‘Why Don’t We Solve Other Problems?’: Doug LaMalfa Slams CA’s ‘Wasteful’ High Speed Rail Spending

Forbes Breaking News

During remarks on the House floor prior to the Congressional recess, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) slammed high speed rail spending.

Transcript

00:00I'm here to address the situation of California's wasteful spending.

00:05A new bit of information has come out that the interim segment of high-speed rail

00:11that's going to be built between a town called Merced down to another one near Bakersfield called Shafter.

00:19This segment would end in an almond orchard out there in the middle of nowhere.

00:25The price for that segment has gone up to about $38.5 billion.

00:30Just for this segment, which is going to be in a low population area comparatively,

00:35when the whole concept for California high-speed rail was one that would go from San Francisco to L.A.

00:41The population centers.

00:43The original cost, I'll remind you too, when it was placed on the ballot in front of the voters,

00:48was that it would be $33 billion to build the entire system from SF to L.A.,

00:52not just that 150-mile or so segment between Merced and Shafter.

00:57So who's being shafted in this deal?

01:01Of course, the taxpayers, as always, since in their quest to not let this go, to not let it die,

01:09they're going to continue to seek more and more money for this project.

01:13Now in the 17 years since this was passed and placed on the ballot in front of the voters,

01:18and it went by a very narrow margin, 2% or 3%, to have an initial $9 billion bond of state money go towards

01:26the $33 billion and then the rest would be raised from the private sector,

01:30that price is today seen as $128 billion.

01:33In that 17 years, they've only managed to raise $17 billion or so towards the project in 17 years.

01:42So since the project is about 110 or so billion dollars short,

01:47where are they going to get 110 billion more dollars when it took them 17 years to raise 17?

01:54Where is that going to come from?

01:55California has a scheme called the cap-and-trade tax that taxes the privilege of making carbon dioxide

02:04if you're a manufacturer or some other large entity that

02:08produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct of your industry.

02:14Well, let me remind you, carbon dioxide is only 0.04% of the atmosphere.

02:22All these things being done to cut carbon, including this whole rail project itself,

02:26supposed to be a big carbon saver.

02:30They're chasing a gold that's incredibly small, incredibly out of touch.

02:37So here we are.

02:38They're going to come to Washington asking for more and more money.

02:40So far, two Democrat presidents have given the project about $3.5 billion on one occasion each.

02:48So they're going to fall far short, far short of raising $110 billion more,

02:53since cap-and-trade, as I mentioned, in California only brings in about $1 billion per year of

02:57taxation on CO2, and they've managed to get a couple of $3.5 billion segments from the U.S. government.

03:06So it's a long ways from getting done.

03:09We should be solving other issues in California instead of building this dream rail system,

03:14running through the middle of communities, having to take so much land by eminent domain,

03:18messing up farmland, messing up the middle of the cities that it's going through,

03:24having to take out a high school in one case, a rendering plant in another case.

03:28All these things that are making it actually worse for people so they can have the idea of,

03:32oh, we've got to be like China and have a high-speed rail system.

03:35It isn't working out in California. It won't work out. The price is horrendous.

03:40And the tickets themselves for people to be able to ride the train

03:43are going to be a lot more expensive than what they're trying to tell us they will be,

03:46especially when you have low-cost airline tickets like Southwest and others going back and forth

03:52pretty often.

03:52Why don't we solve other problems like California's water issues, water supply?

03:58For that kind of money, you could build 26 new dams that would hold who knows how many acre feet,

04:04many, many millions of acre feet. Let's just try and build two or three dams that will hold

04:09three, four, five, six million acre feet and solve California's water problems,

04:13solve California's continued transfer of agricultural water to fish supplies.

04:19We could actually get something useful done. And also people that use the roads and the highways

04:23and the freeways would probably like to see some of the potholes. For example,

04:26it's always gets worn into the right lane of a freeway. Maybe we get some of those fixed.

04:30Maybe we could add lanes here and there where there's more dense traffic with a fraction of that

04:35money because no one's going to ride this thing for the cost and for the time it takes to still get

04:40back and forth between SF and LA. And they don't have a car at the other end.

04:44You might as well take the airplane and save money and get there even faster.

04:48Mr. Speaker, of all the things we could be investing in, whether it's water supply

04:54or managing our forests better so we don't have to burn them down every year and suffer

04:58with air quality that we have. Each year, there's a million acre fire, including the Dixie fire in

05:03my district about four years ago that hit this town, the smoke plume hit this town because we don't

05:08manage the forest. There's so much other things we could be doing besides high speed rail. I yield back.

05:11The chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona, Mr. Siskimani for five minutes.

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