to dedicate use-it-or-lose-it ARRA stimulus money on a project that was not ready for construction, plus their highly unusual decision to allow a “tapered match” for the federal grants (whereby the state can spend 100 percent of the federal appropriation for a project jointly funded by the federal government and the state, with the state promising to pay its share later on, by a date certain) increasingly look like a bad idea. The report says:
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