Another Nail in Pringle’s High Speed Rail Coffin?
The Voice of OC is reporting that the Feds are finally getting tired of Anaheim Soon-to-be-ex-Mayor-for-Hire Curt Pringle’s misdirection of High Speed Rail priorities to feather his own Anaheim nest.
It appears that the Feds have suddenly realized that they require that the initial track be laid in the Central Valley – not in a stretch of territory already covered by existing rail and commuter lines, and where a high speed rail line makes virtually no sense.
Good to see the US Gov’t get one right.
In other news, the HSR hired a former Parsons Brinkerhoff executive to be project manager. Hmm. That’s a tentacle that may need to be lopped off.
And finally, more good news: the new Guv is said to intensely dislike Pringle’s HSR shennanigans.We know he got our letter.
So maybe soon Pringle will be off the HSR board althogether. And that would make for an early Christmas.
Interesting…. Turlock will get HSR before Anaheim?
With the Curtster soon leaving the OCTA Board and his conflicts of interests behind, it’s now time for Shawn Nelson and the other more honest Board members (how about YOU, Moorlach?) to begin the defunding process for Pringle’s ARTIC edifice and anything to do with High-Speed Rail.
As the HSR project is now under the complete control of the Democrats and servicing their interests in the Central Valley (save freight — you’ll never see one of these people movers carrying a load of lettuce to some place useful as the Fresno-Merced commuting run will certainly take precedent), Anaheim and the OCTA need to get the message that HSR’s never coming anywhere close to ARTIC and therefore its construction is useless (unless we need a generation of blog-posted photos of its empty corridors and vacant retail shops). It’s already failed as a “public-private partnership” as the smart investment money won’t go near it (one of Pringle’s failures that few remember).
How about it Shawn? Use this money for something useful and disabuse the OCTA Board of a useless waste of money. Maybe you could even roll back that last bus fare increase?
Right on Steinway. If HSR makes sense at all it certainly isn’t in Anaheim, where commuters can easily catch a train to LA, where it’s southern terminus should be.
http://highspeedboondoggle.com/
Who wants a lawn sign?
Cynthia Ward reminds up in a Red County post today (http://www.redcounty.com/content/high-speed-rail-getting-hit-all-directions) that Nelson’s already made a recommendation as to where Pringle can put his train.
It’s perfectly reasonable that two extraordinarily expensive commuter rail systems (Metrolink and BART) NOT be made redundant and also try to share revenue with the HSR debacle.
And no one’s yet taken the temperature in the House either as the Transportation Committee, now to be led by a Republican since Oberstar got himself unelected, probably won’t be inclined to be handing out train funding to true BLUE California, especially since Pringle and Richard Katz have already wasted some serious cash and the press is finally getting on their asses.
And btw, where were these two at yesterday’s CHSRA Board meeting? Damn, another misses stipend for them. Cowards.
http://www.fresnobee.com/2010/11/03/2145003/key-gop-lawmaker-cool-to-high.html
Right you are, the new Speaker-elect is already talking about putting the money elsewhere. So if it stays in CA it goes north, or it can be pulled altogether and sent elsewhere. However, I am not relying on that, I am going to keep pushing to educate people until this is dead, who else is in? We have talked about this before but the election spread bandwidth too thin. Let’s get to work on this. Contact me directly if anyone wants to help.
Unfortunately, with the way the repuglicans have controlled Orange County for so long, the prophecy seemed to be “if it seems too bad to be true, it probably is”. Hopefully, that era is over and the Anaheim-LA HSR idiocy is coming to an end.
This should be fun to watch as Nelson dismantles Pringles baby, payback time in Anaheim.
I see that Norby is on the Assembly Transportation Committee. Has anyone asked him about his views on this train wreck?
I’d guess that Norby (assuming he’s sober) will go along with whoever shows up with the biggest bag of cash. He had to have been in Disney’s pocket as Anaheim’s Supervisor.
Another HSR backer that needs to shut up is Pringle’s pal, big Lucy Dunn. As head of the OC Business Council, she’ll back anything that favors the engineering firms that are members of her faux Chamber of Commerce and anything that favors infrastructure building over property rights. She’s dangerous in that she sits on the State Transportation Commission