State leaders are speaking out on California’s High-Speed Rail system.

Taxpayer dollars have been going into this high-speed rail train project for over a decade, but now the project is estimated to cost over $120 billion.

California voters approved the high-speed rail project to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco in 2008, proposed then to cost $33 billion and be completed by 2020, but that never happened.

Democratic Senator Dave Cortese, who also serves as the Senate transportation chair, said the project failed because they were not looking at private sector money, and now they know how important this investment is.

Gov. Gavin Newsom recently announced that the cap-and-trade program would fund $1 billion into the project each year, but the Trump Administration just pulled $4 billion in federal funding for the project. California filed a lawsuit to stop this.

“The only thing high-speed about the high-speed rail is how they are wasting our taxpayer dollars,” said Republican Senator Tony Strickland, who serves as vice chair of the Senate Transportation Committee.

CBS13 asked Cortese how much taxpayer dollars have been spent so far on the project.

“It’s most certainly billions of dollars that have been invested in the project, and the project now has in excess of a $100-billion budget,” Cortese said.

The train tracks would stretch for about 400 miles, connecting Merced to Bakersfield by 2032 and Gilroy to Palmdale by 2038. The full connection from San Francisco to LA is not completely impossible, but supporters said the unforeseen cost increase has them focused on the first two phases.

“This is an economic development project with a rail line in the middle of it,” Cortese said.

Cortese said the train will bring more to California than just connections, but economic development along the tracks, like housing. He hopes train riders and the development projects will eventually pay for themselves.

Cortese introduced Senate Bill 545, which will conduct a study on the economic impacts the high-speed rail project will have on California.

Republicans are convinced they will never see a return on the investment.  

“If you had your money, would you invest in a project that said it would be 33 billion and is now over 100 billion?” said Strickland.

Construction for 119 miles is currently happening in the Central Valley.

The project has received nearly $24 billion in funding so far, mostly through the state and some from the federal government.

Strickland thinks taxpayer dollars could be better spent on funding public safety, like Proposition 36. It is why he thinks the project should go back to the ballot so California voters can decide the future.

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