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JEAN HELLERThe governor sends a memo to lawmakers decrying high-speed rail's effects on road projects and soliciting their help in killing it.
Gov. Jeb Bush is cranking up his campaign to undo the constitutional amendment that requires the state to connect Florida's largest metropolitan areas with a bullet train.
Bush issued a lengthy memo to lawmakers Thursday, outlining flaws he sees in the high-speed rail plan and saying it will imperil nearly $17-billion in road projects. He sought their support for a ballot measure next year to repeal the rail amendment voters passed in 2000.
"Projected costs are unreliable and escalating, the assumptions on how high-speed rail will be paid for are not sound, ridership and revenue forecasts are questionable, and the promised private sector investment and risk assumption has not materialized," Bush said in his memorandum.
If the measure reaches the ballot, and if voters reaffirm their decision of three years ago, the state will have no option but to find a way to pay for a multibillion-dollar rail system. Construction on the first leg, connecting Tampa to Orlando, was supposed to have started last month.
Among Bush's objections to the proposal:
The cost for the Tampa-Orlando leg, projected last year at $1.2-billion to $1.8-billion, has risen to $2.3-billion this year. Current negotiations with the principal contractor, Fluor-Bombardier, to put in two tracks instead of one, would add another $258-million. Changing to electric equipment would add several hundred million more.
The original project envisioned that the private sector would obtain financing and assume financial risk. This did not happen.
The federal funding on which the project relies does not exist, and chances of congressional approval are slim.
There are right of way questions that carry unknown costs, including what the Orlando-Orange County Expressway Authority would charge to have the train run in the median of the Greeneway between Walt Disney World and Orlando International Airport. The estimate for the right of way is $105-million. However, the authority also will try to recoup lost tolls, and that cost is unknown.
Bush compiled a laundry list of state transportation projects that would have to be put into mothballs if the state had to fund the bullet train. These included improvements to U.S. 19 in Pinellas County and Interstate 275 in Tampa.
Implementing the second phase of high-speed rail, from Orlando to Miami, would doom even more projects, Bush said, including additional work on U.S. 19 in Pinellas and I-275 in Tampa, the Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway in Tampa and improvements on Interstate 75 from Tampa north to Florida's Turnpike.
"By 2037, the state will have lost nearly $17-billion in planned highway capacity projects in order for high-speed rail to be fully implemented," Bush told legislators.
Sen. Jim Sebesta, chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee, said he has been in private negotiations with Fluor-Bombardier to try to bring private funding to the table. He declined to go into specifics but said if the plan works, it will become public at the rail authority's Dec. 11 meeting in Tallahassee.
"If it succeeds, then full speed ahead," said Sebesta, R-St. Petersburg. "If not, then I will join Gov. Bush in attempting to take it off the table."
C.C. "Doc" Dockery, the Lakeland businessman who spent $2.7-million of his own money to get the rail proposal on the 2000 ballot and to campaign for its passage, said Bush's letter "has no news value for me."
"The governor's been against this for 10 years," Dockery said. "The governor hates this."
He called Bush's facts and figures "questionable" and added, "The problem with putting it on the ballot again is the governor will be using his bully pulpit to throw around bad information."
Asked if he was willing to spend more of his own money to fight Bush again, Dockery said, "I don't think I'll have to. I don't think the Legislature will go along."
William Dunn, a Miami consultant and a member of the High Speed Rail Authority board, said he has no quarrel with Bush's plan to revisit the project, but he thinks the result might surprise the governor.
"I don't have any problem putting it back on the ballot," Dunn said Thursday. "If the repeal fails, it will make the will of the people clear."
He said he thinks it is premature, however, for anyone to criticize the cost before negotiations are complete.
"The problem for Bush is the timing. We're going to put budget before the Legislature in the spring, and he can't get a repealer on the ballot before he has to deal with the budget."
Dunn said he also thought it unfair to the public to throw around figures in the billions of dollars to which no one can relate.
"It's 20 cents per tankful of gas. Not gallon. Tankful," he said. "Ten years ago I took a poll in which we asked people if they would pay 20 cents more for a tankful of gas if it would buy high-speed rail, and 65 percent said yes. I'm not advocating paying for the train through a gasoline tax, but we have to put the costs into terms people understand."