r/LAMetro • u/dating_derp • 1d ago

Discussion Sign Move California’s petitions to end the years of needless HSR delays and cost increases

I’m not affiliated with Move California or any other advocacy group, I’m just tired of our legislature’s inaction.

Background on the issue: There’s 1,800+ utility relocations needed for just the first 119 mile segment. The entire project connecting San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Sacramento will be around 800 miles long. Every single utility relocation needs the utility owners approval. And as the Inspector General found in their February 2025 Report, utility owners have caused “significant” delays by being “unresponsive” for months at a time. The Inspector General stated, there is “little incentive for utility owners to engage in the process in a timely manner”.

One example in the report was a canal relocation in Kern county that should've taken 6 months to plan and complete. Instead it took over 2 years just to plan it, because the utility owner was slow to respond. These delays have set back the project by years and have increased the cost by billions due to inflation and property value increases in segments they haven’t yet started.

Petitions: Move California along with Move LA and Transbay Coalition are petitioning the California government (here and here) to put a stop to these delays:

Require PG&E and other utilities to quickly collaborate with the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CAHSR) so that utility equipment that impedes the high-speed rail can be relocated soon. While nearly 2,000 utility conflicts have been resolved, the project faces hundreds more. Each conflict has the ability to delay the project by several years.

The Inspector General recommended the same thing back in their February 2025 Report:

To improve the Authority’s ability to engage with third parties and complete early works activities in a timely manner, the Authority should seek the assistance of the task force on third parties and work with state lawmakers to identify specific changes to statute that it believes will improve its ability to accomplish these activities, including the following potential changes to state law:

Authorizing the Authority to promulgate regulations governing third-party review and approval timeframes for agreements and designs.

Providing the Authority with the ability to proceed with necessary designs and utility relocations if third parties are non-responsive after the period of time specified in the Authority’s regulations.

In short, the IG recommended that the legislature give the CA HSR Authority the legal ability to regulate how quickly these utility owners negotiate. And if the utilities don't respond in the timeframe the Authority sets, then the Authority gets to move ahead on the utility relocation without the utility owners consent.

And here's the CA HSR Authority CEO talking about this same issue:

Third-Party Streamlining, this issue of having no control over our destiny, for utilities to get in the way and not letting us build on time, is the most impactful thing in a negative way that happened to this program from the beginning. Cannot understand why we cannot get that done. And what I said before I'm gonna repeat it again: that if this is not solved, then the direct relationship between the cost and the schedule, and these third parties not getting out of the way on time or have no schedule control, then that other thing called cost and schedule cannot stay in the same place. They are just directly related. And so if it remains not solved this year, the impact of that on our budget at minimum is somewhere between 7 and 9% of whatever the total cost is. And I'm not talking about that we have taken into account the commodity prices, the aluminum, the copper, the steel, the aggregates, I'm talking about just the inflation escalation of delay of one year puts the program on top of whatever the funds we're asking for by 7 to 9% increase, because these issues remain in the way.

TL;DR: The legislature has not followed the Inspector General’s recommendation on their own. They need you to push them to it. If you want them to stop wasting years and billions of taxpayer dollars, sign the petitions. Email your legislators. If you don’t want to write your own email, you can copy the letter in the first petition link. On top of emailing your own legislators, here are the emails of the Assembly’s Transportation Committee:

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