Dan Walters: California's high-speed train losing public support

Has California's bullet train project – or pipe dream – finally run off the track? Voters think so.

When the California High-Speed Rail Authority released a much-revised "business plan" for the project that doubled its cost, it won praise in many quarters, including this one, for moving from abject fantasy into at least semi-reality.

The revisions were largely the work of two new rail authority members, Dan Richard and Michael Rossi, whom Gov. Jerry Brown appointed to pull the project back from the verge of political death because of ridership and financing assumptions that were ludicrously unrealistic.

However, the new plan didn't silence opposition among those living along its route. It also continued to draw sharp criticism from the Legislature's budget analyst, and – most importantly – its eye-popping cost eroded an already thin veneer of public support.

That erosion is starkly evident in a new statewide Field Poll that found overwhelming support for resubmitting the project to voters and overwhelming opposition to building it.

More than three-fourths of registered voters said they should be given another chance to vote on the project and, by a 2-1 margin, they want it to be killed.

Or to put it another way, should Brown and the Legislature continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the bullet train, they would be defying the very clear wishes of those who elected them to office.

Coincidentally, the Field Poll results were distributed to its news media clients Monday just minutes before two state Senate committees began a review of the revised business plan, in which legislators expressed both support for the concept and skepticism that it is financially viable.

The projected cost has now ballooned to nearly $100 billion, but the state has only a $9.95 billion bond issue and a few billion in federal funds to build a test track in the San Joaquin Valley.

The rail authority is hoping that more federal money will allow it to build an initial operational segment and that private investors then will be impressed with its potential and put up the rest of the money.

The Legislative Analyst's Office, however, suggests that even with revision, the plan does not comply with conditions of the bond issue on financing and completion of environmental clearances, and that building the San Joaquin Valley segment is probably not worth its $6 billion cost.

Richard, Rossi and other rail authority officials continued to defend the project as lawmakers peppered them with skeptical questions about the bullet train's prospects and mentioned revelations in The Bee and the San Francisco Chronicle about the authority's lavish spending on contracts to political insiders to positively influence public opinion.

The Field Poll's results would indicate that it was money down a rat hole.