High speed rail agency looking at different approaches to extend work to Merced, Bakersfield
The state agency that’s engaged in construction of a high-speed rail route segment between Madera and Shafter is getting ready to figure out how to extend the 119-mile route north to Merced and south to Bakersfield.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority’s board, at its meeting Thursday, will vote on asking companies to submit their qualifications for the initial design work for two separate extensions of the line: a 34-mile stretch northward from the northern edge of Madera into downtown Merced, and a portion of about 19 miles from Shafter into east-central Bakersfield.
Part of that process will also include getting contractors that are ultimately hired to give information on how they will deliver their work on-time.
The board meeting, which is being held as a videoconference, will be webcast live starting at 11 a.m. Thursday on the authority’s website, hsr.ca.gov.
Each of the two route extensions is being considered as a separate project by the agency.
Construction has been under way since 2015 on three different segments of the route. That includes from Madera to Fresno, from Fresno to the Tulare-Kern county line, and from the Tulare-Kern line to the community of Shafter northwest of Bakersfield.
Completing work on those three packages, as well as the extensions into Merced and Bakersfield, would represent what the state rail agency describes a the “backbone” of an electrified system of high-speed trains traveling at speeds up to 220 mph between San Francisco and Los Angeles by way of the San Joaquin Valley.
Aspects of the contracts
Christine Inouye, the agency’s chief engineer of strategic delivery, said in a staff report to the board that the contract for the Madera-Merced extension would have an initial value of up to $41 million. That cost would include work to determine the final footprint of the route.
Additional options to the contract, expected to be awarded this summer, include possibly producing final design work to make the project ready for construction. Those options could increase the contract value to $151.2 million.
For the Shafter-Bakersfield extension, the design services are estimated at almost $45 million.
Both contracts would ask the winning bidders to work on drawing up plans and maps that would represent about 30% completion of the pre-construction design work. That would provide a jumping-off point for advanced design, right-of-way acquisition, and ultimately construction.
A different approach
The process for the extensions is a departure for how the agency approached the in-progress construction segments. Each of those three contracts were awarded as “design-build” work, in which the contractor hired was tasked with both designing the civil infrastructure such as overpasses, viaducts and trenches and the construction itself.
When those contracts were awarded almost a decade ago, the design-build process was hailed by the rail authority’s leaders as a means of reducing both time and cost, allowing a contractor to be nimble as construction moved forward.
But the work has been beset by delays, most notably in acquiring the property needed for the railroad right of way. To qualify for several billion dollars in federal stimulus funds in the early years of the Obama administration, construction contracts were awarded before the rail authority had purchased most of the land needed for the route.
And because contractors could not build on property the state did not own, work was stymied until the agency could assemble a critical mass of property to allow construction on different pieces to move ahead.
Changes in design by the contractors has also meant that some new pieces of property needed to be purchased, while some already-purchased pieces of property were no longer needed.
Part of the task of the contractors to be hired this year will be making a recommendation on how the construction should be delivered once the detailed route footprints are determined.
“These contracts will focus on the pre-design work needed to develop that footprint that would allow us to move forward,” Annie Parker, a spokesperson for the rail authority, told The Bee on Wednesday.
“This is a different, more methodical approach to how we have done (right of way) acquisition in the past when we were under (federal) deadlines to fully spend the grant funds by September 2017.”
Design-build could still be an option for construction, Parker added, but not the sole focus as it was in 2012, 2013 and 2014 as contracts were being bid and awarded. Design-bid-build, a methodology in which either the agency or a consultant fully designs the project before contractors bid solely on building what was drawn, is another possibility, among others, Parker said.
To date, almost 10% of the property that the authority needs for the Madera-Shafter contruction contracts has yet to be acquired. For the extensions to Merced and Bakersfield, Parker said, “we are not acquiring right of way until the project footprint is established.
The state originally approved two major route sections, Merced-to-Fresno and Fresno-to-Bakersfield, in the early and mid-2010s. But litigation prompted a reworking of environmental approvals and final route selection in two areas. Only within the past couple of years was a final route chosen through the Chowchilla area of Madera County, where a junction is planned to head east to Gilroy, San Jose and San Francisco.
And an alternative route was chosen between Shafter and Bakersfield as a result of Kern County and Bakersfield leaders’ objections to the rail line entering the city from the west. The “locally generated alternative” features the route veering east from Shafter to and across Highway 99 before it reaches east-central Bakersfield.
The latest estimates for construction of the Valley “backbone” route from Merced to Bakersfield are between $22.5 billion and $23.9 billion, according to a draft 2022 business plan released by the rail authority eariler this month.
That reflects the extent of the statewide system for which the agency either has, or believes it can get, the money needed for design and construction.
There are no current plans for moving ahead beyond environmental planning for the remainder of the system, extending west and north to the San Francisco Bay Area and south into Southern California, because of uncertainty over both the costs of burrowing through mountains and other construction factors, and over where the money for completion would come from.
The rail authority’s most recent cost estimates for building a San Francisco-to-Los Angeles/Anaheim sytem range from a low of $72.3 billion to as much as $105.1 billion.
This story was originally published February 16, 2022 at 3:37 PM.
