More California high-speed rail land purchases needed — 11 years after project started
More than 10 years ago, the California High-Speed Rail Authority launched its effort to buy the property needed for the state’s planned bullet-train route through the central San Joaquin Valley. The first written purchase offers to Fresno-area landowners went out in spring 2013.
And while workers have been building overpasses, trenches, viaducts and other structures since 2014 on portions of a 119-mile stretch from north of Madera to Shafter in Kern County, there are still almost 50 pieces of property needed for construction that have yet to be acquired by the rail agency.
What’s taking so long?
“Sometimes it’s sequencing; sometimes it’s resourcing,” Daniel Horgan, program director for high-speed rail consultant AECOM, told The Fresno Bee after making a presentation Thursday to the rail authority’s board of directors in Sacramento.
“You start by making an offer, and if it’s a willing seller, it takes maybe a year” to close the deal and make the property available to the construction contractor to build upon.
“But if they’re not a willing seller, then you have to go through a condemnation process and you’re very much dependent on the courts,” Horgan added. “All the willing sellers have already sold.”
As of the end of July, that left about 25 parcels of various sizes for which the state is going through eminent domain or condemnation in court.
Horgan said the authority also remains in negotiations to acquire 23 additional parcels owned by freight railroads whose tracks are along the high-speed rail route.
None of the still-to-be acquired parcels, Horgan reported, are in locations that would bring construction to a halt this time.
Right-of-way acquisitions for bullet train
Right-of-way acquisition in the Valley has been one of many thorns in the side of the rail agency.
As the authority and its contractors on three different construction contracts in the region tweak the designs for structures on the route, those changes have often forced the state to have to buy more property to accommodate the revisions.
In 2013, the authority estimated it needed to buy all or parts of about 1,330 pieces of property for its three construction segments in the Valley. As of this summer, that had ballooned to 2,290 parcels, as well as 176 railroad-owned parcels.
One of the complicating factors was a decision by the authority’s leaders to award construction contracts in the Valley before sufficient planning and land purchases had taken place — a decision driven by a 2017 deadline for project completion that was originally contained in a federal stimulus grant agreement between the state and the Federal Railroad Administration for construction in the Valley.
Using condemnation to acquire land
Eminent domain or condemnation typically is a last resort that government agencies can use to acquire property for public works or transportation projects when the agency and property owners cannot agree on the price and terms for the land.
Eminent domain law requires that owners receive “just compensation” for their condemned property, and if the sides remain in disagreement, a trial determines what the government must pay. A judge could allow the state to take possession of the property within months, long before a trial on compensation.
For the high-speed rail project, the first resolutions declaring a public need for condemnation of property were approved by the state’s Public Works Board in December 2013. By January 2016, 305 pieces of land up and down the route in Madera, Fresno, Kings, Tulare and Kern counties were subject to eminent domain resolutions — the first step in the condemnation process.
Hundreds more properties have been the subject of similar resolutions of necessity since 2016, including 126 since the start of 2022.
California High-Speed Rail real estate cost so far
Since the inception of the bullet-train project, the California High-Speed Rail Authority reports it has spent more than $1.5 billion on real estate acquisitions in the San Joaquin Valley:
- $796,787,695 in Construction Package 1, a 32-mile stretch from Avenue 19 north of Madera to American Avenue at the south edge of Fresno.
- $531,241,666 in Construction Package 2-3, which runs from American Avenue to the Tulare-Kern county line.
- $185,650,664 in Construction Package 4, a 22-mile segment from the Tulare-Kern county line to the northern edge of Shafter, northwest of Bakersfield.
Horgan said the challenges the authority has faced in its real estate purchases for the first 119 miles under construction are not as likely for another 52 miles of the route extending the future tracks north into downtown Merced and south into downtown Bakersfield.
Agents for the authority have already begun doing appraisals of property along the route extensions, “and I believe in the very near future we’ll be making our first offers,” Horgan told The Bee.
Authority leaders have previously said they plan on avoiding the mistakes of awarding construction contracts prematurely. Contracts for the Merced and Bakersfield extensions likely won’t be awarded until they are sufficiently designed and engineered and a critical mass of property is in hand for construction.
Horgan reported to the authority’s board Thursday that engineers are working toward a 30% design benchmark for both the Merced and Bakersfield extensions.
This story was originally published September 29, 2024 at 5:30 AM with the headline "More California high-speed rail land purchases needed — 11 years after project started."
