Since California is dumping their plans for building high speed rail between LA and San Francisco, President Trump has decided to keep the remaining nearly 1 billion dollars set aside for the project and wants the 2.5 billion, California has already squandered on it.
Gov Newsom is none too happy about it it, but I doubt the president really cares what Newsom likes or doesn’t like. Newsom considers the money to belong to California, even though California has not lived up to it’s end of the bargain. The Money was awarded to Ca based on the high speed rail project that was to be completed by 2022.
That is now impossible.
The president had other ideas, and took to Twitter to demand that California return the money. Newsom rejected that demand, insisting: “This is CA’s money, allocated by Congress for this project. We’re not giving it back.”
But on Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) sent a letter to the California High-Speed Rail Authority, informing it that it was terminating its agreement with the state and therefore would refuse to provide the state with $928,620,000 allocated to the high-speed rail project.
The FRA listed several factors informing its decision, including the likelihood that the high-speed rail would not be completed by 2022, as contemplated by the original agreement. The state’s high-speed rail authority had also failed, according to the FRA, to provide “timely and satisfactory financial reports” to the federal government.
The Los Angeles Times reported additionally that the Department of Transportation said it was “actively exploring every legal option” to recover the other $2.5 billion granted by the federal government to California for the project.