LAEDC SAYS CALIFORNIA HIGH-SPEED RAIL PROJECT IS TOO BIG, TOO EXPENSIVE AND BAD TIMING

CEO Lee Harrington says, "California cannot afford the diversion of necessary infrastructure money for a high-cost high-speed rail system, which duplicates existing relatively low-cost airline service within the state.

Los Angeles, CA - "The California high-speed rail project is ill-timed," said CEO Lee Harrington, Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC).

"The issue is not whether the High Speed Rail Project should be placed under the California Department of Transportation. The issue is whether high-speed rail is affordable given all of our other infrastructure needs. This available money should be spent on our bus and rail systems for now, and we should re-visit the high-speed rail funding after the State budget crisis is clearly behind us."

"With the State's basic infrastructure deficit growing daily, we need to carefully prioritize our infrastructure needs and spending," explained Harrington. "California's budget crisis has made it all the more clear that available funding will be far short of our total infrastructure needs. Southern California alone is expected to add more than five million people in the next 20 years. This will require the infrastructure support equivalent to two cities of Chicago."

Harrington says California's success in international trade and logistics will also continue to require infrastructure support for movement of goods and the related jobs in the region.

"We will need to add new regional transportation infrastructure, such as bus and light rail systems, to serve commuters and lessen the congestion on our freeways. California and particularly Southern California cannot afford the diversion of critical infrastructure dollars for a high-cost high-speed rail system, which only duplicates existing relatively low-cost airline service throughout the state. Moreover, the legal challenges by people along the selected routes of the proposed high-speed rail system will go on for a lifetime. Nimby's will come out of the woodwork on this one!"

"The National Bureau of Economic Research has not declared the recession officially over, yet," Harrington said. "We still have the economic impacts of "September 11th Attacks" rattling around. If you want to know where real pain is, just go to a hotel in San Francisco or visit the Boeing commercial aircraft facility up in Seattle. Now that's pain! Also, you've got the corporate scandals of Enron and WorldCom, and everyone now admits there was a Stock Market Bubble. In addition, the tech and telecom crash was very harmful for California. Now we have the threat of war with Iraq and state budget problems. We only expect a 1.9 percent growth rate nationally in 2003, when previous forecasts were for 2.8% or 2.9%."

"While the idea of high-speed rail service in California looks appealing on the surface, the land acquisition process and the resulting environmental problems make it better suited as a "SimCity" project, not a real world transportation solution at this point in time," concluded Harrington.