California High Speed Rail Authority Announces Over 13,000 Jobs Have Been Created

The California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) announced on Tuesday that over 13,000 construction jobs have now been created for the project, with a majority of them in the Central Valley.

According to the CHSRA, 4,222 jobs alone have been created in Fresno County, along with 2,538 in Kern County. They also noted that more than 10,000 jobs in total have been created in the past five years. Every day on average around 1,400 people are dispatched to high-speed rail construction sites in the Central Valley every day. The CHSRA also noted that most of the jobs were union, with many of them also going directly to “individuals from disadvantaged communities.”

“High-speed rail construction has continued to flourish, creating good paying construction jobs for men and women across the Valley,” said Chuck Rojas of the Fresno, Madera, Kings and Tulare Counties Building and Construction Trades Council on Tuesday. “As the number of construction sites continues to grow, so does the need of a growing workforce to bring the nation’s first high-speed rail system to California. When construction grows, these workers and their families thrive, and we couldn’t build this system without them.”

However, the job report comes only days after a disastrous  Senate Transportation Committee meeting where CHRSA CEO Brian Kelly told lawmakers that several billion dollars more was needed to finish the Bakersfield to Merced leg by 2030-2033, with another $100 billion more needed to complete the initial San Francisco to Los Angeles route. Kelly was grilled by lawmakers from both parties over the project only further ballooning to the higher end of recent estimates, for a project that was supposed to cost only $33 billion in total and be complete, by the latest, by 2028.

“It’s been tough to fund a project with something that has an expiration date,” said Kelly last week. “We’re doing it in building blocks. We’re giving you the portions we think we can get done with the funding we have.”

13,000 jobs in Central California, $100 billion still needed

With a sudden positive announcement coming out so soon, experts told the Globe on Tuesday that the announcement was likely put out to help deflect from the recent negative coverage of the $100 billion meeting in Sacramento.

“This is classic damage control,” said media specialist Rick Gonzalez to the Globe on Tuesday. “The CHRSA got a largely negative reception for how $100 billion more is needed, at least, to complete this project well past the due date. And this is what a team then does. They try to find a positive story to bring out soon after. California needs job growth, especially in the Central part of the state, so they say ‘Look at how many jobs we created! We hit an arbitrary milestone!’ and push all those negative stories on that meeting out of the way.”

Another, transportation industry accountant Derrick Clark, added, “The announcement also fails to mention that all of those jobs are either only temporary or that they are going to be moved farther away as the track gets completed. They have these construction workers so happy to have work and being able to work close to home. What is that going to look like in a few years? Longer commutes or out of a job. 13,000 jobs. That’s great. How many of them are permanent? How many aren’t short term or contract construction jobs?”

“They don’t say. This is one of the few god things they can say about all this, bringing jobs out to the Central Valley. They needed to cycle out that whole disastrous hearing with Kelly, and even the announcement they replaced it with  wasn’t too great. If they really want to impress people, bring costs down. Bring an opening date sooner. Give out a date where the system will be profitable by. Right now, this isn’t even a white elephant. At least with that you get a stadium to use or a building to look at. You get something. Right now, this is tens and billions for some construction jobs and the possibility that a train will be running from Bakersfield to Merced in 6 years.”

More on the High-Speed rail system is likely to come out soon.