Scathing Report Takes California High Speed Rail Authority To Task

SACRAMENTO (KCBS) _ A blistering new report has taken California's High Speed Rail Authority to task for among other things, poor planning and management.

But the agency insists it is well aware of the challenges it faces and is already addressing them.

A peer review board said there is not enough staff, no business model and not much of a financial plan for the project. But the High Speed Rail Authority said they hope to begin laying track within two years.

KCBS' Doug Sovern Reports:

The board's chairman, Will Kempton, the former head of Caltrans, said the agency needs a clearer sense of how it will be run.

"How are you going to implement this project? Is it going to be done up in the Bay Area using BART as an example?" said Kempton. "A fully public mass transit model or, at the other end of the scale, is this going to be essentially a private approach?"

The original chairman of the authority, now a board member, Quentin Kopp, said he welcomes the feedback and said much of the criticism is justified.

"It's easy to be critical because the High Speed Rail Authority has been understaffed," said Kopp. "The underlying fact is that the project is on time and on schedule."

Kopp said the High Speed Rail Authority knows it needs to hire more people and it will. He said he's confident there will be adequate funding to get those bullet trains running by 2018.

(© 2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)