Photo: Sacramento BeeYesterday, Vice President Joe Biden, met with governors from eight different states that are competing for High Speed Rail funding. Streetsblog's D.C. Correspondent wrote a story about the national implications of the meeting available at our New York site. While neither Schwarzenegger nor another representative from California was present, there was good news for California. From today's Times,
"The reason why California is looked at so closely -- it's been apriority of your governor, it's been a priority of your Legislature,they've talked about it, a lot of planning has been done," Biden saidin a conference call with reporters.
The vice president saidthe administration wants "to get shovel-ready projects out the door asquickly as we can. . . . So California is in the game."
In other words, because California has been working on the San Francisco to San Diego High Speed Rail Corridor, and because voters put up funds for the project in the form of bond money; we have a leg up in applying for federal funds as the Obama Administration makes them available.
And let's be clear, it's not as though the entire corridor were "Shovel Ready" but there are two sets of track that the California High Speed Rail Authority says are ready to go. The first is local, as the state could connect Los Angeles to Anaheim at a cost of $3 billion. The second corridor would connect San Francisco to San Jose at somewhere between $4 billion and $5 billion.
Back when the federal stimulus was first passed, Ben Fried out of our New York office wrote a pretty brutal takedown of the final bill that I re-posted at the LA Streetsblog. Supporters of California High Speed Rail were upset for obvious reasons and I defended Fried's post in the comments section by saying.
But that so much of the negotition was done in Harry Reid's office (tothe point that Pelosi actually pitched a fit about it according toPolitico) and he's already talking about funding for the gamblin' trainto Las Vegas, I am mighty sceptical that much, if any, of that money isgoing to end up being spent on the line we supported last fall. If itdoes, I'll do a mea culpa post and you can all "I told you so'd" me.I've certainly been willing to do them in the past.
Well, let's just say I'm not quite ready to eat crow just yet, but I got it marinating. In this case, the crow would taste awfully good.
