From Merced Sun-Star:
California’s bullet train is pumping billions into the Valley economy. So why is it so unpopular?
BY DALE KASLER, RYAN LILLIS, AND TIM SHEEHAN
DECEMBER 23, 2018 12:00 AM, UPDATED DECEMBER 23, 2018 01:25 PM
MADERA - Vicente Ward had trouble finding work after leaving the Air Force — until California’s bullet-train project came along. Now he’s helping build a bridge that some day will carry rail passengers across the San Joaquin River between Madera and Fresno.
“It’s a sense of accomplishment; my kids can see this 20 years from now,” said Ward, 52, a carpenter from Clovis, during a break at the job site. “It’s providing jobs for the community. We help stimulate the economy. ... Now my family has medical, has dental.”
Phase One of the state’s high-speed rail line is being assembled, piece by painstaking piece, along a 119-mile stretch between Madera and northern Kern County. A decade after getting approval from California voters, and nearly four years after breaking ground, one of the largest public works projects in California history is taking on a life of its own: Bridges, viaducts and overpasses have sprouted on fertile San Joaquin Valley soil. A section of Highway 99 has been relocated. Work has begun on an enormous trench in Fresno where trains will run beneath an irrigation canal.
More than 2,300 workers have been put to work at more than 20 different sites around the Valley. Eventually $10.6 billion will be spent on the Valley portion of the project, fueling dreams of an economic bounty in one of the poorest regions of California. Community leaders envision Fresno, with its relatively low cost of living, becoming a bedroom community for Silicon Valley — which will be less than an hour’s ride away once the train is running.
“We’ve got a lot of things to sell that Silicon Valley can’t provide,” said Tom Richards, a Fresno developer and vice chairman of the rail project’s governing authority.
Yet for all the dollars and dreams chugging into the Valley, the high-speed rail project is notoriously unpopular around here. A Los Angeles Times/USC poll earlier this year showed that 64 percent of Valley residents want the bullet train halted in its tracks. Statewide, 49 percent want to pull the plug.
The opposition in the Valley is partly philosophical. Many in this hotbed of conservatism see the bullet train – beset with lengthy delays, substantial cost overruns and serious questions about future funding – as big government run amok.
But for many Valley residents, it’s also intensely personal. They resent how construction has carved up their farms and scrambled their highways. Completion of just a partial segment through the Valley is still years away, and residents doubt the project will ever get finished. They question the promises that high-speed rail will lift the Valley out of its economic doldrums.
“Let’s fix our roads and bridges – anything but high-speed rail,” said John Tos, a Kings County farmer who’s tried unsuccessfully to keep the California High-Speed Rail Authority from taking a portion of his walnut orchard. “It’s unbelievable the cost we’re going to have to pay.”
Meanwhile, advocates for low-income residents warn that the very thing train boosters are promising — trainloads of Bay Area techies moving to the Valley — will lead to gentrification and a nightmarish spike in housing prices. The Central Valley is already facing a long list of issues, including poor air quality, a lack of affordable housing and contaminated water, and social justice advocates are worried Valley residents will be left behind by any progress created by the bullet train.
“We’re concerned that one of high speed rail’s major goals is to address a lack of affordable housing in the Bay Area,” said Veronica Garibay, a co-founder and co-director of the Fresno-based Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability. “How are families already living in the Valley today going to benefit from all of this? (High speed rail) is just one small component of the pressures that are facing and are going to face this region.”
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Link:
https://www.mercedsunstar.com/news/s...223441880.html