If you live in California and want something to be done on time and within its budget, well, you should probably try doing it somewhere other than California.
California has become a model of doing things as slowly and expensive as possible, and no issue so seemingly simple is immune from this. Rob Pyers, the research director for California Target Book, highlighted the latest example: In 2016, the California legislature approved an update to the state’s campaign finance portal. The bill required the new website to be “available for use no later than February 1, 2019” and said it would only “incur one-time costs of $11.6 million to develop, test, and implement.”
It is now 2025. The most recent estimated finish date is Feb. 16, 2027, more than eight years past the original deadline. The total cost is now over $92 million. If you don’t like that, you don’t like California governance.
“Over budget and way past the due date” may as well be the California state motto at this point. The infamous high-speed rail proposal pitched in 2008 was supposed to be done in 2020 and cost $33 billion. In March 2023, the new estimated price tag was $128 billion. The new completion deadline was 2030, but only for the stretch of line from Bakersfield to Merced, less than half the original plan of Los Angeles to San Francisco. Engineers and project managers don’t expect the magic train to be completed in this century (which still has 75 years left), and the French team that looked at taking on the project decided instead to work in the “less politically dysfunctional” country of … Morocco.
Take your pick of an issue or project that California has taken up in the past decade and you will find it over budget, way past its deadline, or both. In 2014, California voters approved a bond for water storage projects including the Sites Reservoir, which hasn’t been built yet. In fact, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) bragged in September of last year, nearly 10 years after voters approved the bond, that he was “streamlining” the project.
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Voting? California turns Election Day into Election Month, with voters hoping to know the results in competitive races before Thanksgiving. Even San Francisco’s plan to build a public restroom consisting of a single toilet somehow came out to a projected cost of $1.7 million, with a projected construction timeline of three years. San Francisco Democrats at least had enough shame to cancel the celebration for the project, which managed to cut its costs down to $200,000. (It still took 3 1/2 years from announcement to completion.)
This tracks with the normal California experience, which includes the state wrestling with a budget deficit over the past several years, spending more on homelessness than other states for far worse results, and kicking the can down the road one expensive kick at a time. Everything important thing (or even unimportant toilet) in California is over budget and behind schedule. Perhaps California Democrats can ask Morocco what it can be doing better.