Members of the Senate Tourism and Commerce Committee met on Tuesday with officials of the Department of Transportation (DOT) to receive an update on the proposed high speed rail connecting Tampa and Orlando and from all accounts showed interest in the project. But, there is at least one law maker who is definitely not interested–Senate President Mike Haridopolos.
Haridopolos said last week that he wasn’t interested in high speed rail, not even paying $300 million for the train, even though Florida has already received $2.4 billion in federal dollars toward the overall cost, estimated at $2.65 billion.
“My take on high speed rail is if we’ve go to (pay) $300 million, I’m not going to go for it,” Haridopolos told the News Service of Florida. “We can’t afford $300 million. It might be 90 percent off, but it’s still $300 million we don’t have…I’m not going to borrow from the Chinese to build a railroad that a lot of people don’t want.”
Senator Paula Dockery, one committee member, delivered an impassioned speech in favor of the bullet train, reports the News Service of Florida and was “quite shocked” with Haridopolos’ recent statement, in view of his earlier support for the SunRail commuter train in Orlando, to which she was opposed.
Dockery attributed Haridopolos’ changing position on rail to “politics,” saying “there’s so much confusion out there among the electorate about the project, and rather than taking the time and effort to educate them on the difference, the easy way out is to just say ‘oh, I’m now against this rail,'” reports the News Service.
Meanwhile, Gov. Rick Scott is yet to indicate whether he supports moving forward with the high speed rail project. He has said he will make a final decision after reviewing a ridership study expected to be completed next month and a final feasibility regarding the actual cost to the state.
“I also want to sit down with the companies that possibly want to run this and see which one of them is going to fund this if there are going to be any operating losses,” said Scott.
While the “Jobs Governor” made no mention of the jobs to be generated from the high speed rail project, according to DOT, the Tampa-Orlando leg is projected to create 23,000 job-years of direct construction jobs and more than 48,000 job-years of work, direct and spin-off employment during the four-year construction period.
With a current jobless rate of 12 percent in the state, Floridians continues to wait and see whether high speed rail will run or not.
