Caltrans and high-speed rail would hire hundreds of workers in Gov. Newsom’s budget
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration is gearing up for a hiring spree in the state’s transportation departments, advancing plans to add hundreds of positions for highways, roads and high-speed rail.
He outlined the plans in the $268 billion budget proposal he submitted earlier this month. It’s moving forward with a deadline for the Legislature to pass a spending plan by June 15.
It includes some 600 new permanent positions for roads and rail.
The administration’s proposal to add 56 positions to the state High-Speed Rail Authority is meant in part to address findings from a 2018 audit that criticized runaway spending on contractors. The report said that the authority “in essence placed portions of its oversight of large contracts into the hands of outside consultants, for whom the state’s best interests may not be the highest priority.”
California began planning for high-speed rail in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration, when the total project linking Los Angeles to San Francisco was estimated to cost $40 billion. It’s now projected to cost about $100 billion as work unfolds in the San Joaquin Valley.
The High-Speed Rail Authority is asking for $10.7 million in funds “to advance design, right-of-way mapping, utility relocation identifications and other pre-construction work for Merced to Bakersfield extensions, further advancing the project toward early interim high-speed service on the 171 mile segment between Merced and Bakersfield,” according to a budget document.
The funding would allow the High-Speed Rail Authority to replace four multimedia consultants with four state positions, while also filling out the agency’s strategic delivery, real property and contract management branches among others.
Caltrans is in line to add even more positions as the department prepares to carry out more work funded by a 2017 increase in gas taxes and vehicle fees. The department is asking to spend $107.4 million to hire 548 full-time-equivalent positions, with the majority of the new positions going toward state highway projects.
The department has about 20,700 employees, and it’s rushed to hire in recent years as it added staff for new projects.
California adopted the gas tax increase to raise about $5.4 billion a year for transportation projects, but the state’s maintenance and improvement backlog continues to grow. A recent report from the California Transportation Commission projected the shortfall is coming in around $6 billion a year.
Public employee unions representing Caltrans and High-Speed Rail Authority employees called the hiring spree “absolutely necessary.”
“Building projects now spurs the economy, creates jobs, gets a lot of people back on their feet, and solves the problems we have in terms of poor pavement condition, bridges that are not safe and a high-speed rail program that needs to get going,” said Ted Toppin, executive director of the Professional Engineers in California Government.
Brandy Johnson, a representative for the union that represents blue collar workers at Caltrans, said her organization is going to work with the state to make sure the new hires get the proper pay, training and personal protective equipment necessary to do the job.
“We’re going to work with the department to make sure those are proper classifications doing the work,” said, a representative for the International Union of Operating Engineers.
This story was originally published May 27, 2021 at 5:25 AM.