Click here to read Thompson's letter.
Senator Tony Strickland (R-Huntington Beach), Vice Chair of the Senate Transportation Committee, is once again raising serious concerns about the California High-Speed Rail and the Authority’s 2026 draft Business Plan. Even Lou Thompson, former chair of the CHSRA Peer Review Group, wrote a critical letter to legislative leaders in March, outlining a series of concerns about the project’s direction and underlying assumptions.
Senator Strickland, a long-time critic of the HSR, released this statement:
“The nonpartisan LAO points out that the CHSRA has arbitrarily changed the scope of the program and costs, ignores specific requirements that the California State Legislature has imposed on the project, assumes significant changes in state law, and once again, dramatically changes cost estimates.
“Even if the Authority accounts for these requirements, it still lacks a clear funding plan to complete the project. The San Francisco–Los Angeles line is now estimated at $231 billion.
“Overall, the CHSRA has produced a completely unrealistic business plan. This is why we need to pull the plug on this wasteful spending project because it will go down as the worst public project in world history.”
The Senate Transportation Committee will hold an informational hearing following the adjournment of the Senate floor session to discuss the Authority’s proposal.
Background on HSR:
The High-Speed Rail project is now projected to cost up to $231 billion from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which is nearly seven times the roughly $33 billion estimate presented to voters in 2008. Originally envisioned to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles by 2020, the project has faced significant delays. Today, the state is focused on an initial 171-mile segment between Merced and Bakersfield, with about 119 miles currently under active construction. That segment is now targeted for completion in the early 2030s.