Bids on High-Speed Train Derailed : Construction: Morrison-Knudsen and Bombardier Corp. apparently drop out, leaving only Bechtel International interested in Anaheim-Las Vegas link.
Two companies that were expected to compete for the chance to build a high-speed rail line from Anaheim to Las Vegas have apparently pulled out of the competition, leaving only one other bidder.
Paul Taylor, executive director of the California-Nevada Super Speed Ground Transportation Commission, said Tuesday that he strongly doubts that Montreal-based Bombardier Corp. and Boise-based Morrison-Knudsen will file a formal proposal to build and operate a rail system by next Monday’s commission-imposed deadline.
“I don’t expect them to bid,” Taylor said. Citing a June 22 letter to the commission and the firms’ presentation at a recent meeting, Taylor said Bombardier argued that the project would be “excessively risky” financially without planning and other assistance at state government expense.
Taylor said Bombardier and Morrison-Knudsen had been attempting to prepare a single bid on the $4-billion project rather than submit two separate proposals.
Bombardier and Morrison-Knudsen officials could not be reached for comment Tuesday. The companies were known to favor construction of a French-built rail system known as TGV on the 275-mile route.
The only other firm to have expressed a desire to build the line is San Francisco-based Bechtel International Inc., which favors a German-built train known as “mag-lev” because it is propelled by a magnetic field.
Bechtel officials said Tuesday that they don’t believe the loss of competing firms will give them any ability to dictate terms to the bistate train commission, most members of which are quite taken with the mag-lev idea.
“I don’t really think so,” said Ervon R. Koenig, Bechtel’s senior vice president and the man in charge of the company’s high-speed rail proposal. “We would not have gotten into negotiations with the commission until it made its selection of a franchise. But this may accelerate the process a little bit, because we won’t have these competing technologies anymore.”
Koenig said he could not respond to Bombardier’s letter indicating that the project needs a publicly subsidized process for planning and getting project permits, except to say that his firm has already committed millions of dollars to that effort.
But he repeated the company’s longstanding position that even if the train commission awards Bechtel a franchise, his firm will still need to do a final feasibility study that could make or break the project.
Orange County Supervisor Don R. Roth, a strong advocate of mag-lev, said he is not ruling out bids by Bombardier and Morrison-Knudsen, since he has seen no formal statement from either firm that definitively seeks to remove them from further consideration.
But Roth said neither firm has been pursuing the project with much relish.
“Why should I have spent all this time analyzing and riding the TGV if they weren’t going to submit a proposal,” Roth said testily. “They knew all along that the commission was insisting on totally privatized financing.”
Roth said that in the end, Bechtel’s proposal may be found unacceptable. “It’s possible that the whole thing could be scrapped,” he said.
Even if Bechtel is awarded a franchise as the lone bidder, Roth said, he believes there are sufficient “checks and balances.”
Both the California and Nevada legislatures, which set up the bistate train commission, must ratify the franchise award, which is also dependent on Congress providing federally owned rights of away along Interstate 15 free of charge. That legislation is still pending.
