From: Martin Engel <martinengel_at_(domain_name_was_removed)>
Date: Wed Apr 02 2008 - 18:27:15 PST

The history in the two articles, below, become a red warning flag in light of the anticipated high speed rail bond issue on the ballot this November.

They plug directly into Richard Trainor's article from 2003.

<http://www.counterpunch.org/trainor12092003.html>

This article also bears out the history of corruption underlying the high speed train efforts by Morshed, Diridon and their associates.

After reading all three articles, I wanted to pick up the phone and call the FBI.

Why has all this been swept under the carpet? Unfortunately, the prospects for the bond measure to pass will increase dramatically as millions will be spent promoting the glories of the train to the voters. Isn't this the time to begin educating the voters to what they are really in for if it does pass?

How can the media, our legislature and our Governor simply ignore all this? It's six years later. Nothing has changed. The wheeling and dealing, Parsons Brinckerhoff, Diridon, Morshed, all still there and doing business as usual.

The French expression for the behavior described here is: "mains sales." Dirty hands.

Please note that Richard Tolmach,. the author of the two highly critical articles, is a high-speed rail advocate who represents the Train Riders Association of California.

Martin

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http://www.calrailnews.com/crn/1102/1102.pdf

926 J Street, Suite 612,
Sacramento, CA 95814
Telephone: 916-557-1667
Fax: 916-448-1789
e-mail: trac@omsoft.com
www.calrailnews.com

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California Rail News November-December, 2002

"Pay to Play" Tarnishes High Speed Rail Plan

by Richard F. Tolmach

Less than two months after the Oracle
sole-source scandal finally simmered down, another contractor's apparent attempt to politically lock down a corrupt plan for high speed rail backfired on Governor Gray Davis in late September, providing Republican Bill Simon one of the few cogent issues in his ill-fated campaign. Things got hot when Simon
learned of a private contributor event paired with the Governor's signing a day before of high speed rail legislation placing a $10 billion bond issue on the November 2004 ballot.

Tipped off by a copy of an e-mail giving the address of the fund-raiser, Simon showed up outside the home of High Speed Rail
Authority Executive Director Rod Diridon September 20 along with placard-waving
supporters and a large press contingent. Simon, surrounded by television news cameras, attacked the governor for linking political pork to fundraising.

Diridon's e-mail promoting the fund-raiser stated "the gov's campaign staff gave us 11 days to pull this off and I thought you might be able to help. We're committed to $50,000 and are a far pace from that so are really in need of your assistance and that of any that you think might be willing to help.

Diridon also forwarded an e-mail note
from Mike Montgomery, the Davis campaign finance chief, which mentioned checks "can be made payable to the Governor Gray Davis Committee. We also accept Visa, Master
Card and American Express contributions."

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the note also told Diridon "you can personally accept contributions and give them to me at the event." This last helpful advice from the Davis campaign seems to stray very
close to the limit of campaign law, since its ambiguous language can be read as an offer to shield identities of original donors.

On the other hand, Davis's senior campaign advisor Garry South took a harder line
than Montgomery, the finance chief. He said Diridon violated "an absolute ironclad rule that nobody can send off a (fund-raising) invitation" without specific permission; his targeted invitation "put this thing so far over the line... we didn't hesitate a second to cancel it," South said.

Davis campaign press secretary Roger
Salazar claimed the event was cancelled, but both caterers and donors had already shown up. Engineering firm execs. had to run a gauntlet of news cameras while shielding their faces entering and leaving the event.

The identity of the donors was also protected by Salazar, who claimed none of the
checks would be accepted, and that there would not be a rescheduling of the event.

The Governor's attitude towards Diridon
does not seem to presage his appointment as Secretary of the Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, a position Diridon told donors he would soon occupy while he was trying to fund-raise. Several days later, when Governor Davis was still dogged by press inquiries about the incident at an Oakland press conference, he snapped that "Diridon made mistakes. We don't want any more
mistakes."

Simon called for "law enforcement to
undertake a comprehensive review of all the governor's past and current fundraising
activities." Key among Diridon's financial backers is Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade and Douglas, (PB) the only firm that has been allowed to oversee high speed rail planning or engineering for the State of California since 1987, a de facto sole source contractor.

PB was identified by Diridon as the
sponsor of a September 25 symposium on
high speed rail at the Cal State University San Jose campus where Diridon's Mineta
Transportation Institute is based. Following the September 20 blowup, rail activists were pushed forward as sponsors, and Diridon got a sudden case of pneumonia and missed the event, despite his attendance at the Las Vegas APTA conference two days before.

Governor Davis may have backed away
from pay to play accusations, but everyone who is playing at the High Speed Rail
Authority has been anteing up constantly. PB gave Diridon's MTI $10,000 at a June
event, as did HNTB Engineering Corp.,
which is heading up design of the tri-level addendum to San Jose Diridon station. PB subcontractors URS, CH2M Hill, and DMJM
each threw in $2,000. Their loyalty to the Diridon family apparently runs deep. Three of the four firms also pitched in when Rod Diridon's son ran unsuccessfully for
Assembly last spring.

Diridon's history with PB goes back to
the early 1980's when he brokered a Santa Clara County decision to pursue a new light rail corridor with known serpentine excavation problems and a fraction of the ridership potential of the alternate corridor following Highway 101. The line opened years late
and hundreds of millions over its budget.

"Pay to play" came along as a statewide

issue at a point when the Authority board and staff's comprehensive ties to PB were already being questioned by TRAC and
other observers.

A letter from TRAC President Richard
Tolmach to Diridon in May, 2002 pointed out that, "there is a perception that you are not in control of the engineering firm so much as it is directing your actions and rhetoric on the issue of [the line through Henry Coe State Park]. While no one is drawing a time line or making any conclusions about prior interactions with the firm, your stance is not helping your image as a leader capable of brokering an alternatives process that leads to consensus."

A letter from TRAC President Richard
Tolmach to Diridon in May, 2002 pointed out that, "there is a perception that you are not in control of the engineering firm so much as it is directing your actions and rhetoric on the issue of [the line through Henry Coe State Park]. While no one is drawing a time line or making any conclusions about prior interactions with the firm, your stance is not helping your image as a leader capable of brokering an alternatives process that leads to consensus."

As the May 2002 letter said, "There is
every reason that high speed rail must be relevant to San Francisco, the South Bay and East Bay's regional travel needs and provide congestion relief along Interstates 80, 580 and 680. Northern Californians stuck in gridlock are not going to vote for a plan that
ignores their needs and focuses only on 400 mile trips or travel to Central Valley destinationsŠ.

The present preferred alternative
does virtually nothing to help congestion [on Bay Area highways]."

"The question now," says TRAC Vice-

 Dan McNamara, "is how the
Authority can carry out a selection of a route and a technology that withstands Federal scrutiny, after the process has become so contaminated by financial influence. French, German and Japanese rail technology
providers are statutorily prohibited from making political contributions here because of past scandals in third world countries.

Does this mean we end up with hockey puck technology in place of something world class because on this continent money can buy off any candidate? Does this mean the tracks swerve to cater to real estate speculators?"

"What is most needed is a housecleaning

that restores the public's trust that this is a serious, feasible project, and not just another money grab," said McNamara. "Everyone is altogether too ready to look at this as the next Enron or Qwest, unless we have someone with impeccable credentials running it."

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California Rail News November-December, 2002

Flawed Plan Blocks High Speed Progress

California needs a high speed
rail system, but plans put forth
by the High Speed Rail Authority
will delay progress with years of
environmental litigation,
community opposition, change
orders and project delay.

by Richard F. Tolmach

With breathtaking speed, the California
Legislature passed a bond measure at the end of session in August that would put in place a mechanism to finance a California high speed rail line. SB 1856, packaged by Sen. Jim Costa and a bipartisan coalition of progressive legislators is by and large an admirable and far reaching piece of legislation with only a few minor technical flaws.

Despite this progress, actual plans for
the line are anything but ready for prime time. Moreover, the cast of characters at California's High Speed Rail Authority
(HSRA) does not inspire confidence that
Californians will have bullet trains any decade soon. The HSRA Chairman, Rod
Diridon, is best known for presiding over a rail project in San Jose which had among the longest delays and highest cost overruns of any new light rail line in North
America. Once it opened, it had the lowest cost-recovery ratio of any rail line in
California.

Diridon, highly identified with San Jose by reason of its railroad station bearing his name, has definitely put his mark on the high speed rail project. Although he currently denies this detail, for months he
maintained that all trains on the high speed rail starter line would stop at Diridon station, an arrangement which would delay
and inconvenience the vast majority of
Californians who aren't going there. This detail of the plan is most onerous for residents of Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto,
and the East Bay who get left out of the starter plan and won't have high speed rail serving their cities until some undetermined date years later.

The Authority's prime consultant,
Parsons Brinckerhoff, has spent tens of millions of dollars in over 10 years of studies
for the state, but has failed in all that time to come up with a politically attractive, buildable concept for high speed rail in California. Dubbed "the taxi drivers" by industry observers because its interminable studies keep the meter running, PB is
famous for its multi-billion dollar plans for airport expansions and freeway double-decking projects, as well as its uncanny
knack of having its hapless transit clients aim projects straight at foreseeable problems which later cause huge project overruns.

The problem was the La Brea Tar Pits
on the Los Angeles Red Line, where Metro Rail was surprised to find gas and oil, serpentine formations on San Jose's
Guadelupe Corridor light rail, where
County Transit was surprised to find
asbestos, a telephone switching center in Millbrae on the BART-SFO project where
BART was surprised to run into fiber
optics, interrupting phone and data service to 25,000 customers. Each of these discoveries cost the public many millions of dollars, but was quite profitable for the contractors.

Nobody who has been closely watching
California's high speed rail planning has been surprised that instead of using
Altamont, or another of the easily scalable passes into the Bay Area, the project has a preferred routing aimed at the heights of Mount Hamilton and Henry Coe State Park, where predictable engineering difficulties and environmental opposition both provide immense opportunities for lucrative change orders and cost overruns. Problem tunnels are PB's most lucrative specialty. PB's endless Boston "Big Dig," its 50 percent underbid of the Seattle light rail tunnel and its role in the Hollywood cave-in show three possible scenarios that could be played out on even a grander scale on a project with a $20 billion price tag.

Nor was anyone surprised when
instead of doing a true alternatives analysis that would find an unobstructed path
through the Central Valley for its 220 mph trains, the Authority's Mehdi Morshed
wrote citizen advocates on June 14, 2002 to say that all "non-railway corridors through the Central Valley have been eliminated
from consideration at this time" and that the route would consist of the Union Pacific or the Burlington Northern Santa Fe
through the middles of cities. Chairman
Rod Diridon said we should think of the city center stations as airports. That's perhaps fitting, since the jet-like noise of 220 mph trains every ten minutes would make all
residents of these cities feel like they are living at the end of the runway.

At its recent meeting in Fresno,
Authority consultants changed their story yet again. They said they would instead
loop around any town that poses a problem.

With grain elevators, packing houses,
and cement plants blocking the path typically every ten miles in our mechanically laid out Central Valley, and with the three mile turning radius required by 220 mph,
the resulting route would wind like a sine wave. This isn't good for passengers or
trains. Actually it's a recipe for maximizing route mileage, motion sickness and equipment failure. Not coincidentally, the winding path proposal maximizes design constraints and future change orders.

Even more recently, apologists for the
High Speed Rail Authority plan have said that trains would slow down for cities, not run through at high speed. Project insiders deny that they have any intention of doing this, but if trains were slowed, it would increase elapsed travel time by well over an hour, decimating projected ridership and destroying
any financial justification for the project.

Successful builders of high speed rail
lines in Europe and Japan chart straight routes that avoid intermediate cities and serve these cities with trains diverting from the high speed tracks to conventional rail lines. Citizen supporters of rail have tried to educate the Authority on this issue and others, but it is really too late to teach HSRA
staff and leadership anything. It's now time to replace them with professionals who have actually built high speed rail lines.

Instead of wasting another decade by
having HSRA bureaucrats run detailed engineering and environmental studies of high
speed lines that cannot work economically, California should proceed in the way that Texas did, and solicit proposals from operators of high speed rail. Texas paid qualified high speed operators to produce bankable proposals, and ended up with two highly
attractive alternatives. Only heavy lobbying by Southwest Airlines prevented the Texas line from being built, because the plan by a French and German consortium convinced
both European and American investment
banks of its merit.

For the banks to be convinced of the
value of California rail bonds at this particular turn in our economic history, we will need a definitive case made by international rail experts, not by bureaucratic poseurs. For this to happen, the plan cannot be jiggered to produce change orders, cannot waste money on
tunnels where surface track will do the job, and cannot aggrandize a particular city or pair of cities. For a California high speed rail plan to be accepted by financial institutions, it has to be reasonably determined to produce the best revenue stream with the least
capital, and with the least engineering risks.

In the runup to the November 2004 ballot in which his measure will be considered by voters, Senator Costa would do well to convince the public that high speed rail is not
just a bigger, faster Metro Red Line hole in the ground. The best way to do this is to close down the Authority's ill-considered planning activities, let the Parsons
Brinckerhoff contract lapse, and obtain active proposals from successful high speed rail operators.

By the way, I cannot refrain from addressing those slight technical flaws in the bond act, although the French, Germans, Japanese or Spanish would be glad to point them out.

The last minute revisions to lengthen travel times specified in the act were necessitated by a realization that the 2 hour 2 minute travel time between Los Angeles and San Jose is impossible, even with the latest technology, because of the distances and obstacles
involved. The revised times 12 minutes
longer are equally unlikely to be achieved.

These flawed figures were provided to
Senator Costa by HSRA and are yet another example of why the Authority's planning
activities should be handed over to rail experts who actually have built and operated high speed service.

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**********************
Martin Engel
1621 Stone Pine Lane
Menlo Park, CA 94025
650:323-1670
martinengel@earthlink.net
**********************


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**********************
Martin Engel
1621 Stone Pine Lane
Menlo Park, CA 94025
650:323-1670
martinengel@earthlink.net
**********************

Received on Wed Apr 2 18:28:39 2008