Furious lawmakers slam Gavin Newsom for trying to bury High Speed Rail secrets as $215 million-a-mile fiasco deepens

Gavin Newsom is desperately trying to keep secret key details of California’s troubled High Speed Rail project — now costing taxpayers about $215 million per mile.The California Post has obtained records detailing 58 separate construction projects built over the past eight years along the 171-mile Central Valley route running between Merced and Bakersfield.Central Valley lawmaker Alexandra Macedo likened the incomplete concrete structures to ”Stonehenge”, and said her rural constituents were furious about the waste involved in the project.”What have we gotten for those $15 billion? Lots of fancy videos and graphics meant to convince you this is still a viable project,” she said.The High Speed Rail project was initially projected to cost $33 billion and connect Los Angeles to San Francisco when it was approved by voters in November 2008, with full service supposed to begin in the 2020s.Those ambitions have since been wildly scaled back as costs ballooned.The state is now projecting a reduced Central Valley line between Merced and Bakersfield to open in 2032 at a cost of $36.7 billion.Newsom has already committed an additional $21 billion to that smaller segment alone.Merced and Bakersfield have a combined population of roughly 500,000, meaning the cost of adding high-speed rail service works out to about $22,000 per person, based on state ridership estimates.Other Central Valley stops would include Fresno and Madera.Estimates for eventually connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles hover around $135 billion, but critics say the full route is increasingly unlikely to ever be completed.The soaring figures help explain why Democratic lawmakers are now pushing legislation that would shield High Speed Rail audit records from public scrutiny — a move critics describe as an attempt to conceal the true scale of the multibillion-dollar money pit.”At the very moment we finally start ramping up efforts to figure out what happened to all this money, they’re taki...