Free Republic

It’s time to go sit in the corner, Billy! Mayor de Blasio finally admitted Tuesday that his costly and controversial Renewal plan to fix nearly 100 of the city’s worst schools was a failure — pulling the plug on a years-long effort that cost taxpayers $773 million. “We did not say everything would be perfect,” the mayor said, offering a huge understatement to describe a program that saw one-quarter of its schools either closed or merged. “We said we were ready to go out there and create real investment, help kids right now, and see how many schools could really...

The $2.5 billion has already been spent — but California has failed to deliver the high-speed rail (on time, or at all) as promised. Therefore, the Trump administration argues, the state has to repay federal taxpayers. The Los Angeles Times quoted Stanford law professor David Freeman Engstrom, a Stanford law professor, describing Trump’s effort as a “nuclear option.” The practice of recovering money after a breach of contract, while common in the private sector, was virtually unheard of in government, he explained. “There is a reluctance to penalize misspending by local government agencies. … Almost never do those violations result...

President Barack Obama secured $8 billion in his 2009 economic stimulus package to start building toward the dream of true high-speed trains whisking passengers between major American cities. It was a paltry amount compared to the hundreds of billions it would actually take to fulfill that dream, but it was considered a serious down payment. At the time, Obama’s transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, said, “I’m not a historian, but I know this: One of the legacies for this administration, for the president and the vice president, will be high-speed rail. That will be their transportation legacy.” A decade later, little...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday he's abandoning a plan to build a high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, a project with an estimated cost that has ballooned to $77 billion. "Let's be real," Newsom said in his first State of the State address. "The current project, as planned, would cost too much and respectfully take too long. There's been too little oversight and not enough transparency." The idea long championed by Newsom's predecessor, Jerry Brown, is years behind schedule. The latest estimate for completion is 2033.

Before NASA's Mars 2020 mission is ready to launch toward the Red Planet, the agency has to paint the new rover — a task more challenging than it sounds. While a paint job may sound like an insignificant task, both the formulation and the process of painting a spacecraft like this have to be precise. And each spacecraft is unique. In August 2018, engineers working on the rover's chassis (the frame of the spacecraft) started the first step in the painting process: taping. Parts of the rover must never be painted, such as places where electronics boxes will eventually go...

a report from the Auditor of the State of California on the High Speed Rail Project ... To understand just how damning the HSR audit was, just consider the subtitle: “Flawed Decision Making and Poor Contract Management Have Contributed to Billions in Cost Overruns and Delays in the System’s Construction.” But like many government documents, the audit is couched in bureaucratic language that ordinary citizens may not understand. For that reason, below are the summary points as provided by the state auditor with accompanying translations. Auditor: “Although the Authority has secured and identified funding of over $28 billion that it...

The cost of constructing the Southern California section of the state bullet train could jump by as much as $11 billion over estimates released earlier this year, though rail authority officials caution that their new numbers assume a more expansive design than is likely to be built. The new estimates are contained in environmental reports prepared for Thursday’s meeting of the authority board, which will review planned routes throughout the Southland. The reports acknowledge that the new cost estimates could affect the $77-billion price tag of the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco system, though they also use a different methodology than previous...

California’s embattled high-speed rail project has been beset by “flawed decision making and poor contract management” that have led to billions of dollars in cost overruns and significant delays in construction in the San Joaquin Valley, according a report issued Thursday by state Auditor Elaine Howle. Howle’s audit, requested earlier this year by the state Legislature, is a sharp critique of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, the agency tasked with planning and developing the state’s bullet-train system. Among its key findings is that the authority, in an effort to beat the clock on a federal deadline for spending stimulus grant...

Jerry Brown did not invent the idea of a high-speed rail system to connect Northern and Southern California. It was voted on by the state Legislature and ratified by voters years before he returned to the governor’s office in 2011. But for the last eight years, as cost estimates have skyrocketed and federal and private sector funding for the project has evaporated, Brown has become high-speed rail’s most persistent defender. Only weeks away from the election to replace him, neither candidate for governor appears to share the depth of Brown’s commitment to a statewide rail system. Fellow Democrat Gavin Newsom...

The California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) surprised local communities on Wednesday by proposing a controversial Burbank-to-Palmdale route featuring above-ground tracks. The Los Angeles Times reported that the proposed 38-mile track alignment will cross the San Gabriel Mountains via a series of at grade sections and five separate tunnels. The bullet train’s original route, offered in support of the SB 1856 bond measure passed by the California Legislature in 2000, proposed to follow the Interstate 5 Freeway and tunnel under the 4,144 ft-Tejon Pass to link Los Angeles and Bakersfield.

California's biggest boondoggle just broke the bank. Not only is the massive high-speed rail project 11 years behind schedule and billions in the red, managers are now saying they will need to ramp up spending to hit a 2033 deadline. California’s money pit cost taxpayers $3.1 million a day last year. But that’s small potatoes compared to what they’ll have to shell out over the next four if they want to meet their deadline and budget, estimated most recently at $100 billion in a report last month by the New York Times. The California High Speed Rail Authority will have...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, working alongside Boeing and Aerojet Rocketdyne, has demonstrated that it can successfully fire the AR-22 booster rocket engine 10 times over 240 hours. The test outcome marked a major step in the development of DARPA’s Phantom Express experimental spaceplane, officials said July 10. “We needed to show that main propulsion system, the AR-22, … could in fact support rapid turn operations,” said Scott Wierzbanowski, DARPA’s program manager for the spaceplane. “We were extremely successful. We completely destroyed previously held records of how … you deal with a liquid-hydrogen, liquid-oxygen-type engine.” The agency also proved...

Ron Tutor, chief executive of Tutor Perini, said the redesign was not his firm’s fault... “We designed it and they approved it and then they changed their minds,” Tutor said. “They had a change of heart.” At least three other bullet train bridges in the Central Valley used the same design as the Avenue 8 bridge and are now being redesigned, according to a January rail authority status update, raising questions about whether potentially more costly designs will be required in the future. The previous design for Avenue 8, using what is known as mechanically stabilized earth walls, is generally...

Let me just say from the outset that I still miss California. When I see news about my former state, it’s like reading the details of a train wreck after having safely disembarked a comfortable time ago. I and my family got to live in Orange County for seven glorious years and another year in the Bay Area when the state was not convulsed with insanity on stilts. It was sunny nearly every day, with low humidity. There were no bugs. Our local amusement parks were Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. We did, as Californians are fond of boasting, go...

NASA is pressing forward on plans to build a Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, an outpost for astronauts positioned in the space near Earth's moon. According to NASA, the Gateway will not only be a place to live, learn and work around the moon but will also support an array of missions to the lunar surface. And scientists foresee a host of uses for the station. By making use of a suite of instruments housed on or inside the structure itself, or free-flying nearby, scientists could make Earth and solar observations. They could also carry out astrophysics and fundamental physics experiments. ......

That may sound like a clickbaity headline, but it’s proving to be literally true. Apparently, no one can guess it, least of all the California High-Speed Rail Authority that is running the bullet-train project. Their latest projection shows total predicted cost has jumped 20% to $77 billion, with a completion date moved out four years to 2033.For now, anyway. Be sure to check back next week in the Boondoggle Lotto! The price of the California bullet train project jumped sharply Friday when the state rail authority announced that the cost of connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco would be...

Friday, California's High-Speed Rail Authority published its draft 2018 Business Plan. Its 800-mile bullet-train project's estimated cost is now $77.3 billion, up from $64 billion two years ago, and its final completion has been pushed out another four years to 2033. The current estimate is now more than 70 percent above the $45 billion presented to voters in 2008. The related Associated Press story failed to disclose that original cost estimate, as did three leading California newspapers. The Authority's draft discloses that "More than $3 billion has been expended to date on construction in the Central Valley and planning for...

The price of the California bullet train project jumped sharply Friday when the state rail authority announced that the cost of connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco would be $77.3 billion and could rise as high as $98.1 billion — an uptick of at least $13 billion from estimates two years ago. The rail authority also said the earliest trains could operate on a partial system between San Francisco and Bakersfield would be 2029 — four years later than the previous projection. The full system would not begin operating until 2033. The disclosures are contained in a 114-page business plan...

NASA's latest tower for launching rockets has a little bit of a lean, which means it may be able to launch just a single rocket. The cost of this tower boondoggle? Almost $1 billion. The tower in question is the Mobile Launcher designed for NASA’s upcoming Space Launch System, which would become the world’s most powerful rocket once completed in a few years. The tower is supposed to keep the rocket stable and upright on the platform during a launch. The system was built for NASA’s now-defunct Ares I rocket and later repurposed for the SLS. The Mobile Launcher is...

William Shelton will not let go of the past, even if it is in the way of someone else's future. He has spent more than five years rebuilding his family's ancestral home, board by board, and has no intention of leaving it or the 250-acre farm that has been in his family since 1851. Two years ago, surveyors started showing up, wanting a clear idea of his property lines for Texas Central Railway, the company behind plans for a 200-mph "bullet train" connecting Houston to Dallas. The proposed route would go through Shelton's farm. "I guarantee I will be restoring...