California Dems push ‘ridiculous’ bill to bury High Speed Rail details

Gavin Newsom is desperately trying to keep secret key details of California’s troubled High Speed Rail project — now costing taxpayers about $215 million per mile.

The California Post has obtained records detailing 58 separate construction projects built over the past eight years along the 171-mile Central Valley route running between Merced and Bakersfield.

Central Valley lawmaker Alexandra Macedo likened the incomplete concrete structures to ”Stonehenge”, and said her rural constituents were furious about the waste involved in the project.

”What have we gotten for those $15 billion? Lots of fancy videos and graphics meant to convince you this is still a viable project,” she said.

The High Speed Rail project was initially projected to cost $33 billion and connect Los Angeles to San Francisco when it was approved by voters in November 2008, with full service supposed to begin in the 2020s.

Those ambitions have since been wildly scaled back as costs ballooned. The state is now projecting a reduced Central Valley line between Merced and Bakersfield to open in 2032 at a cost of $36.7 billion.

Newsom has already committed an additional $21 billion to that smaller segment alone.

Merced and Bakersfield have a combined population of roughly 500,000, meaning the cost of adding high-speed rail service works out to about $22,000 per person, based on state ridership estimates.

Other Central Valley stops would include Fresno and Madera.

Estimates for eventually connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles hover around $135 billion, but critics say the full route is increasingly unlikely to ever be completed.

The soaring figures help explain why Democratic lawmakers are now pushing legislation that would shield High Speed Rail audit records from public scrutiny — a move critics describe as an attempt to conceal the true scale of the multibillion-dollar money pit.

”At the very moment we finally start ramping up efforts to figure out what happened to all this money, they’re taking extraordinary action to hide records related to High Speed Rail,” Rep. Kevin Kiley, a longtime critic of the project, told The Post.

”The facts speak for themselves.”

State Transportation Committee chair Lori Wilson has introduced Assembly Bill 1608, which would allow the rail project’s Inspector General to withhold reports if they describe or reveal weaknesses that could be exploited by individuals attempting to harm the interests of the state.

Newsom’s administration has introduced nearly identical, through separate legislation, according to CalMatters.

Assemblymember Macedo, whose Central Valley district overlaps with parts of the planned rail corridor, blasted the proposal as an outrageous effort to silence critics.

”We want to know where our taxpayer dollars are going,” she said. ”And now the California Legislature is hearing that cry and saying, ”Let’s hide more information from taxpayers”.

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”It’s especially disrespectful to the Central Valley, which has dire needs when it comes to safe roads and basic necessities like clean drinking water,” she added.

Newsom traveled to the Central Valley on Tuesday to celebrate what his office called the start of the track-laying phase of High Speed Rail.

‘We’re going to see precisely what you see here — real tracks, real progress,’ Newsom said while posing in front of a freight train.

Kiley, who requested an FBI investigation into the project last year, dismissed the milestone as hollow and described the project as the ”worst public infrastructure failure in US history”

”Every time they try to highlight some milestone, it only underscores what a total disaster this has been.”

A report from the U.S. Department of Transportation last year concluded there was no viable path forward for the project, and President Donald Trump subsequently pulled $2 billion in federal funding.

California officials have since insisted they can raise private money to replace lost federal funds.

A federal Department of Transportation spokesperson told The Post that Californians ”deserve to see the receipts.”

”If eighteen years and billions of dollars have taught us anything, it’s that no one should hold their breath waiting for Gavin Newsom’s train to nowhere to finish.”