David Valadao: “Thank you. Mr. LaMALFA. So, indeed, the investors that were supposed to come in, private investment for what had been…”

“Thank you. Mr. LaMALFA. So, indeed, the investors that were supposed to come in, private investment for what had been billed to voters as a $33 billion project, up to $45 billion if you built the San Diego and Sacramento link, they have not materialized. When you see that the price for a time went up to $98.5 billion--hence California's Senate bill 985--it scared everybody away from this. You see, in a Baltimore to Washington proposal to do a maglev project here locally that has outside investors that want to come in on that, nobody is touching California's high-speed rail. So in the absence of this outside investment, California has moved in many different ways to try and find other pots of money. The Governor plans on diverting truck weight fees that are collected from commercial truckers away from repairing California's aging roads. Just try and drive in the right-hand lane of any freeway--I get to enjoy Interstate 5 a lot--and see what the condition of that road is. Some areas have been repaired. Caltrans had a pretty good year last year. Other areas it is still pretty rough. Interstate 80, near Sacramento, they are doing repairs now; but the potholes on that were pretty bad. Yet we are seeing the effort by the State to shift funding away from repairing roads that everybody uses versus a project that maybe few can afford to actually use.…”