Mercury News editorial: California high-speed rail is high-spending folly [View all]

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California's high-speed rail project has left the station, and we're taking bets on how far it goes. The smart money is on: Not very.

While the plan's origins go back more than a decade, high-speed rail has become Gov. Jerry Brown's would-be legacy. But if all we end up with is some really spiffy railroad track in the Central Valley, which is the best bet at this point, it may become Jerry Brown's folly -- especially as people see tens of millions of dollars each year coming out of the state general fund to pay interest on the $4.5 billion in bonds the Legislature authorized last week.

That money should go to schools, children's health care and other services that are wasting away amid continuing budget deficits. And even if the state spends all $9 billion in bonds voters authorized in 2008, it will build only a fraction of the project, now estimated at $69 billion (but who's counting). The rest of the money is expected to come from imaginary federal grants and pipe-dream private investment. Perhaps those sources will come through, but objective analysts so far see no good reason to think so.

Last week's vote was the Legislature's last clean chance to dump this project. Now there will be the usual lawsuits and other challenges that go with any major public works project, as staff writer Mike Rosenberg reported in Wednesday's newspaper, and there might be another ballot initiative at some point. But an initiative can't roll back contracts already signed or take back money already spent. All that can happen now is a decision to stop spending more -- and not building more. That is the likeliest scenario, at least for the foreseeable future.

full: http://www.mercurynews.com/editorials/ci_21052954

Thoughts about this? The Merc editorial board is NOT like those at the Washington Times or Wall Street Journal, so I think it is quite telling when this newspaper is editorializing against high speed rail. Maybe the Merc is doing this to keep selling papers and avoid a mass exodus of conservative subscribers?