CA high-speed rail wants to leave Merced at the altar in favor of Bay Area | Opinion

The California High-Speed Rail Authority lured Merced as a partner in the country’s first bullet train project. It threw $500,000 at the city to spruce up its downtown in anticipation of a train station serving passengers by January 2033.

A 2022 law held the rail authority to this marriage proposal, explicitly requiring a 179-mile Bakersfield-to-Merced section and putting a $500,000 limit on any work outside that route.

Lo and behold, the rail authority now would prefer to leave Merced at the altar, opting instead for the riches and beauty of the Bay Area.

It’s just like the telenovelas my aunts would watch where the villain (the rail authority) would string along a country gal (Merced) before running away with the high society, rich lady (Bay Area). The country gal gets duped.

Moral of the story: Beware if the villain returns bearing flowers and asking for forgiveness.

I don’t blame Merced officials – from state Sen. Anna Caballero to Mayor Matthew Serratto – for acting like they got hoodwinked by the rail authority when it announced a supplemental project report that said a Bakersfield-to-Gilroy (Bay area) connection would not only generate more revenue than a Bakersfield-to-Merced route but that its revenues would offset operating costs and generate a profit.

The rail authority did not notify Merced of its preference. There was no “Dear John” letter.

“I was blindsided,” said Caballero, a Democrat, of the report that notes the rail authority prefers a delay of the Merced connection. She had reached out to rail authority CEO Ian Choudri two weeks before the Aug. 22 release of the report to arrange a tour of construction.

Diplomatically, Caballero, who voted for an extension through 2045 of an annual $1 billion cap-and-trade grant to the rail authority, said the report did not say “we should move in that direction.”

“It’s like a pro forma that says here’s what the cost, the time and the ridership is likely to look like, and here is the revenue that would be generated by these segments,” she told The Merced Sun-Star. “One of the options is to bypass Merced and come back later to build a Merced (connection).”

Merced has prepared for high-speed rail

Not every Mercedian is as calm as Caballero, who is expected to support Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to extend $1 bill in cap-and-trade funding to the rail authority through 2045.

Merced Mayor Matthew Serratto said he heard about the rail authority’s report in media reports.

“That is not how partners should be treated,” Serratto said in a letter to the editor. “Merced has supported California’s High-Speed Rail project for more than a decade. Our city has invested time, planning and resources to prepare for a downtown station.”

The rail authority has pledged better communication with Merced. The bigger question is, will the rail authority pay attention with its eyes looking westward to the lucrative Bay area?

Stacie Guzman, CEO of the Merced County Association of Governments, said the rail authority report diminished the value of a Merced connection to “just a return on investment.”

Merced backers say a viable connection to the Bay area can still be made through Merced by connecting about 60 miles to the Altamont Corridor Express (ACE) train station in Tracy. ACE, which received $400 million in state funds in 2017 for its expansion, plans to branch out to Turlock, Livingston and Merced by 2027. From Tracy, ACE takes passengers to San José and Santa Clara.

That extension to Tracy, said Caballero, is simple because the route is flat and involves “no complicated engineering.” A high-speed route to Gilroy would be more complicated, she said, because it must deal with hills and wetlands.

It takes a little more than two hours (a tortoise-pace 39 miles per hour) for the ACE train to travel the 85 miles from Stockton to San José, but future plans are for speeds of up to 125 mph by separating the line from freight trains and creating grade separations.

Merced has prepared for this high-speed rail wedding.

“Our city has invested time, planning, and resources to prepare for a downtown station,” said Serratto. “Families, businesses, UC Merced, and Merced College have built their futures around this promise.”

“We certainly don’t want to invest in projects that are built on the foundation of a future with a high-speed rail station being here by 2033 if that is remaining in question,” said Guzman.

For now, it appears the rail authority has signaled the Bakersfield-to-Merced connection remains its priority. But that’s because it is legally bound to focus construction on that route.

I wonder how this telenovela will turn out.