Kings County officials are appealing directly to Gov. Jerry Brown to intervene and force a reconsideration of the proposed high-speed rail route that would swing through local farmland.

The letter, dated Thursday, asks Brown to “bring the California High-Speed Rail Authority and Federal Railroad Administration to the table to coordinate the proposed project’s enormous impacts on Kings County as required by the National Environmental Policy Act.”

“Kings County understands your support for the project and also your awareness of the growing criticism of management and increasing costs of the project,” the letter states, going on to refer to recent news reports that quoted Brown as saying he wanted to become personally involved in “working with the Authority to get its act together.”

By “coordinate the proposed project’s enormous impacts on Kings County” the letter may be referring to the minimal impact on farmland that will result from the tracks bypassing Hanford. Kings County may also be hoping to get Gov. Brown to help them convince the Authority to adopt a Highway 99 alignment, despite the enormous costs of doing so (and despite Union Pacific’s longstanding opposition).

Such an alignment isn’t necessarily a bad idea. The problem is that Kings County is not going to get it by following the path they’re currently on. Protesting to the governor is fine, but if they really wanted to put Highway 99 back on the table, they ought to be going out and finding some money to make that happen. I’m speculating here, but if Kings County were to come up with its own cash, that could help change things.

Instead, Kings County is more interested in prepping a lawsuit:

Since then, the county’s coordination strategy has been laying the groundwork for legal challenges to the Authority down the road.

“We’re putting all these issues in the record … By doing that, it will allow us to continue the EIR/EIS process,” [assistant county administrator Deb] West said.

It was always safe to assume that someone in Kings County would sue to block the EIR for the Central Valley segment. Residents there should ask why their tax dollars will foot the bill for a lawsuit that would be filed on behalf of a small group of farmers, at the literal and figurative expense of everyone else in a county whose economic future depends on the HSR link to jobs and economic activity elsewhere in the state.

The U.S. Transportation Department has given the green light to developers of DesertXpress to begin preliminary engineering for the $6 billion, 186-mile high-speed rail project that would link Las Vegas with Victorville, Calif.

The approval, known as a record of decision, is the final step in the arduous process of preparing an environmental impact statement on the controversial project.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office issued a news release Tuesday announcing the record of decision.

This “announcement is about one thing: creating good-paying jobs right here in Nevada,” the Nevada Democrat said in the release. “This major step forward for the privately sponsored DesertXpress project will create more than 32,000 jobs in Southern Nevada and boost our economy by providing another way for tourists to visit and enjoy this great state.”

One of the key issues left open in the proposed route was the alignment near the Mojave National Preserve. The vast majority of the route would follow alongside Interstate 15. But near the Preserve, just south of the Nevada border, things get tricky. The Preserve, a wildlife refuge, and a proposed solar power plant all get in the way. Alignment 4A would thread the needle, running close to I-15, but cuts through some protected areas. Alignment 4C is 6 miles longer, but avoids most of the problems (though not entirely). The FRA, after soliciting feedback from the agencies involved, prefers 4A, but only if legislative action happens to make it possible. If not, it’s 4C:

Stakeholder agencies in the area have recommended selection of Segment 4A over Segment 4C. In a February 2011 letter to FRA, the NPS acknowledged the lack of legislative authority at present to grant such a ROW, but indicated the NPS’s preference for Segment 4A because the vicinity of Segment 4A would adhere more closely to the I-15 corridor than Segment 4C and would traverse lands that have been largely disturbed, unlike portions of Segment 4C. In addition, in its April 2011 BO, the USFWS recommended that FRA select Segment 4A over Segment 4C, citing that Segment 4A would result in far fewer impacts to desert tortoise and would result in less fragmentation/disturbance of desert tortoise habitat relative to Segment 4C. Segment 4B was not chosen as part of the Selected Alternative because of the insurmountable conflict of this alternative with a solar energy project.

And here’s a map that shows this a bit more clearly:

With an ROD, DesertXpress is now the closest to construction of any true HSR project in America, including the SF-LA HSR route. But the bigger question is where DesertXpress will get the money to begin construction. They appear to be pinning their hopes on a federal loan:

DesertXpress officials said they were encouraged by the publication of the record of decision, which would enable the Federal Railroad Administration to review a $5.9 billion federal loan application.

In an emailed statement, a representative of the company said, “With the continued support of federal, state and local leaders, DesertXpress is committed to becoming our country’s first true high-speed rail line.”

It remains entirely unclear where the money for that loan would come from. Congress does not appear to be in a mood to help. Senator Harry Reid remains a big DesertXpress backer, but the project may have to look overseas for help.

DesertXpress also needs to make sure that Palmdale remains part of the SF-LA route. A Grapevine alignment that cuts out Palmdale would really screw with DesertXpress’s plans to cross the desert and link up with the California HSR route there.

Will DesertXpress break ground early next year, as they claim? We’ll see. With a ROD in hand, they are as well-positioned as any HSR project in the US to get underway.

Second, the Sac Bee had an excellent editorial defending the project over the weekend, including a fantastic graphic showing how the SF-LA route compares favorably to the LGV Sud-Est in France. Go look at it!

Of course, one core piece of the LAO’s attack on HSR was their suggestion that California follow the lead of Scott Walker and Chris Christie and demand that we be allowed to use federal rail funds for other purposes, including delaying their expenditure. I predicted that the feds would not go along with this, and that the LAO would have known this if anyone on their staff actually had a clue about HSR.

Today we learn that I was right and the LAO was wrong:

Federal officials say that a 2012 deadline to start construction of a multibillion-dollar high-speed rail system in California is firm and can’t be postponed.

The U.S. Transportation Department said in a letter Wednesday to the California High-Speed Rail Authority that regulators have no authority to change the deadline. The department also says it won’t allow the state to move the first stretch of track from the Central Valley to a coastal city.

The LAO ought to toss out their report and start from scratch, this time with people who actually know a thing or two about HSR, interview people who have worked on HSR, gather stats from other countries (and from the Acela) on HSR, assess the benefits of HSR as well as the costs of not building HSR, and produce a report that actually provides some informed discussion and recommendations that are based in reality and respect what the people of California voted to do.

The report has made the LAO look foolish and uninformed. For the sake of their own credibility, they would be wise to start over. California deserves a well-informed assessment of the HSR project, not an uninformed hit job that is so easily dismissed.

UPDATE: Here’s the full text of the letter from the US Department of Transportation. It leaves no doubt that they are definitively smacking down the LAO. Mac Taylor and Eric Thronson come off looking like chumps.

Kienitz Letter to CHSRA, 5-11

Now would be a good time for the LAO to admit their error and get this right. Instead they appear to be doubling down on their mistakes:

“The letter doesn’t say anything we didn’t know and I don’t think it changes our recommendations at all,” said Eric Thronson, the fiscal and policy analyst who wrote the LAO report. The letter doesn’t rule out changing the starting point for construction if the federal agency was given a compelling reason, and “we don’t think they’ve been asked to do so,” he said.

Thronson is simply wrong here – the LAO explicitly said they were sure that the feds would let the state mess around with the funding:

Seek Flexibility on Use of Federal Funds. We propose that the Legislature direct HSRA to renegotiate the terms of the federal funding awarded to the state by the Federal Rail Administration (FRA). We believe the state must obtain relief from the current federal restrictions on the project if it is to be developed successfully, and therefore that the Legislature should proceed with the project only if this flexibility is obtained from the federal government…

However, we believe it is likely that the federal government would ultimately work with the state to grant more flexibility, for the following reasons.

Eric Thronson and Mac Taylor, the Legislative Analyst, actually believed the feds would grant more flexibility, even though they had steadfastly refused to do that with all other states that had requested it. If I were a state legislator, I’d be pretty pissed off that the LAO, whose job it is to provide informed analysis, fucked up this badly, this obviously.

The LAO wanted the legislature to abandon the project if the feds wouldn’t grant flexibility. Everyone who believes that a Democratic legislature and a Democratic governor – who brought the concept of HSR to California 30 years ago when he was governor – would side with the LAO, Alan Lowenthal and Joe Simitian over Barack Obama, raise your hands. Keep them high where I can see them.

The LAO is facing a serious crisis. Their hard-earned credibility is ebbing away every day they refuse to repudiate their flawed and ridiculous HSR report. They would do well to stop defending their failures, admit their error, and set things right by producing a new, informed study that helps show Californians how to get this project done.

John Mica, who is expected to chair the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, told Reuters in a post-election interview that he would conduct a close review of how money was spent from the 2009 economic stimulus package approved by the Democratic-controlled Congress. He also plans to reevaluate grant programs that bypassed congressional review….

To start, Mica will focus on more than $10 billion in high-speed rail awards and a $1.5 billion transportation construction financing under the so-called TIGER grant program in which funds were sent directly to states on the merit of proposed projects.

“We had unelected officials sitting behind closed doors making decisions without any hearings or without any elected officials being consulted. There was no rational explanation,” Mica said. “I’m going to have a full review of that.”

Mica is playing the Republican game of trying to make the Obama Administration look bad by claiming there’s a scandal where none actually exists. Even though the FRA’s decision-making process in awarding the funding wasn’t at all unusual – it was in fact quite routine – Mica is claiming it was somehow flawed in order to undermine Obama’s re-election prospects as well as undercut the case for public investment in transportation infrastructure.

Mica’s preference, like that of other Republicans, is to toss 110 years of precedent out the door and have the private sector attempt to fund these projects, with some minimal and undefined public partnership:

Mica says he favors high speed rail in regions where it makes economic sense. Trains, he said, must carry enough people and truly reach high speeds as they do in Europe and Asia. Much of the U.S. high speed rail network in the planning stages now would serve short-haul corridors.

OPEN TO PRIVATE INVESTMENT

Mica also said he hopes to craft a six-year transportation spending blueprint by spring, relying less on new federal outlays and featuring plans to attract private investment for road, rail, waterway and other infrastructure improvements.

“I have some infrastructure accounts, loan funds that are unspent. I have money in trust funds that is unspent,” Mica said. “We’ll go through all of these programs. Public-private partnerships — I’ll have much more in that regard.”

Investors, including big public pension funds, will likely embrace Mica’s determination to expedite changes in how the U.S. government finances transportation projects to include private resources.

So this isn’t the worst thing in the world for California’s project, which ought to meet all of Mica’s standards – high ridership, true high speed service, and already intending to make use of PPPs, flawed though they are. We know that CalPERS has already shown interest in owning infrastructure – they bought a stake in London’s Gatwick Airport over the summer – so it stands to reason that the pension funds could be a source of capital investment to continue the California project, perhaps in concert with the proposed funding from China or Japan.

It seems unlikely that the Republican House can simply yank the existing HSR funding. The FRA has already been given the Congressional authorization to spend the money, so it would require a second act of Congress to take that away. And that in turn requires the Senate, still controlled by Democrats, to go along with it, as well as a presidential signature – unless Mica can somehow get a 2/3 vote to override the veto in both the House and the Senate, which I just don’t see happening.

Still, it’s a shame that Republican Congressmen prefer to use our nation’s dire infrastructure and economic recovery needs to grandstand against the White House and to push their ideologically-based preference for PPPs. Unfortunately that’s going to be our reality for the next two years.

Following last week’s announcement of an additional $715 million award for the development of California’s high-speed rail system, federal officials have clarified that the entirety of federal funding California has received so far must be spent in one of the two Central Valley sections of the project.

Which means approximately $4.3 billion in infrastructure investment will be directed somewhere in the region between Merced and Bakersfield.

California High-Speed Rail Authority CEO Roelof van Ark announced today that a letter received Wednesday from Federal Railroad Administrator Joe Szabo outlines the federal agency’s requirement that all federal funds for the project must be directed to either the Merced-to-Fresno or to the Fresno-to-Bakersfield portion of the project. The available funding total incorporates the Authority’s January 2010 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) federal funding award, matched dollar-for-dollar with state funds, and last week’s award of $715 million matched with an additional 30 percent in state funding.

You can read the letter from the FRA’s Joseph Szabo