Kings County farmers and residents who oppose California’s high-speed rail project are attempting a last-ditch effort to stop the construction of the $68 million behemoth. They are asking the California Supreme Court to hear their case and overturn an appellate court decision favoring the projected rail line, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Filing a petition on Tuesday in San Francisco, the opponents argued that the California High-Speed Rail Authority ignored legal precedent for the last hundred years regarding the “enforceability” of voter-approved bond measures.
Last November, Judge Michael Kinney of the Sacramento Superior Court ruled for opponents of the project, saying that the state’s voters had approved far less than the actual projected cost of the train when it passed a referendum in 2008.
Kinney was overturned in late July by the Sacramento-based Third District Court of Appeal, which ruled that the rail authority’s finance committee did not violate legal precedent when it voted to approve the issuance of bonds.
The appellate decision followed California Governor Jerry Brown’s completion of a deal in which the rail line was granted funds from a quarter of the “Cap-and-Trade” fees derived from the state’s 2006 law fining polluters abusing greenhouse gases limits.
It may take weeks or months may pass before the state Supreme Court decides whether to hear the case; experts are undecided as to what the court will do.
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