High-Speed Rail Shuffle: Bay Area Cronies Board the Boondoggle While the Central Valley Gets the Shaft

Fresno developer Tom Richards spent sixteen years trying to steer California’s high-speed rail project toward something resembling a real outcome. Last week he stepped down as board chair of the California High-Speed Rail Authority. Governor Gavin Newsom’s response: appoint two Bay Area political insiders—Steve Kawa of Cloverdale and Jason Elliott of San Francisco—to fill vacancies left by Richards and Sacramento attorney Nancy Miller.

That tells you everything about where Sacramento’s priorities actually live.

Approximately $15 billion spent. Zero miles of operational high-speed track. And now the oversight board that was supposed to hold this project honest just traded a Central Valley voice for two more loyalists from the governor’s old San Francisco network. Kawa served as Newsom’s chief of staff during his tenure as San Francisco’s mayor. Elliott was Newsom’s policy advisor in city hall and later his deputy chief of staff in Sacramento from 2022 to 2024. Neither of them has spent meaningful time in the communities absorbing the construction dust, the noise, and the debt.

I moved to California in 1990 when housing was still within reach for working families and government occasionally felt obligated to deliver on its promises. Thirty-five years later, I’m watching the same machine turn the 2008 voter-approved commitment of a $33 billion bullet train completed by 2020 into a concrete-and-studies festival with almost nothing to show for it. The Authority’s own current business plan now puts the total cost at $126.3 billion. Critics using the unoptimized scenario in the Authority’s own data land at $231 billion. Either figure represents a catastrophic failure of public finance, and either one demands an honest explanation Sacramento has never offered.

The money didn’t evaporate. It went to consultants, environmental reviews that outlast election cycles, land acquisitions, and a change-order machine that ran up more than $2.3 billion on 597 amendments alone as of November 2025, nearly 7% of the original estimate in contract modifications before a single train has run. The Central Valley, where the first segment was supposed to prove the concept, keeps being treated as an afterthought. Richards, a Fresno native who lived near the route and understood its communities, is out. Two political consultants from the Bay Area who ran Newsom’s offices are in. The directional signal from Sacramento could not be clearer: decisions will keep flowing toward the coast, not toward the communities bearing the actual consequences.

This isn’t pure incompetence. It’s the predictable output of single-party governance married to organized labor’s campaign finance apparatus. Unions backed this project because it meant thousands of good-paying jobs funded by taxpayers. That’s a reasonable arrangement in theory, except when the jobs become permanent and the train never arrives. The same labor interests that helped finance Democratic campaigns now occupy chairs at the table deciding where the next billion flows. I’ve spent three decades structuring private credit deals and advising family offices on capital allocation. No private-sector project I’ve ever worked on would survive this level of delay and cost inflation without someone being fired or investors pulling capital. In Sacramento, that performance earns you a board appointment.

Consider the opportunity cost. California’s 2022 five-year maintenance plan documented $84 billion in deferred infrastructure needs, more than $61 billion of it in transportation alone. The state’s roads, bridges, and water systems are deteriorating while money chases a train that, by the Authority’s own revised plan, won’t run a full San Francisco-to-Los Angeles route until approximately 2040. Any of those pressing needs would have produced measurable, usable results years ago. High-speed rail has produced press releases, union gratitude, and a permanent excuse for the next appropriation request.

Critics will frame opposition to this project as being “anti-infrastructure.” That’s a lazy argument. Real infrastructure shows up on time, stays within budget, and actually gets used. The Marines taught me that lesson in 1988—mission first, excuses never. California’s rail authority has inverted both priorities. The Authority now says first tracks in the Central Valley are on pace for December 2026, which is essentially the same promise we heard in 2015, with different names on the press release. The original scope—San Francisco to Anaheim—was quietly narrowed to Merced to Bakersfield under Newsom in 2019. Lou Thompson, who formerly chaired the independent Legislative Peer Review Group, wrote to state leaders in March calling the entire effort a “dead end.” The Trump administration’s Federal Railroad Administration reached much the same conclusion, recommending termination of approximately $4 billion in federal grants in June 2025 after finding no viable path to revenue service.

The fix isn’t another study or another insider appointment. Require the Authority to meet hard, publicly reported milestones—track laid, ridership projections validated, costs held to the current business plan—or trigger an automatic funding freeze. Redirect unspent bond money and cap-and-trade allocations to the infrastructure Californians actually use today: roads, bridges, ports, and housing. Audit every contract for union favoritism and political connections. Cap board terms so no one converts a gubernatorial appointment into a patronage career.

I’ve watched this state slide from aspirational to absurd under one-party rule. High-speed rail isn’t an isolated failure, it’s the operating model. Accountability is optional; cronyism runs the calendar. Fresno just lost its board chair. The rest of California is still waiting for the train. Until Sacramento stops handing out board seats to Bay Area insiders and starts delivering actual results, the only high-speed thing in this state will be the exodus of the people and capital who’ve finally run out of patience.