We should thank Governor Moonbeam for reminding us how lucky we are to be Floridians and not Californians.
I'm talking about California's high-speed rail system -- a serious legacy issue for Gov. Jerry Brown. California accepted its share of the $8 billion stimulus money to get the system started and built. Florida, remember -- Gov. Rick Scott in particular -- turned the federal money down.
Well, there's news in the California bullet train saga. And you might not have heard it. With the focus on cover-ups in Washington, noncelebrity California news goes unnoticed these days.
Seems Gov. Brown recently took his tin cup to China, hitting up the great wall of cash on Beijing Financial Street. He was looking for a $75 billion loan.
Yes, Jerry Brown. In China. For $75 billion.
Ask yourself. What kind of Jack goes looking to borrow that kind of money from the Giant in the Beanstalk? The answer is, a desperate governor bound and determined to finish this friendless monster of a high-speed rail project, a project that hasn't attracted a single serious U.S. investor -- a creature already awash in charges of cronyism, already criticized for its "bait and switch" management plan, flawed ridership projections, misleading estimates on how many jobs it would create and cost overruns that won't quit.
California has $13.5 billion in pocket to finish a rail line conservatively expected to sign off at $100 billion.
The idea in 2009 was to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco. Which made perfect sense. Japan's famous bullet train between Tokyo and Osaka serves a population three times as large as LA and San Fran combined and carries 130 million people. The California system will need a large population base if it's going to be profitable.
But politics got in the way. The first leg to be built is a 25-mile stretch through the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, between Merced and Fresno. The total population of all of San Joaquin County is 685,306. It's the least problematical segment in the 800 miles between the two big cities. The train doesn't have a hope of paying for itself.
It's going to cost $985,142,530 to build those 25 miles. You do the math. Looks like it works out at just under $40 million per mile. Oh, yes and by the way -- the contractor who won the bid just happens to be the firm Sen. Dianne Feinstein's husband works for.
In fact, a recent Reason Foundation study found that the California high-speed rail system will lose between $124 million and $373 million a year.
Columnist and Stanford professor Thomas Sowell wrote in December that if the high-speed train had started where Brown and President Obama wanted it to go, between the two mega coastal cities, environmentalists and the politicians connected with environmentalists "would lie down on the tracks to stop the trains. Instead, California gets federal taxpayer dollars and Brown and Obama look like heroes."
Survey after in-state survey shows that if Californians could walk back the Proposition 1A (high-speed rail) vote, they would. In fact, San Franciscans' recent, resounding vote to spend nearly $1 million on bike trails was assessed by some in the West Coast media as a protest against the high-speed rail boondoggle.
In reality, California is way past protest. Now it has China. Maybe, anyway. Certainly its governor is dug in enough on high-speed rail that he actually would dash to Asia on an investor search.
Let's look at Rick Scott in contrast.
Let's get away from the health insurance debate for a minute and remember the Rick Scott we knew in 2011 -- complete newcomer to any elected office, let alone the governor's office, in a politically nuanced state with a crushing 12 percent unemployment rate.
Remember the incredible pressure he was under to take federal stimulus money to build an Orlando-to-Tampa high-speed rail line. The "jobs governor" would rather throw away thousands of jobs, his critics railed, than accept money to help a starving economy and put people back to work.
Scott promised to consider the high-speed rail plan if it was right for Florida and could be paid for without tax dollars.
He considered it, and on three counts looked the gift horse in Washington in the mouth. He turned the money down, concluding the Central Florida high-speed rail line was a bad risk for Floridians: its cost to taxpayers, even bringing in private companies, could approach $3 billion; ridership and revenue projections looked to be overly optimistic; and if the federal government decided to shut the project down, the state would have to return the $2.4 billion.
Some of Florida politics' heaviest hitters -- including the most influential newspaper editorial boards in the state -- attacked the governor's decision relentlessly.
That was then. You don't hear much from the Obama administration eulogizing or pining for high-speed rail anymore. Notice that? The California experience has been a lesson in how not to go if you're a left-coast state wounded and left bleeding by the recession.
Rick Scott was right. He won't get much credit for his bold and principled stand on that issue, but he was right, Jerry Brown was wrong. Two governors, two very different philosophies of how to serve citizens, certainly two very different trips to China.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at (850) 727-0859.
