The CEO who has been running the high speed rail project in California since 2018 announced last week that he was stepping down.
[Brian] Kelly inherited a massive project that had been bogged down by slow acquisition of property for the route through the central San Joaquin Valley and beset by schedule delays and cost increases. One of the first efforts that Kelly directed was to emphasize learning from previous miscues and to sharpen the agency’s focus on completing the construction segments in the Valley with the money it had in hand. Kelly also advocated putting the Valley “backbone” of the statewide system into service as rapidly as possible while lining up funds for expansion of the routes north and east to the San Francisco Bay Area.
“I took this job with the intent to stabilize the organization, to have it perform better, and to try to get reinvestment of public funds…
