San Diego was promised a bullet train to Los Angeles. Gavin Newsom once promised to deliver it. Neither promise has been kept — and if you live here, you have been paying for the failure for nearly two decades.
The California High-Speed Rail project, approved by voters in 2008 with a promise to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco in under three hours for $33 billion by 2020, is now one of the most expensive infrastructure failures in American history. After 18 years of planning and more than $15 billion in spending, not a single mile of high-speed track is in operation.
The current cost estimate stands at $126 billion — nearly four times what voters were told. The initial operating segment, connecting Merced to Bakersfield along a route few San Diegans will ever use, won’t open until at least 2032. The full corridor is projected for 2038 to 2039 — if funding ever materializes. There is a $90 billion gap between what the state has and what it needs.
As a San Diego financial controller with over two decades in public finance and government contract compliance, I have spent considerable time with the project’s audit records. What they reveal is not just incompetence — it is a systemic extraction of public money by politically connected insiders, operating largely without accountability.
The failure began before a single shovel broke ground. When voters passed Proposition 1A in 2008, the California High-Speed Rail Authority had not yet determined the specific land parcels the route would require. It had not settled on a final corridor. It had not secured the private investment the project legally required. What it did have was $9.95 billion in voter-authorized bonds and an army of contractors ready to collect.
Construction began in Fresno in 2015 under Gov. Jerry Brown. The first major contract — 29 miles in the Central Valley — went to Tutor Perini Corporation at $985 million, well below the authority’s own staff estimate of $1.2 to $1.8 billion. That contract has since ballooned from $985 million to $2.4 billion in approved invoices.
The consultant structure tells an equally troubling story. The authority employed roughly 180 state workers while its lead consultant, WSP, had approximately 470 personnel on the project. Consultant engineers cost the state an average of $427,000 per year — more than three times the $131,000 cost of in-house staff. WSP alone accumulated an estimated $666 million in contract value. The 2018 State Auditor found the authority had outsourced not only engineering but the oversight of engineering to private consultants — a structure designed, whether intentionally or not, to make accountability nearly impossible.
Newsom walked into this in 2019 and initially called it what it was: too expensive, too slow and not enough oversight. He promised transparency on every change order. That transparency never came. By 2025, he was signing legislation locking in $1 billion annually in cap-and-trade funding through 2045 — funding that could have addressed San Diego’s own crumbling infrastructure, transit deficit, and housing cost crisis.
San Diegans know what $15 billion in undelivered promises looks like. We see it in the congestion on the 5 and the 15. We see it in SANDAG’s perpetual funding shortfalls. We see it every time a local infrastructure project stalls for lack of state resources that are being consumed by a train that goes from Merced to Bakersfield.
Newsom leaves office in January 2027. He has one year to show California — and the country, as he eyes 2028 — that he can govern rather than perform. For San Diegans still waiting for a rail connection that was promised to us in 2008, the standard is simple: stop defending the system that failed us, and start dismantling it.
Jose Navarro is a financial controller and public affairs analyst based in San Diego with more than two decades of experience in public finance, nonprofit management and government contract compliance.
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