In a stunning reversal, the Federal Transit Administration said Monday that it will approve a $647 million grant to electrify Caltrain tracks, nearly doubling capacity on the overburdened San Jose to San Francisco commute route.
The approval comes after months of delays and worries by Caltrain officials and Bay Area leaders that the Trump administration would cancel the grant. If the funding hadn’t been approved by June 30, the $2 billion track electrification project would have lost key construction contracts.
The electrification work will mean faster and more reliable trains on a 51-mile stretch of the Caltrain corridor along the Peninsula, offering more than 110,000 rides per day, up from 60,000. The project will also create 10,000 jobs in California and around the country. The first electric trains are expected to be in service by early 2021, if not sooner, and construction on the project should start in 60 to 90 days.
“This news, quite clearly, is electrifying,” said Silicon Valley Leadership Group CEO Carl Guardino. “This is all the major holidays wrapped into one with a beautiful Caltrain bow around it.”
Bay Area officials have been advocating for the electrification project for decades, and the federal grant was near its final approval under the Obama administration. But after Donald Trump took office, Transportation Sec. Elaine Chao declined to sign off on it.
Just last week, Chao told members of Congress that she couldn’t approve the grant — technically, the “full funding grant agreement” — because she didn’t have all of the necessary funding. But the FTA said Monday it would approve the funding agreement with additional funding amounts “subject to the Congressional Appropriations process during future years.”
The federal agency said it would release $100 million appropriated by Congress this year, and commit the rest in future Congressional appropriations. The remaining two-thirds of the project funding will come from state and local budgets.
The news took San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo by surprise. “I did not predict this,” he said in an interview Monday. “I’m thrilled to witness the triumph of sound policy over senseless politics. There’s not a project in the United States that’s more shovel-ready than this one.”
The grant had divided California’s congressional delegation. Republicans opposed it, arguing it would help the state’s high-speed rail project while Democrats vocally supported the grant.
“This is a win for everyone involved,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, said in a statement. “Caltrain’s fleet of diesel trains are at the end of their useful life. Now is the time to replace these outdated, dirty diesel trains with a cleaner, modern electric fleet.”
Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Palo Alto, called the decision an “Alleluia moment” and a “clear victory for my constituents and the people of the Bay Area.”
“Passenger service began on this corridor during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln over 150 years ago,” Eshoo wrote in a statement. “Today, I am proud that our generation is able to build something worthy of the future of our region.”
Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration has pressed the Trump administration and Congress to support the project. During a trip to Washington in March, Brown raised the issue in meetings with Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
“Secretary Chao did the right thing on Caltrain,” Brown said in a statement. “This is not only good for California, it’s good for America.”
Chao originally blocked the grant after receiving a letter from all 14 of California’s Republican members of Congress opposing the project.
“This is yet another bait and switch to deceive state taxpayers and take imaginary dollars from one project to pay for another, putting at risk California’s transportation future,” Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Turlock, said in a statement, arguing that state funding for the project would come from money approved by voters for high-speed rail.
While California politicians have painted Trump as the state’s biggest nemesis, the Caltrain decision underscores the unpredictability of the Trump administration — as well as the president’s “willingness to play ball” when it comes to high-speed rail and other major infrastructure projects, said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
“Donald Trump marches to his own beat,” Whalen said. “Some days that’ll delight conservatives and other days it’ll drive conservatives crazy, and this is the latter.”
But — as with Trump’s approval of disaster-relief funding requests from the Golden State — Whalen cautioned against reading too much into the decision.
“I would be hesitant to go out and dance in the street and declare some kind of truce between California and the Trump administration,” he said. “You have to go policy by policy.”
