This is far from surprising, as anyone with a memory longer than a goldfish could tell you that every proposal is under estimated so severely you wonder if anyone in Sacramento owns a calculator.
Water is wet, the sun rises in the East, and any cost estimate that comes out of Sacramento must be multiplied by 5 to be repeated with a straight face.
But this is not the development worthy of the painstakingly selected choice of words which comprise the title for this post; the amazing development is that they stopped.
That's right. They reassessed, loudly announced the discovery they knew from the project's voter approval, and actually stopped what they were doing so they could review their ability to continue funding the project!
This is a huge step forward for California (and a revealing view behind the curtain of the fiscal problems California faces), because it used to be that when a project ran belligerently over budget, there was this song and dance about how they need to reign in spending, and reduce overhead, and reevaluate the project, and absolutely nothing official interrupted anything about the project. It just kept chugging along as if the politicians' words carried as much weight against the project as they did outside the political echo chamber. Then, years later, the project would be reevaluated, "discovered" to be horrendously over budget, and the song and dance would start up again.
But they actually stopped this one.
This is a huge step forward for California!
Well, "huge step forward" might be a bit much... Lets just say California ceased its self mutilation for a moment.
I take what I can get. Who wants cake?
4 comments:
Cake! It IS a huge step forward, or in some direction - I would prefer backward as in, "They backed away from the edge of the terrible financial cliff over which they were about to throw themselves into a sea of hungry sharks." That would be a start. And then eliminates 90% of the commissions and other wasteful make-jobs-with-pension we're stuck with.
Meh, it's just going to be an excuse to either beg more money or admit defeat, pocket the money they've already appropriated (they've bought not a damn thing with those billions they've already been given) and go home.
Yeah, light rail has been voted down numerous times in Austin, TX. The bastards keep funding the study groups though. They won't let it die.
Hell, it might have already passed since I last checked.
They're looking into light rail here in San Antonio (wonder if there's a salesman that goes around singing about the greatness of the Monorail...), and they keep citing BART (over in the San Francisco area) as an example of success.
Only problem, I've used BART and it sucks. It's expensive, it doesn't take you where you want to go, it's slow, it's horribly wasteful (there are several stations that are almost completely unused). Also, I'm sure you know that San Antonio is pretty spread out with a lot of open space. Not a prime city for mass transit...
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