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FRESNO, Calif. – In a congested area of abandoned warehouses, Miguel Arias has evoked a wide strip of land where California's high-speed line, one of the most ambitious and controversial infrastructure projects in California, was emerging. United States.
Son of Mexican farm workers and a newly elected city council member in this sprawling city of the Central Valley, Arias hopes the train will deliver to Fresno the Californian dream that has long since bypassed this impoverished region.
"We have been feeding the country for decades and now have a chance to feed ourselves," said Arias. "This will be the first step in the middle class."
But newly-installed California governor Gavin Newsom, in his first important speech to lawmakers this month, laid the groundwork for the project. The governor announced that the project, which would connect the central valley to Silicon Valley, would be significantly reduced due to exorbitant costs.
For now, the train would begin and end in the central valley, said the governor, making no mention of a connection to the coast, where most of the region's inhabitants reside – and the opportunities available. their.
Mr. Newsom has since tried to go back. But the portion of the rail line leading to Silicon Valley is still underfunded by at least $ 9 billion, and the governor's comments have sparked deeper questions about America's capacity. to see big and work together on complex public works projects, an area that seemed to have bipartisan support. during the last presidential election before it was definitively postponed.
On the contrary, the confusion and recriminations about the high-speed train seem to show that the country's partisan division extends to infrastructure. Newsom's speech led to an animated Twitter exchange with President Trump, which then escalated into a much more serious – and potentially financially disastrous – California dispute over funding. The Trump administration has canceled or is trying to recover up to $ 3.5 billion in federal allowances from California.
For Governor Newsom, who has been in power for less than two months, the rail episode was a burning introduction to the nation's fighting political scene of the Trump era. The California media has described the governor's position as incomprehensible, critics have called the project a train for nowhere and a mocking cartoon depicting a high-speed train filled with cows.
"He virtually killed the project with this speech," said Ray LaHood, secretary of transport in the Obama administration. "I was shocked – it was a short-term vision and no rail vision."
Although the California project has received the most attention, other states are considering high-speed rail projects. Governor Jay Inslee of Washington proposed an international high-speed line that would link Vancouver to Seattle and Portland. Private investors are asking for a train from Dallas to Houston. But no other project is more advanced than that of California.
Mr. Newsom has campaigned to tackle the extreme inequality of the state. But his position in the high-speed train seemed at least to highlight the fact that California's new division lies between east and west, more than north and south.
California may seem best placed to carry out large infrastructure projects: with sufficient revenues, the state is controlled by a single political party and its citizens regularly vote to raise their own taxes for various projects and governments. service.
"California has built the world's largest water system, one of the best road networks, an excellent university system," said Dan Richard, who stepped down as chairman of the board of directors. rail project Tuesday. "When did we lose confidence in our ability to do these things?"
Even before Mr. Newsom's comments, the project was disrupted by repeated delays and cost overruns. The total cost, estimated at about $ 45 billion when funding was approved by voters a decade ago, has now reached $ 98 billion.
The California High Speed Rail Authority, which manages the project, was created 23 years ago. Meanwhile, China has built 16,000 miles of high-speed rail.
The first phase of the California project, which will extend 120 km in the central valley, will not be completed until 2022.
Even as it continues, the project is likely to face more legal challenges and oppositions. Although surveys suggest that it still enjoys majority support, particularly among young voters, many state voters, particularly Republican pockets, oppose it.
"I think the high-speed train died in California in this form," said Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican who represents Bakersfield. "The words of the governors have been rightly recognized, it is too expensive and has taken too much time."
But the project also has disinterested skeptics who say they are not convinced that it made economic sense in the first place.
"I am a big supporter of infrastructure investments for many reasons," said Lawrence H. Summers, Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton. "But in the case of the California high-speed train, I am very skeptical as to whether the numbers work in terms of benefits exceeding costs."
The places where the high-speed train has been most successful, Summers notes, in Asia and Europe, are more densely populated and therefore more conducive. America is an essentially suburban country where most commuters travel alone to work. "America is the country of urban sprawl," he said.
The need for increased investment in infrastructure has been one of the few remaining bipartisan issues in America, although left-to-right disagree on whether public or private money will be funded. President Barack Obama has made the reinvestment in roads, bridges and power plants the cornerstone of the 2009 economic stimulus package and, in the 2016 presidential campaign, the only clash between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump over the 39; infrastructure their administrations would spend more on that. The question unites truckers and train enthusiasts, unions and Wall Street, economists left and right.
And yet, when it comes to spending money – and actually building things – very little progress has been made. After a brief surge during the recession, public investment has hovered around 3.3% of GDP in recent years, the lowest level since the 1940s. bridges and railways have aged, while proposals for new projects are delayed by political intransigence and legal deadlines.
The short-term electoral cycles of the United States, especially in the House of Representatives, are not synchronized with the time required to build such gigantic projects, making them politically vulnerable.
In California, Republicans and Democrats have been promoting the high-speed train for decades before the first shovel was unveiled in 2015. Pete Wilson, a Republican governor, signed in 1996 the law creating the California High-Rail Rail Authority. Another Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, put project funding on the vote in 2008. Later, Gov. Jerry Brown, Democrat, became the biggest supporter and supporter of the project. In the meantime, polls have shown that Republican support for project erosion.
"There are so many obstacles to changing the status quo and litigation opportunities at every step that we are really looking at 20 years of consultants, lawyers and bureaucrats before these projects start. It is almost impossible to maintain strong political and social goals. taxpayer support during this period, "said Jennifer Hernandez, a partner at Holland & Knight, who leads the West Coast law firm's environmental and land-use practices.
Mr. Richard, chairman of the board of directors of the High Speed Railway Authority for seven years, said the main hurdles to high-speed rail have been the complexity of the acquisition of land and a series of tedious lawsuits.
The wealthy suburb of Atherton, in the suburbs of San Francisco, has partnered with a nut farmer and the Kings County Supervisory Board to demand that the project be stopped because it would not respect not the financing conditions of the project: the train would connect San Francisco to Los Angeles. in 2 hours 40 minutes. In October Judge ruled that the project could go ahead.
A dozen lawsuits related to environmental aspects of the projects, including a lawsuit filed by the city of Atherton that stated, among other things, that the railway authorities had not properly analyzed where the train was to be raised along the way. of the San Francisco Peninsula. A court ruled that the analysis was done correctly.
Richard said California's stringent environmental regulations had become a pretext for anyone wanting to stop the project.
"The environmental process has become a matter of litigation protection," he said. "You're going to be sued, so you have to get going, process after process, study after study to make sure someone will not find a foot for a dispute."
Mr. Arias, a city council member whose district is full of homeless camps, toxic dumps from old sold-out factories and the stench of carcasses turned into tallow, sees the train at high speed as a social scale for thousands of families. for young people to connect to the thriving economy of the San Francisco Bay Area through jobs and education. According to him, it is also an environmental blow that could reduce car traffic in a region of the state that suffers from severe air pollution.
Fresno ranks second in the country after Detroit in terms of concentrated poverty – poor residents living in extremely poor neighborhoods – according to the Brookings Institution.
"It's extremely personal," said Arias while driving his electric car in his district. "When people talk so critically about high-speed rail – calling it a boondoggle or something like that – they do not see every day the crisis neighborhoods that would benefit."
"To remove that would be inconceivable," he said.
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