(The Center Square) – A business plan is due soon for California’s High-Speed Rail Authority detailing funding gaps and explaining its plans to find the money.
Assembly Bill 377, which was passed and signed into law in 2025, requires the agency that operates the state’s as-yet unbuilt high-speed rail to include funding information, including financial gaps in the Merced-to-Bakersfield segment, to the Legislature in the agency’s annual business plan. Under the bill, the business plan has to include details such as an estimate of the gap in funding and a strategy to fix it.
Ahead of the report required by May 1, the agency released a draft business plan that shows a commitment of $1 billion a year through 2045 from the state’s cap-and-trade program, also known as cap-and-invest. According to the most recent cost estimates from that report, the San Francisco-to-Bakersfield segment is projected to cost $60.34 billion. The San Francisco-to-Palmdale segment would cost more: $96.73 billion.
That plan also says that the High-Speed Rail Authority wants to use the cap-and-invest money to attract private investors to the project.
The projected cost for the Merced to Bakersfield segment is $34.76 billion, according to the draft business plan. That section of the rail, which the authority called its “first priority” in that plan, is expected to get $39.3 billion in funding through 2045. The Center Square reached out to the authority to ask questions, but no one was available to go on the record about why the allocation would exceed the projected cost.
However, the High-Speed Rail Authority’s Office of the Inspector General called the business plan “objectively incomplete” despite its 121 pages. A letter from the office cited concerns such as the fact that the Merced-to-Bakersfield segment is shorter than required by current law and that there is no station in downtown Merced.
“The main reason we ran [AB] 377 was mainly to get answers and clarity,” Assemblymember David Tangipa, R-Fresno, told The Center Square. “So if the inspector general can’t get the information that they need, how do we expect the people to get the information that they need to decide what they want to do with this project?”
With the third-most expensive infrastructure project in the history of the world, Tangipa said, there should be more transparency.
“This is something the rail authority has to answer to,” Tangipa told The Center Square. “There is a reason why people are asking for more transparency on this. They want to know where their money is going.”
The latest estimate for how much the high-speed rail is supposed to cost puts the price tag at $126 billion, well over the $33 billion it was projected to cost when California voters approved the high-speed rail in 2008. The system was supposed to be completed in 2030, but is now projected to be finished in 2040.
Another bill introduced this year, Assembly Bill 1608, aims to require the High-Speed Rail Office of the Inspector General to publish reports of audits or reviews on its site and submit a copy of that report to the Legislature. The bill would also make those reports, or sections of them, confidential if the inspector general determines that releasing certain information would pose a substantial risk to the project.
“It’s the same things that our California State Auditor are allowed to keep exempt, as well,” Assemblymember Lori Wilson, D-Suisun City and author of AB 1608, told The Center Square on Thursday afternoon. “That is those involving information security, physical security, fraud detection controls and pending litigation.”
The High-Speed Rail Authority Office of the Inspector General has to conduct a review every 120 days to determine if that information still has to be kept confidential, Wilson told The Center Square.
“They have to provide a justification for keeping it confidential,” Wilson added. “Our California State Auditor and other IGs [inspectors general] don’t have those provisions.”
