Written by Julianne Foster
As Democrats are finding new ways to tax Californians, state projects continue to prove the inability of the state government to properly use taxpayer dollars. Hard-working residents paying such high taxes in California deserve the utmost respect when it comes to how their money is being spent, but this just isn’t the case.
Road 27 bridge, a project started in 2016 and meant to last a year, has already gone three years over schedule with no end in sight. The bridge runs longer than two football fields over the future bullet train tracks and the existing BNSF freight tracks in Madera County. The bridge was meant to be in the best interest of taxpayers to give them a shortcut over the railways, yet many issues have inconvenienced residents to take long detours around the site.
Hundreds of pages of documents in public records reveal how the steel supports for the bridge snapped due to neglect, avoidable work damage, miscommunications, and possible design problems. Work on the bridge has come to a halt after these cables snapped, pushing them even further back in their schedule. The California High Speed Railway Authority has hired five different layers of contractors and consultants to the job, leaving no one in particular to take the blame or show correct records of what went wrong throughout the project.
This bridge is a part of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan for a 171-mile train operation from Merced to Bakersfield, which initially is supposed to cost $20.4 billion. The confusion involving so many contractors and consultants and poor performance on the project has led to an endless waste of taxpayer money.
In 2019, Gov. Newsom made empty promises that he was “going to get rid of a lot of consultants” in hopes of making the project seem like it could move forward after they re-evaluated their workers. However, according to engineering specialists and officials involved with bullet train planning, the truth is those consultants remain integral to the project.
The railway authority interim director for the central region, Garth Fernandez, said based on analysis and inspections, the bridge would be operable to its designed load-carrying capacity once it is repaired. However, this is questionable after many failures and a history of other bridges failing due to similar holes in the chain of command and improper communication and execution of projects.
With taxpayers strained by a lack of income from COVID-19 and the state considering raising taxes to appease overwhelming debt, it’s deeply concerning to see the continuous failures of Democrats to handle the money given to them with wisdom and respect for the hard-working people who provided it.
