Senate Transportation Subcommittee on LOSSAN Rail Corridor Resiliency

Okay. Hello, everybody, and good morning. Welcome. We're officially calling this meeting to order. It's great to see all of you here in San Clemente. Thank you for joining us this morning. This is the Senate Transportation Subcommitee on LOSSAN Rail Corridor resiliency. And I'm going to give a few opening remarks and then we'll move forward with the agenda items we have. So first, the Senate continues to welcome the public, and we have provided access to in person participation for public comment.

For today's hearing, we'll be hearing all of the panels of witnesses on the agenda prior to taking any public comment. And once we've heard all the witnesses, we will have a public comment period for those who wish to comment on the agenda. So again, welcome to our Subcommittee's informational hearing. This is the third hearing of this Subcommitee, and I'm really excited to be right here in San Clemente, right next to the rail line.

And I want to particularly thank Senator Nguyen here to my right for hosting us in your district. Thank you for having us today. During our first two meetings in May and August, we heard from the state and rail operators and stakeholders on the risks, threats and benefits of the 3501 mile coastal rail corridor.

We also heard about the tremendous importance and value of this rail corridor for passenger travel, for moving goods throughout Southern California, for the military, and ultimately for the overall economic health of the region and state. We also learned about the havoc that climate change is wreaking on us, accelerating coastal erosion and destabilizing hillsides and bluffs. This is happening across the corridor from Santa Barbara to San Diego counties.

So since our last hearing, the Senators have been back in the district for 3.5 months in between the end of the legislative session and the beginning of January. And in that time, I have visited, will have visited five sections of the rail corridor. So my first visit, I was excited to join Senator Limone in Santa Barbara.

And I also visited Burbank, Los Angeles and Fullerton and met with the other Subcommitee Members, as well as local elected officials who represent that area and the Assembly Members who represent that area. And everywhere that we visited, we could see that improvements are needed and these improvements are needed to safeguard and transform this essential rail corridor. We have a full agenda today of subject matter experts to help inform us where we should go next and how to best set the rail corridor up for success.

And there's much to be optimistic for, but there's much that remains to be done so we know how efficient, effective and impactful a well run rail system can be. And we know this because we can see it operating in other places around the world, from the Northeast corridor here in the United States to Europe and Japan.

We also see the potential to transform our region, and that is an opportunity to create a brighter future for California that capitalizes on rail, to take cars off of the road, to reduce congestion, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to move people and goods more efficiently. This Subcommitee and the collaboration with the Federal Government, our state government, and our agency partners, together with local stakeholders, will be central to creating the shared vision and success for this corridor.

I want to thank my Senate colleagues, particularly Senator Limone to my left, Senator Wynn to my right, and also Senator Allen and Unburg, who will be here shortly, as well as Senator Newman, who was not able to make it today. But everybody was so gracious to welcome me and my office to their districts and to see their section of the rail corridor. And I also want to thank the local elected officials.

There are at least three Members of the San Clemente City Council who are here today, and I want to thank the panelists and Members who've come in from the public and flown in from Sacramento to both testify and to be with us to hear the really important information that will be presented.

So before we move forward with the introductory remarks from the mayor of San Clemente and also from Supervisor Foley, I wanted to just ask my two colleagues if you wanted to say anything here at the beginning. Senator Nguyen.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to, again, thank you and your staff and the caucus staff, I mean, the Committee staff, for being here and coming from either San Diego or Sacramento. Really appreciate it. Really appreciate your time and your diligent and fully concentrating on this situation that we're going through and making sure that our rail system will work for everybody and that it's effective, efficient, and that continues to move.

And so again, thank you for allowing us to host you here today in San Clemente, and I look forward to hearing all the panels.

Thank you. Senator Limon.

Thank you. Thank you to our chair. This conversation about our rail system, particularly LOSSAN in particular, has been an important conversation, but I actually have to commend our chair because I've never in the seven years I've been in the Legislature seen it elevated in this way with real purpose and intentionality in terms of the conversations and visits we're having. So I want to make sure that that is on record. This is very important.

And I think you have a coalition of Members who are impacted in different ways with our corridor and who are looking at what has happened in some areas and know that the reality is that it may happen in other areas along our coast. And so just, I want to commend you chair, for really convening us, but also helping us understand how to troubleshoot the many complications that have come up through our visits and through our hearings. I look forward to ongoing conversation.

As a Member who represents the northern portion of LOSSAN, I think it's really important to see how the entire system is connected, and particularly in this area where we know we have some of our greater challenges. Those challenges will appear in other parts and other counties as well. So thank you.

Thank you very much. Now we will hear from the mayor of San Clemente, Victor Cabral. Thank you for welcoming us to your beautiful city and your beautiful City Council chambers.

Absolutely. So on behalf of the City of Sacramente, I'd like to welcome you, the California State Senate Transportation Subcommitee on LOSSAN rail corridor. It's nice of you to be here. I'd like to particularly thank you, Senator Catherine Blakespear, for bringing this important issue to our city. It's important to all of us. And I think you mentioned I have two of my colleagues, Chris Duncan and Steve Noblock, who are also here attending.

It's that important of issue that we're here to listen to what happened and what kinds of solutions can be created. As you know, San Clemente is an iconic beach town, home to the World Surf League surf championship and approximately 8 miles of beachfront access. Those 8 miles also include 8 miles of rail access between our bluffs and our ocean. So we are particularly vulnerable city to what's happening on the rails. This year we suffered two catastrophic failures along the rail lines.

The Cypress Shores failure of the rail tracks in San Clemente was devastating and continues to have a devastating impact on our beaches in that area. The Castle Romanica slope failure along the railroad tracks is still costing our city millions of dollars every month. To protect our bluffs and protect our tracks, San Clemente, our city is committed to working with you, the Federal Government and other entities to make sure that we solve this important issue. And we thank you for being here with us.

Thank you very much. And next we have Supervisor Katrina Foley. Thank you for joining us. Supervisor. Yes.

Good morning, everyone. How are you?

Welcome.

Those of you who are not from Orange County, welcome to Orange County. Welcome to district five. I'm Katrina Foley, county Supervisor representing district five, which spans from Costa Mesa all the way to San Clemente and is really the home of where we shut down the trucks over this last year. So thank you for putting such, I think, serious attention on this issue.

And Senator Blakespear, I really appreciate the level of detail that you are engaging in and really taking the time out of your busy schedule to dig deep into these issues and find solutions. In addition to serving on the County Board of Supervisors, I also serve on the Orange County Transportation Authority board, and I'm also leading the county's effort to create a climate action plan for Orange County. And we intend to file our plan in March of 2024. So this is great news for Orange County.

The prioritization of key infrastructure projects is a big piece of that. So we really understand the issue of the importance of the rail corridor all across the rail. I grew up in Santa Barbara. My dad lived there, so I appreciate the rail there. My son went to UCSB and it was an important transportation option for us as he traveled from Orange County to UCSB for college.

So from San Diego to Santa Barbara, we really need to make sure that we have a plan for a sustainable future for a rail corridor. So I appreciate you taking the interest. I wanted to share Orange County's investment. Orange County Transportation Authority has invested nearly $2 billion over the course of the last 30 years on the tracks just between San Clemente and here, what we own in Fullerton as well.

We also understand the need for a state led effort to make sure that this rail system is in place and is working for the future. We also understand that having a framework that includes the locals, the regional, and the state and federal partners is really key. So to that end, in August, Orange County Transportation Authority selected HDR engineering as the firm to lead our coastal rail resiliency study. Since the award, we've been working to develop a comprehensive and wide ranging stakeholder engagement plan.

We understand there's significant interest in the development of this study, and it's important to us that we engage all stakeholders and that we listen to the community, that we listen to the experts, and we lead with science as one of the first steps. We're looking at a 90 day hotspot analysis, and this is intended to be in advance of what we expect to be a very rainy season.

So we initiated to identify the most vulnerable areas along the seven mile coastal stretch of rail between San Clemente and Dana Point. So this analysis and some potential solutions will be available in January. We think this will be good information for your Committee and we'll be happy to share that with you.

At the same time, we're launching a group of listening sessions in the winter, and this will shape our overall study for our long term, we want to thank the California Transportation Commission, which last week awarded Orange County Transportation Authority $12 million in competitive funding through our local transportation climate adaption program. And I know Senator Blake's here. We talked about how the Governor even highlighted this in his recent press announcement. So it's good news for Orange County that the state is paying attention.

And I know your effort is for the whole corridor. But of course, we're focused here in Orange County on our link. And so that's why I'm focusing my comments on that. But thank you for all the work that you're doing. We do appreciate the effort to bring everyone together. We've got Octa skag, Sandag, La Metro, NCTD, San Diego, RCTA.

It's so many groups, and to have somebody to consolidate them and lead them together is very critical, I think, to the future of the rail corridor, the complexity of the issues, and really listening and hearing what are potential solutions. So thank you for including us, and thank you for hosting this hearing right here in San Clemente in District five. And welcome home to Senator Nguyen, who gets to be at home for the occasion today. So thank you so much. And we look forward to the presentations.

Thank you so much, supervisor. So next, we will jump right into our presenters. So our first presenter is Chad Edison with California State Transportation Agency. He's the Chief Deputy secretary for rail and transit. And I'll just say, for people who are still getting oriented to this, the question of who within the bowels of the state government knows the most about this. 351 miles of rail, which has seven right of way owners and five different operators. It is Chad.

So we are excited to have him come in from Sacramento to talk today at this Subcommitee hearing. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you. Thank you, Senator. And it's an honor to be here today. I'd like to first start out saying how good it is to have the entire corridor up and running again. The ridership and revenue that comes with that, the importance of the service being there for the people who need to use it for their daily lives. It's really significant that this has all gotten reopened. And we're thankful to all the different stakeholders that work together to accomplish that.

That puts this in the context of how higher levels of ridership and revenue actually support the ongoing investment in the corridor. And it's all a reinforcing cycle here as we continue to get more riders back on the service. The current services are funded, both in the case of the surfliner, by state resources, and then in the case of the commuter rail services, state and local resources, and we appreciate all that it takes to keep this corridor running and being improved.

The service levels that we have there today on the Pacific Surfliner are not back to where they were pre pandemic, and it is our goal in the coming fiscal year to return to pre pandemic service levels. And so we're really trying to get back to that full service in the corridor right now on the north end, Senator Limon, we have the full service back, and we have 10 of the 13 frequencies that were there, round trip frequencies on the south end.

We look to restore those other three in the coming fiscal year and then to continue putting additional services out there. The capital investments in the corridor allow for us to plan for seven round trips on the north end and 16 on the south end. And so as we work through the next couple of years, we see adding those services in to get to that full use of the corridor capacity that we have built.

The projects for state investment in the corridor as a whole since 2015 is about $3.1 billion, and many of those projects are still getting into construction. A few of them have been recently completed, but most of these projects are projects that are going to come to completion in the next five years or so. The funding behind that comes from a whole mix of sources. It's transit, interstate rail capital, it's high speed rail bookend money. It's Prop One a that went into the positive train control systems.

It's Prop 1B resources. It includes state rail assistance, SB one, competitive resources. There's a whole variety of resources that have added up to that. Over $3.1 billion. We most recently put out a draft I-TIP and the draft interregional transportation improvement program contains an additional one hundred sixty million dollars total in the region. But of that, 62 million is in San Diego County with the San Dieto double track and special events platform down by Del Mar. So these investments continue to be added to.

We will be working together with the region to further prioritize funding and definitely recognize the value of statewide planning and effort here in conjunction with our partners. One of the things I'd like to focus on also is just last Friday we got the good news of the corridor ID program selecting this corridor, the Los an corridor from end to end, as well as its extension south towards San Isidro, as a key area of planning for our work with the Federal Government.

That initial grant is small, but it allows us to start the process of doing a service development plan that will be worked on between the Caltrans and Calstea and the various stakeholders in the corridor, including the freight railroads, including our local agencies that own the corridor. And that effort will help. One of its first products is to really have a phased, prioritized list of projects that are kind of next ready for investment. And so having this more formal process with our federal partner is really important.

It's the foundation on which they're going to build a lot of their future capital grant commitments to the region. And we're very encouraged by their willingness to work with us. At the statewide level, we bring some key tools to that process. We have the network planning component, which really looks at the opportunities to make sure all of the services connect well with each other and with local transit. So that network planning involves ridership modeling.

It includes service modeling, and that is done in conjunction again with our local partners, with Losan, with Metrolink, with coaster in the corridor. But that statewide look makes sure that we're getting the connections, the future connections, to Brightline, to Metrolink trains, to Coaster trains, to the buses that connect us to Central Valley rail services. If you leave those out and you don't understand how all the service works together, you really lose out on the ridership and the service to Californians. That's so critical.

So with that, I'll go ahead and leave that as my initial comments here. I'd be glad to take questions, and also I look forward to Jason's testimony.

Okay, well, thank you so much, Chad. Next we have Jason Jewell. He's the managing Director of the LOSSAN Rail corridor agency. And just for a little context about that, the LOSSAN rail corridor agency oversees the whole corridor. And when I traveled back to Washington, DC, and met with our California Senator, Padilla, his Bill when he was a state Senator is what created this LOSSAN rail corridor agency.

And I asked him about how he thought it was going, and he said, well, from my perspective, no news is good news. Basically, I haven't heard anything bad come about in this last 10 years or so. So hopefully that's a good sign. But what we're trying to do is have good news that's actually uplifting the corridor and doing things that may take it to the next level. So here with us today is the top person at that agency, the managing Director, Jason Jewell.

And he's been accompanying me on all of the different tours to all these different places and sticking close by to make sure he overhears everything I say to anybody to make sure he knows what anything secret that might be happening is, and in fact, there is nothing secret happening. We're just trying to uncover all the layers of this onion here of this rail corridor. So I'm really excited to have him here today to speak to us and to provide some slides.

So with that, go ahead, Mr. Jewel.

Great. Good morning. Chair Blakespear and Members of the Committee, Jason Jewell, managing Director of the LOSSAN Rail Corridor Agency. And thank you very much for inviting me to speak on behalf of the Losan agency this morning. It's good to see you all again.

This morning I'm going to be talking about the Losan agency's role in planning along the corridor and really focus primarily on the LOSSAN agency's annual business plan process as it serves as an important role in the agency's planning for the quarter as a whole. And under the interagency transfer agreement between the Los, an agency and the state, the agency is required to submit an annual business plan.

I'm going to refer to it as our ABP for short, and we're required to submit that to the California Transportation secretary by April 1 of every year.

The interagency transfer agreement prescribes the elements of the ABP, which is a two year planning, operations and budget document, and it serves as the agency's plan for operating the Pacific Surfliner inner city rail service, as well as it includes a report on overall performance, it includes a marketing plan, capital improvement projects along the corridor, and it includes the agency's funding requests for Administration, operations and marketing. And the development and submittal of the ABP is approximately. I'm going to move on over to the next slide here.

It's approximately a six to seven month process that really starts with the agency developing key assumptions which are adopted by the LOSSAN Agency board, and after the adoption of those key assumptions which primarily drive the operating service components of the plan.

Some of the main components of the process includes updates to the quarter wide capital improvement list in which information is provided by our technical Advisory Committee Members for Member agency led projects throughout the corridor, while the agency also includes updates for any agency led projects along the corridor as well.

Another main component of the process is the agency coordinates closely with both Amtrak and Caltrans to develop cost and revenue forecasting models that really drive the development of the operating funding request, which is included in the business plan of particular. Actually, I'm going to focus on a little bit more of the process.

Just to let you know, we're currently in the beginning stages of our AB process right now, where we have solicited information from our TAC Members, our technical Advisory Committee Members, and we are beginning to update and draft the chapters of our plan.

And once those chapters are drafted, and that's about the January timeframe, we request that the TAC Members review and provide input and feedback, which then that feedback gets incorporated into a draft that we bring to both our TAC and our board in about the February timeframe. They review it and they provide comment, and those comments and input is then incorporated into a final draft, which is presented to the TAC and board again for final approval about the March time frame.

And then it's submitted to Kausta by April 1 as required. And I wanted to spend a little bit of time to let you know in particular focus this year we are planning and coordinating for future service increases, as Chad alluded to, which really does involve the planning and coordination on equipment deployment, as well as focusing on cost efficiencies and increasing revenue in order to get back up to pre Covid service levels.

We also are going to continue to coordinate with our stakeholders on coastal resiliency efforts along the corridor, and the planning for the operations and for the projects along the corridor is really an ongoing effort throughout the year. We have various touch points with our stakeholders through working groups and coordination calls, and just to name a few of these. For instance, with Caltrans, we have a JPA leadership coordination meeting on a monthly basis.

We also have a business operations working group which primarily focuses on a lot of the financing, budget and performance metrics. We also have an equipment working group. We have regular meetings with colleagues from our Member agencies on a monthly basis. We have technical Advisory Committee meetings, which is a brownack Committee that meets throughout the year. And we have a Los an quarter coastal resiliency technical working group, as well as we've been involved in the Calsto led efforts of the regional rail working group throughout the corridor.

So through those meetings, we learn and coordinate on projects throughout the year. And again, this is an ongoing effort throughout the year that provides really great touch points with all of our stakeholders. And I wanted to get into a little bit more on SB 6677 and provide an update on how we plan to address the requirements included in that legislation. So the legislation, as you may be well aware, requires a discussion on the effects of climate change on the Los an corridor.

And for this we plan on describing the effects and challenges we have experienced along the corridor, both historically, but especially over the last year when the rail line was shut down for 251 days. We will also describe the challenges that are being faced, not only in the south corridor, but also in the northern section of our corridor on Union Pacific's territory and describe what has been done to combat those effects, as well as plans underway to address it for the future.

We also plan on including information from studies and efforts that have been done or currently underway as available, including the City of San Clemente's nature based coastal resiliency project feasibility study, SAnDAG's climate adaptation and resiliency assessments, sand replenishment efforts in Orange County on behalf of the County of Orange, as well as OCtA's coastal rail resiliency study, as Director Foley had mentioned, and these are just to name a few.

So we're looking to really draw information from all these different efforts across the corridor and bring that information into our ABP. And to get in a little bit more detail, SB 677 requires an identification of projects that are planned to increase climate resiliency on the corridor. So we are currently in the process of updating the capital projects list that is included in the ABP.

And this is just an example on the slide here to show what we are planning on including in the ABP, which will identify the projects that are related to resiliency and environmental sustainability efforts. And we plan on including the possible funding options for each of these projects identified as required by the legislation. And for the description we do plan on including a description of how the projects will address increased resiliency on the corridor.

And in closing, I just wanted to also piggyback off of what Chad had mentioned about the federal corridor identification and development program. We at the Low sand agency are very excited about the acceptance of the Losan corridor into the program.

The Losan agency coordinated closely with Caltrans on the application for the program, and the purpose of the corridor identification program, as Chad alluded to, is to develop a comprehensive intercity passenger rail planning and development program that will help to guide inner city passenger rail development not only for California but also throughout the country. And it will create a pipeline of inner city passenger rail projects that are ready for implementation, and the program is intended to become the primary means for directing federal financial support.

So we look forward to working with Caltrans, the FRA, and our corridor stakeholders to coordinate, plan and prioritize inner city rail projects for the entire corridor. So with that, that concludes my remarks, and I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you very much, Mr. Jewel. We appreciate your comments. When I became a new Senator last year, I was really excited to learn that there is something called a Senate office of Research, and this is an arm of the government. It's a nonpartisan office that provides research for Senate Members and committees, and its mission is to produce comprehensive and reliable research to inform effective public policy.

So we asked for the Senate Office of Research to look into the Low sand corridor, and they've spent the last several months doing that. And so today we have the author of the report, Ted Link Oberstar, who is a transportation and housing consultant with the Senate Office of Research. He's here today to offer some remarks, and so we would like to welcome him next to speak.

There it is. Okay. Morning. Chair Blakespear and Members, thank you very much for having me. Ted Linkoverstar with the Senate Office of Research. As you mentioned, earlier this year, your office contacted us and asked us to look into the issues surrounding the quarter, particularly the challenges that the quarter has experienced in securing funding for critical capital investment needs. So we prepared a report as a background for that.

We interviewed a number of, met with a number of stakeholders, including Executive Director Jewel with the LOSSAN Agency. We also met with officials from Metrolink, with the regional planning agencies LOSSAN and SKAG, as well as state transportation officials also looked at, reviewed a number of documents, state and regional planning documents, operator strategic plans, budgets and various other historical material to try and understand what's going on with the corridor and to make some recommendations for how we can move forward.

Hopefully, the result of that in this report will give us some thoughts for moving forward, move through this very quickly, the background and context, because we all know this, I think it's the second busiest rail quarter in the country, seven right of way owners and five operators, three passenger and two freight. It's a key element of the state's long term transportation vision for comprehensive multimodal system.

And the state's rail plan in 2018 and the draft plan in 2023 builds on that for a network that connects the most populous communities in the state, competitive travel times and reliable integration with local systems. So a lot of the things that Mr. Edison was talking about already this morning, and it's the job of the regional and local agencies to implement the plans, to prioritize projects for funding. The financial need in the sector is vast, as we know, likely exceeds twenty billion dollar for the quarter.

And these numbers are all very fluid because a lot of these projects have not been fully developed and scoped. But at least ten billion for the score program in Southern California, additional money for climate investments, including here in San Clemente, 7.2 billion in LOSSAN's plan, and probably a couple of hundred million in the north portion of the corridor as well. Apologize. Based on Mr. Edison's comments this morning, it's 3.1 billion.

I overcredited the state, I guess, a little bit on that report, but significant resources that the state has contributed so far and certainly plans to Fund additional projects going forward. But there are limitations based on limitations on revenue and the need for geographic equity to address things elsewhere in the state.

Local agencies have also put a significant amount of money, including federal grant applications and also local resources, though one of the things that we did find is that in recent years, it seems that more of the funding at the local level has been going into operations, at least with some of the agencies. And we explore some ideas around what may going on there a little bit in the report, and we do talk a little bit.

I won't go into it this morning, but the report does talk a little bit about some of the challenges that may be involved in using local tax measures for large interregional projects because of the tie to local voters and local needs. Good news is we do have a historic federal opportunity right now. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs act and last Friday's announcement, California receives $6 billion for two projects is certainly good news. And there is more money available through the IJA.

And it's not too early to be thinking about 2026 reauthorization and how we might be doing to position ourselves for success going forward. So positioning the Losan Quarter for success, and this is sort of what we really tried to look at in the report is a couple of things are really important. And one, to be able to be successful in competing for these very competitive federal funds, it's important to have a common shared corridor vision and to prioritize projects that do a couple of things.

I think this is important. You need to have, and several of the stakeholders we met with sort of stressed this, is that having projects that show measurable, incremental benefits, so you know what you're getting from the individual project and also showing that it's part of improved quarter wide performance. So long term performance. So it's important to bring that together. We looked a little bit at regional and local governments, or more than a little bit.

We looked at regional local governments to try and understand how the governance structure might be getting in the way of coming together with this common corridor vision. One thing at the regional level, the two metropolitan planning agencies that cover the majority of the quarter, certainly the most populous regions of it, Skag and Sandag, operate very differently. There's different organizational structures. SANDAG is a consolidated agency that has not only planning responsibilities, but also is responsible for delivering projects. So funding, prioritization of projects and construction.

And it's also a single county agency, so there's a lot more ability within one agency to move things forward. In contrast, SKaG is, and this was stressed by the folks we met with. It's a planning agency. It serves largely a convening role and provides analysis, technical guidance to impact policy. But crucially, it doesn't have the authority to program and Fund individual projects. That all takes place at the county level.

So they do a lot of work to try and bring the county agencies together, develop a common plan, and move things forward, but it's a little bit more complex process in that structure.

We also, as I said, met with the operators and looked at their strategic plans, their budgets, and it struck us that there are some elements of their organizational structures that very understandable that they operate the way they do, but that may make it difficult or more difficult to come together with a coordinated, common vision at times. Metrolink is a five county, 538 miles regional rail system. It's, as you might expect, regionally focused. It was created through legislation in the 1990s to create a regional rail system.

Their strategic plan focuses very much on regional ridership growth, and interestingly, on financial Independence from its Member agencies. They're looking very much to focus on generating new sources of revenue, and so there's a strong focus on the needs of the five Member agencies. It was interesting in the strategic plan, there was minimal discussion other than a couple of references to the shared corridor with Losan, but there wasn't very much discussion about interregional partnerships in their strategic plan.

Their organizational structure determines or ensures that they're very focused on the immediate needs of the five Member agencies. The Member agencies, actually, under the JPA structure, own all of the infrastructure. Metrolink manages the maintenance, but each of the individual counties is responsible for the assets within their jurisdiction, and thus for a role in terms of capital improvements on those. Metrolink's budgetary structure is formuLA based, based on route, miles, passenger trips, those sorts of metrics. And the Member operating subsidies are based a lot on that.

Their budgetary structure and the annual budget is tied very much toward meeting those individual, responding to those individual agencies concerns. And so the effect of this is that, or it appears to us that the effect of this is that it's hard for Metrolink to focus as much on long term priorities as they might otherwise, because the budget structure is very focused on immediate needs. Regarding Losan agency, the rail corridor agency we also met with does have a regional corridor focus or an interregional focus.

11 Member JPA, including representation from the right of way owners and planning agencies. Though, interestingly, Metrolink, we observed, is not a Member. They do participate on the technical Advisory Committee, but they are not a Member of the Los, an agency's governing board. The agency was created for the purpose of operating the Metrolink or the Pacific Surfliner Service, which it took over in 2015. The agency structure, it's very small staff, about 18 positions.

It's entirely funded through the state's inner city rail funding and its primary focus is operations. As I said, it doesn't really, not really set up as a capital program management agency. And as I said, its technical Advisory Committee is where a lot of its work takes place, a lot of stakeholder communication, operational coordination and planning work. In 2021, they did release what's called a rail optimization study, which looks like it is the basis of a capital improvement program.

It's very much based on the state's, state rail plan's pulse scheduling model, identifies short and long term planning scenarios and recommends this is crucial prioritization and sequencing of projects. These are the projects that need to happen first in order for us to reach our long term goals. And these are the way that they should be sequenced. But the feedback that we got from meeting with stakeholders is that to date, this has had an impact on operations.

They have changed some of the scheduling to align based on this, but the alignment of capital projects and the funding of capital projects and the prioritization of that has been slower in coming forward. Likely one of the reasons for that is, again, the Member agencies are responsible for managing their own assets and their own capital improvement programs. So the agency itself, it doesn't have authority because they can't tell anybody else, other agencies what to do. It doesn't have that capacity.

And also what we found interesting was that because they don't have their own funding source other than any grants that they get from the state, they haven't been able to apply for any federal grants because they don't have a source for non federal match. So moving forward in the report, we suggest some options for moving forward. And my colleagues on the rest of this panel will go into more detail on their ideas for what we might do.

But a couple of things that we suggest in the report is to look at developing a common within the quarter framework for shared vision and accountability. And we suggest looking at a model that was developed by the Northeast quarter back in 2015 and has been recently updated, has three pillars to it. One is a cost sharing structure to make sure that all of the entities in the quarter are sharing according to a common understanding of costs.

They also have a robust reporting structure that's there which creates transparency and accountability. There's annual reporting, quarterly reporting among all the agencies. So agencies understand who's doing what, whose projects are moving forward and on what schedule and what cost. So there's just a lot more shared understanding. And then there's also a federal partnership piece, which I think has some things that may be instructive for us as well.

The federal partnership element of their policy is a statement among the partners in the corridor of the need for a partnership between the corridor and the Federal Government. They're essentially saying, we're coming together with this policy. We're doing our part. The Federal Government has a responsibility to do its part.

And so that is something that we might look at as well out here for if we're able to come up with a common vision for ourselves using that to go to Washington, DC and make the case for increased federal participation. It is important to notice, to recognize that there are differences between Losan and NEC. Infrastructure ownership is one of those. It's all publicly owned in the NEC, and we are dealing with a public private structure, which complicates things. They also have more operational complexity.

They have nine operators on the passenger side versus three passenger operators here and two freight. And they also have a number of agencies that have a larger number of amount of maybe a larger capital program, which may affect things as well. Beyond that common vision, or maybe as a way to get to that common vision, we suggest looking at an expanded role for the state.

The state has reconvened the 2020 corridor Working Group, and that may provide the forum and foundation for some capital planning process and activities. We also might look at a more formal role for the state government in terms of an office that deals with leading inner city rail capital development for the Losan corridor and potentially elsewhere in the state. And then we might want to look at whether there are needs to restructure things at the local level.

I mentioned earlier that the, we have these different agencies that have different roles. Metrolink is not currently part of the Low stand agency structure. Should we look at having some increased role for Metrolink if the Low stand agency becomes sort of the common agency that is going to be responsible for a shared capital program in the corridor.

If that were to be the case, there are some other considerations, such as whether staffing levels would need to be changed, whether there's funding that needs to be changed, and whether the agency should operate at some level of Independence from its Member agencies. That is the summary of my report, and I'd be happy to take questions at the appropriate time.

Well, thank you very much for that. There's a lot of really good meat in here, and there might be some questions and comments about it. I'm mindful of time, though, and wonder if we should hear the rest of the panelists, and then we can come back and ask questions of everybody. So I think we'll proceed with that plan. But thank you very much for that presentation, Ted. We appreciate it.

Our next panelist is Sarah Katz, and she's a researcher with the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Irvine. So welcome, Sarah. Thank you. You're welcome to start whenever you're ready.

Thank you. Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to talk with you today. Before I jump into my slides, I'm hoping to talk to you on a little bit of a personal level. I attended college in Washington, DC when the metro was still being built. So I was able to witness firsthand what a good, convenient, effective, inclusive transit system can do to the entire vitality of a region. And I'm not just talking about economically.

I'm talking about the way it enhances the quality of life of its citizens and workers. So when I moved to Orange County for a job shortly thereafter, I was amazed and stunned at the lack of transit. We had the most anemic bus system, and it would take you on the most circuitous route, and it would take an hour to go three to 5 miles. It was really crazy, and I wanted to try and change that.

So I was delighted when I was selected to be the public Member on the OCTA board of directors. And from there, I became a founding board Member of Metrolink and then a Member of the Los sand corridor rail agency. So this corridor is near and dear to my heart. I know it well, and I know its critical importance. And I'm so proud to see what has happened in the last few decades from whence I came.

There's some big decisions to make today and in the future, and I hope some of the information you receive today will help you with that. So on this slide, it basically go through some of the history, the importance of how this corridor supports the state's greenhouse gas and VMT reduction efforts, which is so important, and how ridership is really beginning to rebound. I also want to make one note here.

Prior to the pandemic, Metrolink ridership through Orange County equaled the trips of one freeway lane driving during rush hours. I mean, that's pretty remarkable. And 10 days ago, I was at the grand opening of the express lanes on the 405, OCTA put two new express lanes and a General purpose lane. And some of the remarks from the dais, one in particular stuck with me, and that was from OCTA's CEO, Daryl Johnson.

And he said that this is probably the last major project of its kind to expand highway systems in California. And if that's true, and I think it probably is, this makes this corridor even more critical. The challenge, at least in Orange County, is that a seven mile segment of the rail corridor is highly at risk, affecting both statewide passenger and national freight and military rail traffic. There are local resiliency efforts underway throughout the corridor.

Nearly four years ago, a rail defense against climate change plan examined a 25 miles stretch of rail from Irvine south to the county line in San Diego, and it identified initial strategies to help mitigate those risks and preserve continuity of rail service.

OCTA has continued to build on that effort from a high level policy perspective, and given that there are multiple owners and operators, the existing model is largely an effective 11 where the public agency owners have collaborated and coordinated to focus on maintaining and building passenger rail service. I understand that OCTA is taking an appropriate phased approach and recently launched a study to develop short and midterm strategies to keep the rail running in place.

The primary focus is to identify critical vulnerable points and proposed protective measures for the rail line, and we heard from supervisor Foley this morning about that. I was very happy to hear. And we've also heard that today that CTC awarded OCTA $12 million for environmental work to implement the identified short term solutions with the current approach to operate and coordinate service in the Low stand corridor. The bigger issue is who is best positioned to set an overall vision for this corridor.

There are several principles I would like to recommend to be considered in choosing a lead for a long term study. The lead agency should view the long term study as a foundational guide rather than a final decision making document. Transparency and inclusivity are crucial in the study process to ensure all perspectives are considered, and engaging with agencies that will eventually approve future projects throughout the study is vital to prevent unforeseen challenges.

I was very impressed when I learned a few months ago that the top executives of LOSSAN, SKAG, La Metro, RCTC, OCTA, MTS and NCTD all signed on a letter to the California Secretary of Transportation requesting that the state take the lead on initiating a study for a long term plan for the Losan corridor. All those agencies have competing interests, yet they've come together on this important issue.

I find myself agreeing with these executives that a state led study is necessary, given the long lead time, to plan and secure funding for future phases, as well as to ensure continued involvement by a broad coalition of stakeholders as well as regulatory agencies such as the Coastal Commission and the State Lands Commission. And I'd probably throw in the FRA there. Even though they're not a state agency, it truly is a consensus based approach, much like the Northeast corridor.

I don't think we need to consider another governance structure. What probably would work best is for Calsta and Caltrans to step in and help coordinate, fund and lead this effort. The state has a depth of resources, both technical and financial, and I'm confident we'll be both transparent and inclusive to ensure that all perspectives are considered. And that's my recommendation today.

Well, thank you very much. We appreciate your remarks at the beginning about your personal connection to this as well. Next we will hear from Genevieve Giuliano. She's a Professor at the sole price School of Public Policy at USC. So welcome, Genevieve.

The other side, because you're all right. Thank to me.

I'll start again. Sorry. Thank you, everybody, for inviting me here. I'm Jen Giuliano. I'm at the University of Southern California, and unlike almost everybody in the room, I am not an expert on the Los Angeles corridor. You heard amazing things from Chad and Ted. In terms of the details. I've got a kind of different perspective. I'm kind of coming from this at kind of a much higher level.

I did as much homework as I could in the time that I had before this thing to think about this corridor and sort of share my perspective. So could we go to the next slide? I go to the next slide. Okay. You'll notice that I missed an operator here. I was trying to find a picture of everybody, and I missed one operator. So very quickly, what I'm going to do is talk about where we are, which you heard already.

I'm going to talk about some of the reasons why, as I see them a bit on challenges, very briefly again, because you've heard all this and then some possible solutions. So where we are now, as you all know, is that we have this corridor that's actually shared by both passengers and freight. And although I've heard people say passenger and freight or goods movement, I don't see as much attention being paid to the freight part of this corridor.

We've got a very strong passenger market here, especially on the southern portion from LA south. It's got a lot of growth potential. It's a small market relative to all the travel that goes on in California that's related to freight, but it's actually a very critical piece of the freight market as well. You also heard that you are operating with a very complicated governance and funding structure. You've got multiple owners. You heard about the seven owners of right of way. You heard about the five different operators.

You heard about at least two of the planning agencies, gag and Sandag. And there's the counties, there's the local jurisdictions. There's many, many players here. There's also multiple funding sources that you heard a little bit about, and they all come with different strings attached. So we've got a very complicated situation here. One of the reasons you might ask, well, how did we get here? And the answer, first of all, is that the corridor itself developed incrementally.

And if you go back to the history right, this actually started out operated by one of the major rail carriers, and that was back in the old days when the rail carriers actually had freight and passenger business together, and that meant that they were able to optimize their system together they were able to coordinate passenger and freight, basically to optimize the entire system. The disinvestment that took place on passenger rail way back in the 1960s actually severed that relationship.

And actually, from that time, I don't think we've ever figured out how to do it. And what we've seen is these regional corridors, right? Like the northeast corridor, for example, that because of the demand in the corridor, people figured out sort of ways of operating the system. Amtrak, as you know, was established to preserve passenger transport, but it hasn't ever really been responsive to the changing market that we've seen. And then finally the later emergence of metropolitan based corridor services, like Metrolink, for example.

So we've had this constant incremental change going on. You're not alone. This corridor is not alone because one of the things that's kind of interesting is that we don't have any really good federal or state models for what I call middle distance travel. So we have a very well structured system for regional or metropolitan level travel, right? We have a three c process. We have mpos, we have forecasting models that help us.

So we really do have a very structured and pretty smooth working operation for metropolitan level travel. We also have a pretty good situation for interstate or long distance travel. We have the airlines, right, that are regulated to some extent, but we have very stable institutional structures that manage the airlines. We don't have that in the middle, the middle of 50 miles to, say 300 miles, which goes beyond regions, sometimes goes across state lines, but in California doesn't, but goes across county lines.

And that's one of the reasons that I see that we have so many people in the mix here because there's all these jurisdictions and there's no actual model that's been developed for this kind of a corridor. So we also have a situation here which is long distance commuting. Right. And it's similar to the northeast corridor. So layered on top of what is essentially intercity travel is long distance commuting up to 50 miles, for example. So that's why I think we're in the situation we are.

So let's move on to what are some of the challenges? And you actually heard all of these, so I don't really need to spend a lot of time. The coordination, the collaboration, the consolidation words that I heard this morning are very clear. Everybody's kind of aware that this is where we are. The lack of coordination or the difficulties of coordination between freight and passenger I think are pretty real.

Freight has its own set of objectives, and since they own a great deal of the right of way. They're in a very powerful position. There's a lot of things going on that you have already mentioned. There has to be some long term planning for climate change adaptation. There has to be some sort of planning for maximizing the productivity of the corridor, and there's a whole lot of federal funding on the table, and you want to be competitive for that funding.

So what are some of the options? One of the things that I often talk about is what I call bandaids and surgery. And bandaids are the incremental fixes. So this corridor has developed via bandaids basically, right. So we get a new service, we figure how to integrate it and so on. The other option is big change, which I call surgery.

So I thought it would be interesting just to kind of look at what the difference would be if we sort of took a band aid path versus a surgery path. So you heard a lot of the band aids today already. More Authority for Los Angeles, standardized rules for cost sharing, which comes out of the NEC recommendation, fair integration and rules for revenue sharing. Very important. I read in one of the reports, more coordination and freight operations, obviously, and more coordination for infrastructure planning and funding.

Well, what if we took a more structural change approach and we thought about a new or restructured state regional authority whose responsibility was not just planning, but managing funding and delegating operations in some way? What if we thought about a full integration of passenger service from the demand side? I, as a passenger, don't care whether I'm riding the surf liner or the coaster or the Metrolink. I just want to pay a fare. I just want to know what's the service?

And yet I as a passenger right now have to choose, do I want to do this or do I want to do that? So imagine if we were to integrate on the demand side so that there was one integrated service. What if we were to rationalize the right of way and track ownership? Could we rationalize it in some way so that it could be better managed as a whole? That's going to be really important. First of all, we need double tracking in many places.

And secondly, as you've all noticed, there's going to be some big adaptation work that's going to have to take place. And what if we had a long range, comprehensive capital and operating plan, not just one, but both? So what would that look like? This is kind of my picture, right, that I've kind of gone through right now. So if we had a new structure for the authority, right? There's always the power of one voice.

So if we're talking about going to the feds, it's always better to go to the feds with one voice rather than multiple voices. More efficient management and decision making, taking advantage of sort of scale economies and capacity for service integration. What about passenger service integration? Well, we could do a much better job of integrating fares, more efficient operations, and so on, rationalized truck and right of way structures.

We could think more about more efficient management of the corridor, the infrastructure capital of the, of the corridor as a whole. We could think about facilities and standardization of costs, as we talked about before, and funding eligibility. And then finally, in terms of long range planning, that's really the key for us to get to a corridor that really lives up to its potential.

So those are just some thoughts from somebody who's not the expert, and I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to share.

Well, thank you very much. We appreciate your engagement on this topic and putting together these slides. Thank you. We may have some questions, and you're welcome to stay seated there as we hear from our last speaker, and then we'll go to questions from the panel. But I know Senator Wynn has to leave soon. I want to make sure that you have the chance to ask any questions or make comments. So bust in when you would like to. Just let me know.

So our last speaker is Amy Peak, Director of Policy and Advocacy from Rebuild SoCal Partnership.

Good morning. Thank you. Chair Blakespear and members of the subcommitee. I'm speaking today on behalf of the rebuild SoCal Partnership, and we very much appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today to talk about the promise of infrastructure and what investing in infrastructure and what investing in infrastructure means for Southern California, particularly when it comes to the LOSSAN Corridor.

We've heard a great deal today about some of the planning, the projects, the funding streams, and all the policy decisions and challenges that are ahead for the LOSSAN Corridor. But I want to spend a few minutes to back up and think about the bigger picture, about what investment means. Think about the working families, the workers, the residents, the small businesses, the commuters, the seniors, students, industries, and economies that are all connected and thrive when we invest in infrastructure.

Our organization plans to release a report in January looking at the high cost of underinvestment in infrastructure. It highlights the fact that in Southern California, we have declined in our infrastructure investment over 37% in the 2010s decade. But we also look at why infrastructure matters and the promise that it brings. Rebuild SoCal Partnership is a partnership of contractors and union workers who believe that infrastructure matters.

Our partners represent over 2700 contractors, particularly in heavy civil and 90,000 union workers, including Leuna, the carpenters, operating engineers from across Southern California. We're dedicated to working with elected officials like yourself and everybody who's here today on the continued need for essential infrastructure funding from airports, bridges, ports, rail transit, roads and water projects. We believe that we can invest more in public infrastructure projects and rebuild our aging transportation networks, our rail networks, along with water, sewer and storm drain systems.

Investing in building communities will also serve the future needs of our region, which we've talked a lot about today. So just a little bit about the promise of infrastructure investment. First, infrastructure investment creates jobs for working families. Large scale projects require a significant amount of labor to be completed, from pipe layers and project managers to engineers and architects, carpenters, electricians, and other professional services. Infrastructure projects have a multiplier effect in the economy.

As workers earn income, they spend it in local goods and services, injecting capital into the region. Importantly, workers without a college degree see relatively higher wages in the construction industry, providing integral pathways into the middle class. Second, infrastructure is an essential component of equitable climate change mitigation practices. Vulnerable communities, such as low income community neighborhoods, are disproportionately affected by extreme weather events and other climate related risks.

By investing in road, rail, bridges, and waterways, we will enhance our region's ability to withstand and recover from climate events. Infrastructure investments can be dedicated to improve evacuation routes, emergency response capacities, and aid in access to essential services during and after disasters. Third, infrastructure investment forms the foundation of a strong economy. We've heard it before, but it bears repeating. Economists estimate that a $1 billion investment in transportation infrastructure will generate up to about $4.3 billion in total economic activity.

Plus, well maintained rail and roads are essential to freight movement. We've talked about that today. Infrastructure can also reduce economic barriers to improve market access, driving that local growth in the communities. Infrastructure also can solve interconnected challenges that we're hearing about today. For example, new capital investments and funding streams in transit and high speed rail infrastructure can create an integrated, accessible transportation system. Furthermore, beyond addressing challenges, infrastructure has promised to improve the quality of lives and communities. We can create equity through infrastructure.

For example, allocating infrastructure dollars to projects to address the needs of historically disadvantaged communities can support local economies and reconnect communities themselves. So these are just a few of the ways that we think infrastructure investment looks like in our communities. Voters, policymakers, stakeholders, we all have a role in bringing this together to effectively make progress on regional infrastructure challenges. Progress will be predicated on the success of efforts to merge the policies, merge the funding programs and the infrastructure projects altogether.

A particular note on this list is for the conversation today is investments in creating multimodal transportation networks. Sustained investments are crucial to expand those safe, convenient, efficient, and affordable transit options to fix roads and support bridges and support bicycle and pedestrian mobility to create that interoperability. Which brings us to LOSSAN and the LOSSAN corridor. LOSSAN represents this promise of infrastructure.

For Southern California residents, investing in the LOSSAN Corridor is an opportunity to increase transit accessibility for all of those folks that we're talking about, the working families, the students, the veterans, the seniors, all of those folks, to expand transportation options, to maintain those strategically critical networks that are important to our national security and connect people to job centers, to universities, to healthcare and hospitals. First, upgrades to transit projects offer convenient and high speed options connecting various regions and job centers.

By increasing road and transit interoperability and accessibility, we can mitigate congestion, reduce our air pollution, and protect our environment. As part of the strategic rail Corridor network, maintaining functionality of LOSSAN is critical to our security. New transportation options that link universities and economic centers and hospitals with a community that benefits our entire region. Finally, just bringing us back to we want to make sure that service Members can travel to a VA hospital.

We want to think about seniors who need healthcare and can travel back and forth. We want to think about students who can get to campus, which we heard a little bit about earlier, that residents and visitors and tourists alike can patronize businesses all up and down the LOSSAN Corridor. Fundamentally, the LOSSAN Corridor represents an opportunity for investment in SoCal and for infrastructure investment in Southern California. Our partnership is pleased to have the opportunity to comment before you today on what infrastructure investment means.

Thank you so much.

Well, thank you very much, Amy. We appreciate your presentation today. I'd like to invite the other panel members to come back up here to answer questions. So, Ted, if you'd like to sit here, and then I would like to offer a chance for Chad and Jason to maybe sit right here so that if anybody has questions, reduce the time spent in coming back and forth to the microphone. You here's another chair coming for.

Okay, great. Well, thank you so much to everybody. It's strange how you're facing each other, but that's the way that this is set up. So it's nice that you're all here and we can ask questions. So I'll just start off. So I come to this question with the goal of trying to improve ridership. So really as a main goal of saying how can we add opportunities for people to take the train instead of driving?

And that has the benefits of reducing congestion, reducing air pollution, creating a higher quality of life for people, being able to go longer distances and make trips that they might not make otherwise because they're able to do work on the train and to reduce the stress that comes from sitting on the five freeway. As was mentioned, we know that road projects and major freeway projects are going to be increasingly unlikely, or maybe we won't see those really at all.

So as we do continue to have more and more people in this state as time goes on, we'll need to figure out what our future looks like when it comes to transportation. Recognizing that the corridor has such potential. And I grow up living within a short walk of the rail corridor, and I'll admit to an unauthorized crossing of the corridor at times to get to the beach, but I've ridden the train quite a lot and would like to be able to ride it more.

And I hear these stories of people whose child is at school at UC Santa Barbara and they want to come back to their home in Encinitas, but because the train is down and last year was down for eight months approximately around that section in San Clemente, they don't want to get on a bus bridge for an hour and take a train from Irvine to Oceanside and get back on the train.

So they don't take that trip for the weekend or their parent takes time off to drive up and pick them up. And people who are no longer commuting up to Los Angeles from San Diego because they don't have a reliable train trip. So unfortunately, what I see happening right now is as the state is facing this $68 billion deficit and we have a declined ridership from COVID and then from track instability, we're in the situation where ridership is falling and nobody's ringing the alarm bell.

And so part of this Subcommitee effort is to say this track is important. We spend a lot of time talking about high speed rail in this state, and there's a lot of money going to it. We should be investing in this and figuring out how it is we can improve ridership and functionality on the corridor, and what are the things that are stopping us from doing that right now? So there are a number of different presentations and ideas that were presented today.

And one of the things that I think is most important is the idea of having a stronger state role. So when we talk about Calstel and or Caltrans together, and the technical capacity, the wherewithal, the knowledge, the background, to be able to say, what is the state's role? When we're talking about involving the state more in a corridor that's owned by five different owners and then these seven different operators, there are certain things that to me, seem like we should not spend as much time on.

Like, for example, changing the ownership structure of the rail corridor. I haven't heard one owner of a section say they want to sell their part. So whether it's freight or a public agency, I don't see that that is something that in the midterm is really possible. And maybe my mind could be changed on that.

But I do see that we would be able to integrate, to look at it from the passenger perspective, of making sure that the operations, that the train lines match up with each other, that they cross boundaries, that they connect to the ecosystem around them, of transit that goes in. And even somebody who rode his bicycle here, took the train, rode his bicycle here today, to this hearing, and he was chatting with me back here, and the trains were aligned and miss each other by three minutes.

So he was sitting there. There he is, shaking his head, yes, they're waving his hand, and you're welcome to talk to him, anyone in the media who wants a story about this or otherwise. So he sat at the train station for 40 minutes, and he knew he would have to do that, but he's so committed to it that he rode the train anyway. But there are countless hundreds of most people who will not do that.

They'll see that misalignment of the schedule and they won't take that trip. So figuring out exactly what is an expanded state role, how does that fit in with LOSSAN as it currently exists? To me, that's the project that we're working on here incrementally and trying to figure out the ideas. And I think it's clearly critically important what LOSSAN thinks, what the state Caltrans thinks. But I also just want to focus. I want to say just one more word here before I go to my colleagues.

Know what we're currently looking at right in front of us now is the suggestion that the state supported part, which is the Amtrak Pacific surfliner part, that they try to do, basically efficiencies or cost cutting. So the idea of having things on the table, like, should they eliminate their business class or the glass of wine that comes with a business class ticket? What about the porter service? What about the Wifi service? What about closing ticket counters?

These are all things to me that really we should not be talking about, should not be on the table, and we should be thinking about how we can draw more people into riding, because the customer experience is so good. In the same way that people choose airlines and they choose to sit in business class, and they get alcohol with that, and they want somebody to help. They want to get on the airplane early, and so they buy tickets.

All these little things that happen in the airline industry, I think, are a good model for looking at what is it that we want on our train trips. So decreasing the passenger experience and contracting and contracting and thinking that's going to lead to success, I think ultimately that's going to lead to fewer and fewer people riding it and more and more state subsidy that goes to fewer and fewer routes.

So we need to be thinking about expanding the number of slots, the number of seats, the number of trains, the marketing, so that we can. I think there is unquestionably an untapped hunger for this. And you see it from the northeast corridor, you see it in other countries. You hear it all the time when you talk to people. I would love to take the train if it was reliable, if it was timely, if it was frequent. And so how do we get there?

I think hearing from my colleagues about the things today that were presented that they think are the most compelling, asking questions of the panelists to say, what exactly do you see as the state role? How can we make that happen? That's my hope for what we can be doing. And I recognize this is, of course, incremental and will continue to build on itself. But moving from the talking stage to the potential action stage is really where my mind is right now.

So with that, I'll open it up to my colleagues and start with Senator Wynn, if you'd like to make any comments.

Thank you, madam. Thank you, Madam Chair. Again, I do want to once again appreciate your efforts and everybody else here and all those who've traveled, whether by train or by car, to get here and attend this today. You're right, Madam Chair. Ridership is very important in any of their infrastructure system that we're looking at. And I'll give you an example. Way back when, I was a county supervisor. I was on the Orange County Transportation Authority board.

What I did was I gave an example of what we need to do to move people into the bus system. So from my home back then in Garden Grove, I took the bus to my office in Santa. It took me over 2 hours to get there. And I went from one bus to the next bus to get all the way, connect myself to my office. My car would have taken me there in 30 minutes. That's what we have to look at, is the efficiency.

If you want someone like me to get out of my car, to be able to get to work or to wherever I need to, it has to be almost the same amount of time, or it has to be efficient. Most folks will not spend an hour, two or 3 hours waiting for the bus or the train. We all work and we have to get to the location and that, especially with me. I've got two boys, a 10 year 12, who's turning, actually 13 this week.

This morning I dropped him off at school to a different location, an elementary school and a middle school. You can't do that if I'm trying to get onto the bus or if the train was near me. So that's where I think agreeing with the chairs that ridership is so important. We need to make sure, and if you want people to get out of the car, we need to find a way that makes it convenient, efficient and fast.

Can't be 3 hours later than they could in a car. And the cost. Most people would take the bus or the train because of not having to pay for the car insurance, the gas and everything that saves them money. But how much is their time every minute that hour is worth compared to having to spend that money on a gas or the insurance.

And I also want to, as we continue to move forward in talking about LOSSAN and how it works and collaborating with all the entity, I agree with the chairs that I don't think we should talk about who should be on first, who should be on second, who should be responsible for what area. I think we should move on.

We do need to always keep in mind, as we are talking about and having discussion about the rail is making sure that we protect the residents and the businesses around it as well, for their safety, and also making sure that we work in the community and get their input so we know what works for them every day. We don't necessarily live in, I don't live in San Clemente, it is in my district.

So I rely heavily on the residents and the council to give us that guidance. And so as we move forward, whatever we do, we need to have their input. And if we can't get their input today, we might get it tomorrow. We need to continue to always make sure that we involve the local residents, the leadership and the businesses as we move forward. And so, again, Madam Chair, thank you for hosting this and having it in San Clemente.

Thank you. I have a question I could ask to the panel, but I want to make sure my colleagues don't. Yes, go ahead, Senator Lamont.

Thank you. Thank you. And I think we can probably, all of us have a pretty kind of lived experience in terms of this. I would have loved to have taken the train this morning from Santa Barbara county, but it left at the earliest, left at 6:30, and it would have gotten me here at 11:30. And anyone who's lived here in this region doesn't have an amazing desire on a Monday morning to go through Santa Barbara, Ventura, LA and Orange County for traffic.

So there is an eagerness to try to figure out how to make this work for all of us. Certainly being on a train is so much easier than going through four counties with Monday morning traffic. Having said that, as I've heard the presentation, there's a couple of things that have come up, particularly as a representative of the northern region of this corridor. My first question, and I have two. My first question is for Mr. Link Oberstar.

You mentioned certain Lasco's contribution to giving rail attention in the region, and I was just curious how involved in that planning, perhaps SB CAG and SLO Lasco have been if they were included in this kind of Southern California conversation. I know the corridor goes all the way there, and it's more for clarity purposes.

Yeah. I have to be honest with you, because we had somewhat limited time in putting together this. We spoke, the stakeholders that we actually met with. We focused on the southern, primarily on the southern part of the quarter. That is definitely something we'd like to look at more if we continue working on this, is to look at the northern end of the quarter. But we did end up focusing primarily on looking at the southern.

Southern being. La and down. So Ventura, Santa Barbara, SLO.

Okay.

LA and down. Yeah.

La down.

Okay.

Thank you. And obviously, as a representative of the area, I would welcome that. I think that there are things through this process that we've learned that are going to be issues that LOSSAN is going to. I mean, right. We have these identified areas.

We passed through some of them a few weeks ago, and we know that those are coming, and those are also issues but ultimately, I think that connecting as many counties as possible through this corridor, I think is really the equivalent of if we did this right, this combined with what the ideas are for the Central Valley really could give way to more. And I don't want this know from San Diego to San Luis Obispo county to be so, you know, that's one thought.

You did talk about funding and what it would know potentially to get funding that mimicked what was done in the northeast. What would it take from legislators? Like, what do we have to do? Our chair was in DC this fall, but what would we have to do? Because I think there is a moment and desire, especially with the deficit, that California is going to have to try to figure out who our partners are going to be so that these projects get the funding that they need.

I think, and having talked to the various stakeholders, including state and local stakeholders, and looking at the various information about how NEC got to where they did, I think it's really finding a way to develop that common vision for the corridor to bring stakeholders together around. In the report, we talk a lot about trying to come up with a unified and robust capital improvement plan, which essentially means an overall vision for the quarter. These are the projects that need to be done.

These are the ones that need to be prioritized. And I think one of the panelists talked about the importance of speaking with a single voice when you go to DC. I think that's critical.

So I do think there is a little bit of a chicken or the egg thing here because the kind of funding that we need to sort of get to those service levels that are articulated in the state plan, that pulse scheduling model, that would get to the kind of levels of service that Senator Nguyen is talking about that would allow you to get wherever you wanted to go, competitive with a car or rail. That's going to take a huge capital investment.

And I do think one of the things that came out of this report, it's not actually specifically addressed in the report, but did come from several stakeholders, is that I think in order to get to that level of, in order to get to that level of service, you need to. You need to bring people. You need to bring people together, but you need to. I just lost my train of thought. Sorry about that.

Were you going to say you need to force them? They have to have buy in?

Yes, you need to get people to buy into that level and there's sort of a short term versus a long term.

I think one of the things that I think benefited the northeast quarter is that, and this was an insight that a couple of stakeholders pointed out to us, it's easier to get people bought into a common vision if there's a big enough pie so that everybody's going to be able to get at least some of their priorities, not all of their priorities addressed, but that's where the chicken or the egg thing comes in, is that you need to be able to get that common vision in order to be able to go to DC and make the case for a large enough federal investment that everybody gets at least some of their priorities met.

But I think that's one way that you can at least hope to get beyond the sort of parochial interest that say, well, we've got to make sure that we get our top priority for our part of the quarter, because if there's enough money for everybody to get something, then that may be where you can get to the virtuous cycle.

Thank you. And then final sorry question for Ms. Katz. You talked about the study, and I'm just curious that given what we think we're going to begin the 2024 fiscal year with, do you believe that Caltrans and Calsta have the resources to perform this study, and how does that balance with our need to have that information now versus long term, and perhaps it being delayed with some of the budget challenges?

Normally, I would have just said Caltrams, but I know that their rail division has, I think, been a little decimated as of late. So obviously that needs to get reinforced, and that's why I added Calsta. But they know how to get the right people, and they know how to put things together pretty quickly. So I do have faith in them, but I don't know if they have the personnel to do it immediately, but they certainly know how to get it.

Thank you, Senator Umberg.

Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair, for once again convening this subcommittee. Most useful. Speaking of parochial interests, let me focus on Orange County for just a second with Mr. Link-Oberstar. Did you get a chance to coordinate with the Orange County Transportation Authority?

A little. The. I'm sure you know the OCTA is the managing agency for the LOSSAN Rail Agency. So we met with the LOSSAN Rail Agency, and there were a couple of OCTA Members who participated in those calls. So we talked a little bit about the, and we asked them for data about their projects and incorporated that information in the report.

As I understand, Orange County Transportation authority actually does have capital to invest. Is that right?

Yes.

I would just encourage you rather than indirectly dealing with the Orange County Transportation Authority. You deal directly with them since they're a major stakeholder in this operation. And I also take from what you said, is that we've asked nicely for folks to coordinate and they've not quite coordinated, and so now we need to use more leverage. Why is it the secretary of transportation doesn't have that leverage to make that happen either? I suppose. Let's start with the State Secretary of Transportation.

I think there is a responsibility is diffused to the regional level and the local level. I mean, I do think the secretary has a bully pulpit to a certain extent, and they have the authority or the ability to convene and to partner. I think what the report is suggesting is that, and we're suggesting options for increased state leadership or increased state role, one being the more informal role along the lines of the expanded role for the court or working group that they've already got.

The other would be some form of essentially a restructuring that gave the state a more formal role. And I believe one of the other panelists mentioned that as an idea, as part of a more structural do we.

Need to empower the secretary of transportation to do so? Is that.

I don't know that I can. I don't know that I can. That's probably a question for maybe one of the other panelists.

Katz is raising her hand.

I think he could use a nudge.

Well, besides a nudge, do we need to actually provide additional tools?

Oh, I think they are going to need additional tools, no doubt.

All right. I'm a keen observer of this. Our district offices at the Santa Ana Regional Transportation center, also known as the train station. And so I, on a daily basis, get to see what ridership looks like and doesn't look like and what train coordination looks like and doesn't look like. And yes, obviously, as has been said by a number of folks, we need to do better.

But we need to do better for a couple of reasons, not just because of transportation issues, but also housing issues, is that to the extent that we are encouraging housing to have some sort of nexus with transportation, that only works to the extent that transportation is efficient. So in any event, all right, I take what you've said, and we'll look forward to operationalizing some of that. Thank you.

Yes, thank you, Senator Allen.

Well, first of all, thank you again to our chair. I mean, you've really focused so much attention on this very important topic and gotten us all convening and thinking and working on this. And I look forward to all the work that you're going to continue to do in trying to ensure that the lessons learned today get applied and translated into policy at the state level, I'd love to ask a few questions. First of all, let me ask Professor Catz.

I was handed a big packet of papers when I walked in today, including a whole set of different presentations that call for the shutting down of this line altogether. And given your leadership role on the line, I assume you've heard from these people. It's the first time I've ever seen this has been proposed. But I understand that. I'm sure someone will be speaking in public, comment about it a little bit later.

The argument being that this is right on the coast, sea level rises is an inevitability. We're going to continue to have heavy rains and sandy soils and vibrating trains that create slide risk. I'd love it to just get your comments on their idea and if others want to make comment as well. Certainly interested in hearing their idea.

Meaning to shut it down.

Yeah, I guess they have a rails to trails idea. I haven't seen any kind of present. I haven't heard their public comment. I just flipped through their. They gave us a couple of these powerpoints. But the point being, it doesn't seem as though they have an alternative proposal for another route. So maybe they're just opposed to. Maybe they just want to not see rail transit in the area. In General, I have no idea. But presumably you know more.

Look, there are a lot of issues. It costs a lot of money. We are the second busiest corridor in the nation, but it's still not an incredibly high revenue generating service. But at the same time, and the.

Ridership's not been great recently.

No, but it is on the rebound, especially the state supported Amtrak service. And I know Metrolink and Coaster are doing some very creative ways to get new passengers to attract discretionary riders as well as the transit dependent, they've lowered fares. Metrolink, now you can have a free, I mean, it's free if you're a student. They're just doing so many innovative, creative ways to try and attract a new passenger. And I think that's really important, especially a young passenger.

So it's just, there's so much happening on this corridor, not only for passengers, but freight. I mean, Jen mentioned that we're not really talking a lot about freight, but it's really important. And it's also a military rail line. I don't know how you shut that down. Also, the state has made it clear we're not adding capacity to highways. How are you going to move people? I don't know if you've traveled to San Diego, even on a weekend. It is harsh.

It is like the five freeway, which is really one of the only ways.

It's ridiculous. I mean, train is really the way to go to San Diego today. And I read a few things. I think the economy, the tourist economy was actually hurt when the line was shut down. I know San Juan Capistrano had a little bit of downturn of tourism and I assume San Diego did as well. And there's just so much being transported on the line today. I think everybody's comments are important.

Just.

I don't think we can shove away any perspective, but I think we need to get together with everybody, including the folks that say this, and we need to come to some consensus. I don't know if it's relocation of the line. I don't know what the answer is, but we all need to come together. We can't shut down this corridor. It's just way too important. And with VMT being one of the number one issues trying to reduce VMT, how do you shut this down?

What do you see? I mean, given the proximity of the line to the coast and the unfortunate, what we know about sea level rise and the impacts of climate change, how do you think we ought to incorporate those realities into our planning?

I think we need to really study it, see if we need to move the line up, see if we just need to raise mean, do we need to actually relocate it? Do we need to raise it? I've seen on the northeast corridor that they've actually raised it in some parts of Connecticut and other places where they have huge waves and that sort of thing. I'm not a technical person, I'm a policy person. So I would need to get. Chad's looking at me.

I don't know what makes the most sense, but I know that we have to come up with a solution. I know this corridor is way too critical. I mean, it's critical that we keep this corridor, that we keep freight alive, that we keep passenger movement alive, and that we keep the military rail alive.

Yeah, and I'd love to hear Chad's thoughts. I mean, I think part of the challenge, we've been talking about this over and over again, right, this reliability thing, and it becomes a kind of a chicken and egg thing, where the more trains you run, the less economically viable. If you don't have enough ridership at the same time, if you run too few trains, then people don't really see it as a viable option.

And one of the beauties of the most successful rail systems in the world are that you can just show up and there's going to be another train, there's going to be another train. There's this reliability thing you can just count on when you're planning trips, when you're making decisions. I mean, the Shinkansen in Japan, I think, is every five minutes riding up and down Honshu. I mean, it's extraordinary.

But while I'm not asking for, you know, high speed rail networks or just rail networks throughout Britain or wherever else, you can show up with a General sense that there's going to be a train going to where you want to go, when you want to go. And yet we have these sort of horror stories, like the gentleman that was described by our chair, that just make it unviable.

That's why when I was talking about the DC Metro service, I think I used the word convenient, efficient, effective, inclusive. I mean, you have to have all those. And yes, it's going to cost money and yes, it's going to be subsidized, but we have to make that decision. Is that mean we have climate change? We have to come up with solutions? Is it worth subsidizing it? And I think the answer is yes.

And then, of course, there's all these first mile, last mile issues, I think, that are critical to all this, too. Anyway, I'd love to hear Chad's thoughts on the sea level rise issue. And then I'd like to talk to Genevieve a little bit about some of the governance models that she was talking about.

Well, I think on the sea level rise issue, we are committed to studying this with the region and getting to the next set of recommendations there. The last time in the Orange County segment this was studied was a couple, probably 20 years ago, and it came out with certain recommendations that at the time didn't recommend relocating the line.

I think that's part of the effort that we have put funding towards in the last year and that we've also, CTC just put money into to really look at what those options are that can include some of the things that Professor Catz just talked about. So throughout the corridor, we're committed to working with both the working group and responding to the letter that came in from the agencies in the southern part of the corridor to look for the best way to do this planning together.

I think the quarter ID effort and kind of the emphasis of the state rail plan on the resilience of this corridor point to our desire to get the priorities identified here, both near term actions that need to be taken and things that take longer term investment.

Many of the relocation projects take a long time to complete, and there are efforts we're going to have to do in the next five or 10 years that include protecting the line and making sure that we make the highest priority investments in it. We certainly see the big picture here, understand that we need to get more service out there so that more people can use the corridor that's there today as well.

The level of service that is available to us once everybody is fully restored and uses the capacity that's there would lead to just south of Fullerton being able to run 27 round trips a day to some point further south. So, I mean, that's a lot more service than was there even before the pandemic. And when that service is successfully operated and used by lots of riders, we got to very high gearbox recovery numbers.

In the past, we got to 7580% on both the Orange County line service and on the Low sand service. And so I think one of the messages here is, as you have a more successful service, as it's more on time, as more people use it, it actually costs less money to operate, of course. And then you can turn some of that money into the capital investments needed to further improve the corridor.

Yeah, less money per capita.

Per capita.

But even in total dollars, we were seeing more bang for the buck, basically, as we continued to have good ridership before the pandemic hit.

Since we're already chatting, before we get to Genevieve, would you mind commenting a bit on some of the issues that have been raised by Professor Katz and Professor Giuliano and others about the need for a more coherent approach to governance?

Governance involves a lot of stakeholders in that conversation. That's the problem, which is part of the challenge. Mean, we certainly think that some of the existing entities working together well can address many of these issues, and I think we should be pushing each other to make sure that we're doing the kind of integration that the JPA and Metrolink, the LOSSAN Rail, the various Member agencies in the state all work together to get.

The core issues mean, going to the northeast corridor, example, that has some differences here, but each of those entities there was bringing a lot of money to the table for their commuter rail service, for their capital investment in the corridor. And they were kind of all put together to share in the funding on a basis that required many of them to come up with more than they had before.

That was like a federal requirement before they got to where they could actually lay out the capital priorities. If they had more money. So watching that happen, there were a lot of agreements that they reached together among all these entities to share in the costs at a higher level than they historically had. And then during that process, they came up with priority capital projects.

They didn't know where all the money was going to come from yet, but when the Federal Government showed up with a lot of funding, they were ready for it and could really put out those priorities and say, here's what we want to do next. But it was built on a foundation of a lot of agreements to put in more resource and put those resources in over a five or 10 year period.

And right now a lot of our stuff is stuck in, like annual budget processes and so forth. So I think some of the structuring of the agreements among the various governing bodies today would require that kind of working together.

Yeah, it's been alluded to a bit, but could someone give me a better sense of what our chances of getting significant infusion of federal dollars in this latest go around? What those chances are? I mean, you just visited DC for this project. Obviously, the President just announced the big chunk of change for high speed rail, two high speed rail projects. Where does LOSSAN fit into all those conversations?

There are a number of federal funding programs, the biggest of which is federal state partnership, but there are others like Chrissy and some of the other federal programs that are multimodal. And the federal state partnership just gave out 8.2 billion of its $12 billion that are in advance appropriation.

So there's $3.8 billion left over the next three years for the FRA to put into projects all over the country, outside of the Northeast corridor, California has already received in Nevada with Brightline, which comes into California, received over 50% of the total money in that program out of the 12 billion. And so we certainly hope to compete for.

But you're not anything close to the kind of money that the brightline would be asking for, right?

Well, collectively, the needs in the corridor that have been put out there are in the billions of dollars. When you look at the rail line relocation in Del Mar, when you look at the other capital priorities in the corridor, just getting maintenance facilities built in Orange County and San Diego County that are needed to support the expansion of the service, these things quickly add up to billions.

But the near term investments that make kind of significant change in the short term can be significantly less than that. You're not going straight to a tunnel. You have lots of capital projects that further improve the corridor. Finishing the run through tracks at Union Station that takes a lot of time out of the corridor, doing the initial light maintenance facility in Orange County that allows more efficient use of equipment.

Many of these projects start to get to where we can have a service that carries more people and does it on a regular schedule all day long. Doesn't have the service gaps that we have today where there can be a couple of hours where you can't ride. There's no train there. So, I mean, smaller amounts prioritized, smaller amounts of investment can get us a lot in this corridor.

But I guess when I'm looking at the totality of needs that are out there that have been expressed, that's in the billions of dollars. The federal resources that are known today don't have that level to give to this corridor unless they get reauthorized in future reauthorizations.

All right, thank you. Let me turn to Professor Giuliano. I'd love, if you wouldn't mind fleshing out a little bit more about your, if you were empress of the world, what would be a more ideal governance model? You alluded to it, obviously, in your presentation.

Yeah. You've heard all of these discussions from other people here. That decision making is really difficult when you have a whole bunch of different partners, many of which for whom this is not the primary business. So, for know, Metrolink is fundamentally a commuter rail operation, so it has some interest with this corridor, but they're not perfectly aligned. Right. We have that sort of dimension here of lots of institutions, organizations involved, but few of them having this as their actual primary business.

So LOSSAN liner, that's the primary business, but that's not the case for some of the other actors, and that's what makes decision making very difficult. Right. Because if I am one of the others, I have a whole set of priorities, and I have to balance this priority against all the other ones. Right. So a governance model that sort of allows you to provide the right incentives. One of the questions from Mr. Umberg was, how do we make people cooperate?

Well, we got to have an incentive system to do that. And so if we had some sort of a statewide organization. Right, that had some ability, for example, funding behind it and collaboration and cooperation was in some part conditional on that funding, I think you could sort of move closer to that model.

I'm very sympathetic with your point that I can't imagine anybody selling their right of way, but I think it's worth thinking about an ideal and then sort of figure out how close could we come to that ideal, given the resources that we have? Does that make some sense?

Sure, yeah. I'd love to talk to you more about it, actually. Thank you.

Can I say something about demand for.

Please? Yeah, please.

Please. And if others have things they want.

I know I'm.

To add in, I want to say kind of two things. One is the conversation that I'm hearing is going kind of back and forth between what I would consider conventional transit. Right. To intercity. And if you think about the growth of the state and what's going on and how much more integration there is in these, quote unquote, megacities and mega regions and all that. Right.

I think the potential for the market is probably stronger in the inner city area than in the commuter area for a whole bunch of reasons I won't go into right now, but there's a lot of things going on that is going to kind of damp down the long distance commute market. But the inner city market, I think it was Sarah who know who wants to drive from La to San Diego. Right.

Yet there's not good plane service, obviously. And, yeah, trains are the best option.

Exactly. So that's where you really have a sweet spot.

Now, the commute issue is that people are just not going long distance to commute every day anymore because.

Right.

I mean, the maximum commute, really, aside from some real outliers, is going to be about 4050 miles.

Yeah. Okay.

But not many people are commuting from San Clemente to downtown San Diego. Right. A few, but not too many. Right. I think the inner city market is actually the market that, to me, has more potential in the short term also, because you can do that market with relatively longer headways. If I'm on the inner city kind of market, then a train coming every 45 minutes or a train coming every hour isn't awful.

Right.

You can plant. We deal with that with planes all the time. Right.

Of course.

So it just seems like, I just wanted to throw that out there, that if you're starting to think about market here, it might think more about the inner city market. And then the second thing is I'm going to go back to integration. I really think it's worth, even though that's a stretch goal for sure. But to think about an integrated system where I, as the customer, have one website, one set of fares, right? Where I can go.

And whether that train that comes at 03:00 is coaster or somebody else, I don't care. I just want to know the schedule in its totality and the fares in their totality.

Now that shouldn't be that hard to do. I mean, I think about the UK, right, where they've privatized the system. Everyone's running around doing different. There's all these different entities that own the different lines, and yet you can go to a national rail website and buy your tickets. In fact, there's even aggregate.

That's right. It's not that difficult.

I mean, Orbitz does it for private airlines. Right.

The difficulty is on two things. One difficulty is in how do I share the fares among operators. And that's a long running issue. It's always complicated to figure out whose cost gets covered, et cetera. So that's really where the work would be. And then, secondly, again, I'll go back to this. Not everybody has this corridor as their highest priority.

In order to make the corridor work as a whole, it might mean that I, as Metrolink, would have to adjust some of my trains to make it work. And so you'd really want to figure out what kind of incentives can we provide that would make that an okay thing for Metrolink to do. And I'm just pulling that name out of the air by the very. I'm not being specific. It could be any of the options.

But the point being, there's no one right now whose role it is to make sure the system works correct more seamlessly, in a more user friendly manner.

Right. And so that's why you want a state level. We're fortunate this way, at least we're not going across state borders, which is the NEC problem. Right. It's all in California.

Right. So there's less of an excuse.

Yeah. The state obviously has the potential to do this.

I think Ted wants to weigh in on this question.

Yeah, just briefly, and maybe Jason has some comments on this, too. One of the things I referenced in the report is this rail optimization study. And one thing that the rail optimization study did do is it's the basis for both operational changes and infrastructure changes.

And it's my understanding, again, I haven't been part of that, but the technical Advisory Committee, that that report has been, or that study has been used to make some operational adjustments to improve performance, not necessarily on the ticketing side, but in terms of aligning schedules and that sort of thing. But that's just my understanding from the work that we did.

Yeah.

And I'll just focus in on this, because I actually think this is the nut of the entire report that was produced. Is this reality that not that long ago, 2021, LOSSAN released this corridor optimization study. So this is intended as a strategic framework for service expansion. Over the next decade.

But then you go on to say, however, multiple officials acknowledge that the agency lacks the authority or significant incentives to ensure that its recommendations are prioritized by other stakeholders, other stakeholders being those who run the actual operations in this corridor. So this core question which goes to this shouldn't be that hard, you said, but it's like focusing our attentions on how can we create either those incentives that you were talking about or a strong arm, a carrot and a stick, a requirement from the state level.

I mean, going back to Senator Umberg's point, too, about, well, doesn't the state secretary of transportation have some authority here that is already existing that could be exercised with a little bit more umph to try to create that? I mean, to me, it seems like this is an area, especially given that this study was just released recently. We don't have to embark on another five year study. We can use studies that have been done here to see what we can do.

And we do need to move to the public comment really quickly. But I just want to give both of you the opportunity to respond to all these questions and these last statements here about out how to create that, like how to create the authority, the incentives to actually have an integration for customers and.

Yeah, a couple of ideas here. And as I mentioned, we as an agency do have ongoing touch points with all of our stakeholders along the quarter throughout the year. Ongoing meetings and touch points that really talk about not only operations of the service, but also capital projects that each of our Member agencies are planning on leading engaged. So in particular, to address the question of kind of integration with other services, we do meet regularly with Metrolink on a monthly basis. I meet with Metrolink CEO, and we also have some of our technical advisory Members meet our group as well, our LOSSAN team Members, to really just talk about ways to coordinate and focus on operational coordination as we move forward. And so it is an ongoing discussion that we have with them. We have done some things as of lately that I think have really kind of improved that coordination and integration more than it has ever been in the past.

And part of those efforts include an expansion to what we call our rail to rail and code share program. And that program actually allows ticketed customers from either services to use the other rail service. We expanded that code share program so that both Metrolink and Pacific Surfliner customers can utilize either services.

And we did that as an expansion, basically north of LA, up through Ventura County, as a pilot program to basically say any train, a customer can show their Metrolink or Pacific Surfliner ticket and jump on anybody's train. And so again, we're doing that as a pilot program, see how people are utilizing that program, tracking the data, and really wanting to analyze that data to see how people are using the program so that we can make adjustments to the program as we move forward.

We've also been in discussions to coordinate on some type of regional fare products so that we make it easier and flexible for customers to purchase one region pass and be able to utilize any system. So that is something that's an ongoing discussion and engagement on. So those are just some of the things from an operational perspective that we continue to work on and coordinate, especially with Metrolink being our commuter service on the rail line. But with that, I'll hand it over to Chad.

He can make some comments. So I think, in what Jason just went through, know expanding concepts like that pilot program on the north end to the entire corridor would be one way to make it easier for people to use all the trains. We have a couple of different places where today we interact with these decisions. One like that optimization study that was referred to, that was funded by the state. It was a priority of the state to make sure that happened in the corridor.

And Caltrans was heavily involved in the study as it happened, that's kind of foundation. That's that tie back to the state rail plan and that pulse scheduling that you see in the transit intercity rail capital program.

One of the statutory priorities, one of the four statutory priorities is network integration, which gives us a chance to really look at the projects that come in there for competitive funding and say we're going to give higher priority to the ones that do the integration well than the ones that ignore it. So that should be an incentive and motivation for all the parties here to be working together to receive that funding.

I think that the state certainly has a role in making sure that integration is happening, but we also have a lot of input that's coming to us that we have to review. That first starts at the local level, and that's part of the structure of the interagency transfer agreements where a lot of the strategic planning of LOSSAN happens first at their board level, comes to the secretary for approval in his annual business plan response. And so I think we can strengthen this.

I think we can make this better. I think when we work together and we actually think about the results that come out of the optimization work, come out of the grant applications that people are considering to put in, when we actually all work together and say these really are our highest priorities, we are much more likely to get funding.

And that's part of what we just did in our draft ItIP recommendations, was to really put our thumb on certain projects that needed to get over the funding finish line so that they would get delivered rather than scattering the money to four or five different projects in the corridor. And so we have certain touch points right now that are kind of statutorily there, that are processed there. I think building on that would be a place to start.

Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I'll just say that I think a lot about the parallels between this transportation realm and the housing realm. So for a long time, the state would just accept local cities housing plans. That was whatever their General plan said about their desire to add housing or not have that housing. And then after a while the state said, hey, we're not building enough housing and we want to see different results here.

And HCD has come down really hard and said, this is what your plans will have in it. And so the idea of saying, well, what are these transportation plans that are filtering up? What are we requiring are in them? And to me, it seems like we need to have more of a focus on that, because in order to get different results, you need to be doing something a little differently. So I did hear that when Jason was speaking that you were saying, we are meeting monthly.

We are collaborating. We do have these things in the pipeline. But I guess what I would like to be hearing is I think if we did this, we could see this and not just a kind of backward looking reflection on the fact that you're having monthly meetings. Because clearly what we're asking for up here is to improve things and to see a change of circumstances in this area.

And so the idea of speaking with one voice to get the federal, potential federal funds and also to improve ridership and the coordination with both operation and capital, we need to be really laser focused on that in order to get those results. Anyway, thank you so much, everybody. Let's hear the public comment, though. So I'm going to ask anyone who wants to speak, come up to the microphone here and stand in line and I will call on you.

And then we're going to be getting on the train to actually ride down along the corridor to see it. So I'm going to wait to see how many people are in line here. Engaged. 1210. We have to leave here by 1210. Okay, let's do two minutes each. Hello.

Pardon me. Good morning. My name is Brian Yannity. I'm the Vice President south, the rail passenger Association of, California, or RailPac. And thank you so much, Senators, for having this meeting. And thank you to the City of San Clemente for hosting it. And one little bit of historical trivia. The Amtrak Bill in 1970 was signed into law here in San Clemente by President Nixon at his house next to the LOSSAN track. But let me share with you some statistics from the port of San Diego.

From the past year they handled almost 150,146,000 automobile moves on rail. That's a very vital line of business for the port of San Diego. They also handled 2000 freight moves in 2023, or, sorry, military freight rail moves. I should say that works out to at least a few a day is on the LOSSAN corridor from San Diego. But the four stations moving to passenger now the four stations in San Diego County had almost 1 million passengers on the Amtrak Surf liner in 2022.

That's fiscal year 2022 when there's a lot of trouble with the track that's still factored in there. That works out to about 3000 a day. The overwhelming majority of those are traveling through San Clemente, Dana Point, because that's where they're going. But let me just cut to the chase. We need to have a double tracked, electrified, faster railway the entire way between San Diego and Los Angeles.

We need to have an inland bypass tunnel, most likely underneath I five through San Clemente to bypass that but still maintain the track down to San Clemente Pier at the San Juan capitalist Toronto. For local service, Caltrans needs to get on geotechnical studies, what they have for I five. There's a lot of geotechnical work that needs to begin. We should start that. And also the Caltrans division of Rail and Mass Transportation, which was eliminated this past year, needs to be restored. Thank you.

Hi, good morning. Thank you Chair Blakespear and fellow Senators for hosting this today. Denise Erkinup, I'm with Surfrider foundation. I'm with the South Orange County chapter. But surf Rider has engaged in this issue of moving the railroad as a national priority campaign. One of the things that I wanted to address, I too am a DC native, rode the metro all the time. About Ms. Katz's comment about raising the railroad, that does create substantial issues with the rip wrap and raising the railroad.

We already have significant beach loss at the area in South San Clemente and it also denies access to the beach, which is a public trust entity. And over the last few years we've worked with your offices on LOSSAN, primarily in regards to Del Mar. We feel that the priority needs to be made now to move the railroad and to create a state agency or state entity that will focus more on prioritizing and accelerating the process.

Also of note, surfrider sent in legal correspondence to the State Lands Commission as trustee of the public trust beaches. And we feel that denying access to the tidelands and infringing on those tide lands and the beaches with massive armoring and a lack of access impedes the public trust doctrine. And so we also feel that like all private property or business interest, lease fees should be paid by those entities. And thank you for your consideration.

Good morning. Chair by experience Committee. My name is Mark Foxevich from streets for all. We're a transportation and land use organization that works in Los Angeles and the Legislature proudly supported SB 677 and cards on the table. I went to UCSB. I used to commute to San Diego for work via the San rail corridor.

So one of the things I hope that we can get out of this is that you all, as our state elected officials can take some level of ownership of the state rail corridor, and I mean metaphorical ownership. What I mean is that Senator Limone, if there is an issue in linked union Station in Los Angeles that is an interest of Santa Barbara constituents because that is part of the losing rail corridor.

Senator Blakespear, if the Golita train station is having an issue that is part of, I think, your interest in this corridor, and I hope that we can be thinking of a corridor as a major issue for all residents in proximity of it. And I want to take a moment to acknowledge that this is the second busiest rail corridor in the country, despite the lack of strategic and coordinated investment. And what my organization wants to do is push the envelope for what this corridor can accomplish.

We believe that with the right investments we could have the highest ridership rail corridor in the country, and we need to start thinking about those right investments. This is a world where this is a high speed rail project in the future. Lastly, I'll just add that so we're lacking a unifying governing body to deliver the infrastructure and deliver the electrification and deliver the major projects that we need to make this a highly productive corridor with a coordinated common vision.

Streets for all rail pack and California's electric rail are releasing a forthcoming report that focuses on governance reforms needed, and our document highlights the need for an independent and mission driven governing body, many of which align with Professor Giuliano's comments. We also have an end of the at the end of our document, we also have a projects with measurable, sorry. To respond to the projects with measurable and incremental benefits that need to be identified.

We have a short list of major capital projects that we believe are the start of that list on the capital side, including inlanding the rail corridor. Lastly, I'll just say that we echo railPac's comments that were just made by Brian Yandity. Thank you so much.

Hello. My name is Laurie Durand. I'm with Capo Cares and I am a technical person while I live in San Juan Capitrono. I've come to San Clemente this morning to ensure that you understand critical factors that should compel the state to take action on this Dana Point San Clemente segment this winter.

First, while you're appropriately concerned about the distant future of the segment between San Juan and Oceanside, it's as though you are staring across the street while stepping into it and therefore not seeing the semi that's about to hit you. Specifically, last year, both here and in Encinitas, El Nino rains contributed to significant landslides. What triggered them was train vibrations. Second, you need to know that when sandy soil becomes filled with water, it loses its friction.

This winter, train vibrations have the potential to lead to deaths either of residents on the bluffs, pedestrians below the bluffs, workers on the tracks or train passengers if you don't trust us, hire geologists now to put out sensors. Third, we should all be working with numbers here, real data, which Octa is keeping from you and the public. Parts of the LOSSAN Corridor may be essential to the public. This segment is simply not.

It has neither passenger traffic nor military traffic to justify any further investment, and certainly not millions of dollars. The only reason the tracks remain open here is because Octa profits off of nonessential freight transport. We know this because the line has been shut down off and on for months over the last year, 251 days. And only OCta has been adversely affected. For us, you need to know. There are approximately 400 residential properties, some multifamily above the tracks.

This winter, San Clemente will be ground zero of whether the state intervenes in blufftop residential destruction or whether the Governor and this Committee will come to tour a disaster area to keep this segment running until the government finishes crossing the street, Octa expects to obliterate the coastal environment. Though you serve on this Subcommitee, you are beholden not to the train interests and their marketing illusion of an essential train corridor, not to a mystical pipe dream of mass transit in the distant future. Thank you, Lori.

Thank you. But to the people of California and to what remains of our coastal environment, thank you. A little taller. Good morning. Tony Nelson, founder of Capital Cares. First, let me express my disappointment in your refusal to let us show PowerPoint slides today. You need to listen to the public, and we have photos that will show you the devastation that is coming here. There are several myths that have been perpetrated about this segment that must be challenged. Myth one is ridership.

Trains running between San Juan and Oceanside are virtually empty every day. Per Amtrak and Metrolink websites, they generally run at zero to 10% of capacity. The former CEO of Metrolink himself proposed that we should explore truncating some Oceanside service at Irvine. He said this in 2017, before the pandemic. All the Los Angeles agencies rank near the bottom of industry ridership statistics. So how can you say that this is the second busiest rail corridor in the country? This is not true. You need some data.

The facts simply don't support it. Myth two is freight. $1 billion in freight is moved along this vulnerable coast annually. That may sound like a lot, but it's zero. 4% of total California freight. It is insignificant. Last year's frequent stoppages caused no discernible supply chain issues. Myth three, military use. It's just not happening. Would camp Pendleton really send valuable military equipment along tracks that are regularly swamped with waves and moved 29 inches last year, according to a San Diego Union Tribune article last October.

A military spokesman said the closures would have little to no impact because most military equipment is moved on trucks. This is fiction. This coastal corridor is doomed. We have waves hitting trains on one side and bluffs sliding on the other. Why don't you get this picture? Efforts to preserve it will destroy more of our beaches. You've already destroyed some, eliminate more public access, damage our tourist economy, and potentially trigger more landslides. It's time to get real. Thank you. Thank you, Tony.

And just to make a note that your PowerPoint will be part of the record. And it was actually referred to by my colleague and it will be published on the website, and it's also part of all the Subcommitee Members packets. Go ahead.

Good afternoon. My name is Mike Barnes, and I'm a 23 year resident in San Clemente. I think we can all agree on three basic facts. Sea levels rising. San Clemente's beaches are narrowing, and the trains go through unstable bluffs to deal with the sea level rise and narrowing beaches. The railroad has and continues to dump rock and rip rep on the beach, and we're destroying part of our beach. Shore cliffs is almost completely gone. North Beach is gone.

And what I'm afraid is if this continues, there won't be any beaches in San Clemente in the future to deal with the unstable bluffs. The rebel just waits for the bluff to fail and then goes in and tries to do this remediation. I believe in the last one or two years, we spent $23 million just trying to repair two bluffs.

The best long term solution, I think, is we need to move the train off the bluffs and find another location off the beach and find another location for it. We could spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over the next period of time trying to stabilize these bluffs, but Mother Nature will win and we'll eventually have to move the tracks off the bluffs.

So I appreciate the Committee being here in San Clemente to listen to us, and I hope part of the long range planning is to move the train off the beach. We can move the tracks, but San Clemente can't move its beach. We have nowhere else to go. Thank you.

Thank you, Mike.

Madam Chair, I'm going to have to leave in a second, but I will be tuning into the rest of the public comment on the drive, so I'll be listening. Thank you.

Hello? Yes, my name is Amanda Quintanilla, and I'm a San Clemente resident of over 50 years. I am supportive of maintaining the railroad line on our coast. I value the importance of railroads for its significance in the military, for the military use, freight transport, economic health and ridership, reduction of greenhouse gases and BMT reduction. We have sorry. I've been very active in Orange County, especially fighting against the TCA plans for toll roads that would go through San Clemente.

Along with former Senator Pat Bates and mayor Kathy Ward and other representatives, I work collaboratively with OCTa regarding those plans as well. I'm in strong opposition of any plans that would go under, over or next to the I five since our land is unstable, related to sand and a fault line that is next to the I five. When the I five expanded north of Evanita PICO in San Clemente, this caused problems with the foundations of the home along the I five.

St. Andrew's Church, which is above Avenita PICO, has had landslides as a result of Monterey land formation. I'm glad that one of our representatives mentioned Casa Romantica and stories. I was informed by the city manager of San Clemente that there is two artesian wells. One artesian well at Casa Romantica that caused that also because of the sand that was in the soil and the water leak is a result of an artesian well.

Just as the cypress shores, there's problems with a pump, there was a water leak, and then there's also an underground Artesian well at San Clemente Municipal golf course. So I think the experts should look into doing a pump or look into a study regarding those Artesian wells and to offset that problem. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Hi, I'm Dr. Susie Whitelaw of save our beaches, San Clemente. And we're an environmental group that actually does support having our tracks on the sand.

We appreciate being a public transit friendly beach. We like it that we're the only place in California where someone from the inner city can get on the train and end up dropped off right on the sand. However, the OCta's 2021 rail defense against climate change, the options that were proposed in that are really outdated and unacceptable. It's huge piles of rock and then a 12 foot high vertical concrete sea wall that's not acceptable on our beaches. There are other ways.

I'm actually a geologist, a Professor of oceanography, and the beach you consider it's kind of a balance between sand being deposited on the beach and wave energy that washes the sand away. And you can address it in one way by putting sand back on. And starting on Friday, our city is starting to do that in one location around the pier, there's also another way of attacking the problem, which is going offshore and creating an artificial reef.

And what happens there is that the waves first crash against the reef and it reduces the wave energy. And so by the time the wave hits the actual sand, there's much less wave energy to erode the sand. This helps us to maintain our sand, and it's those wide, sandy beaches that actually protected those rails for almost 150 years. And so if we can get those wide, sandy beaches back, keep them and maintain them, it's a climate resilience project.

Not only that will benefit and impact the rail line, but also the entire community of San Clemente. And so we would like that to be considered as one of the options in the studies. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Susie.

Longtime listener, first time caller here. So I was the person the Senator Blake Spur is referring to that took the train and biked here from San Diego this morning. And I just want to say that for thousands of people, not just the Los Angeles corridor, but the transit services that connect to it are a lifeline, just working in the schools and helping to try and get kids riding the bus and trolley in San Diego.

What I found is that programs like Metrolink, Student, Adventure pass, we mentioned a lot of fair integration that they're doing really kind of opens up the region to them. And so for all of this, we need to remember that discretionary riders are a massive rider base and so are essential riders. We need to make sure we have a ridership strategy that doesn't prioritize one class of riders over the other. We need to make sure that we create a system that works for everyone.

And so that means trains that run fast, frequently, all day and safely. We need to make sure that we move our tracks off the bluff. I support everything that's been said by streets for all rail pack, both great organizations. We got to get our tracks off the bluff and we got to make sure it stays this essential lifeline for our communities.

Thank you.

Good morning and thank you for holding this hearing. I'm John Dow with save our beaches, San Clemente. I heard the terms effective and efficient mentioned today. I'd also like to add environmentally responsible. I'm a realist, and I recognize that in the short to medium term, the rail line is going to exist where it is.

However, here in San Clemente, OCTA maintains this rail line, and they simply can't be allowed to destroy valuable coastal resources to protect rail infrastructure when superior, more cost effective and thoughtful solutions exist. The mean high tideline has risen, but to date, the signs indicate this is not due to a rising sea level, but due to an eroding coast resulting from human caused sediment depriving activities. This sediment is essential for the natural replenishment of sand and the maintenance of a sufficient sandy beach buffer.

It is this sandy beach buffer that has historically protected Octa's tracks in San Clemente. It is the beach that insulates the tracks from wave overtopping and track undermining from the west and forms the vital bluff tow support to the east, which prevents landslides. Sand replenishment and retention needs to be a part of OCta's infrastructure protection efforts, and they need to lead in this effort, not follow their historic practice of waiting for an inevitable crisis.

Calling an emergency and dumping mass quantities of boulders on the coast and thereby forever destroying valuable coastal resources is wrong and irresponsible on many levels. I'm asking OCTa, as a taxpayer funded entity, to act proactively and responsibly to protect their infrastructure with sand, not boulders. Thank you.

Thank you, John.

Good morning. Senator Blakespear, Senator Limon, thank you so much for coming down and also to Senator Alan, if you can hear me, Paul Dyson with Railpac since 1980, advocating for this corridor and living on this corridor and attended many meetings and seen the delivery of many, many studies and seen very little action. The current organization is a failure. It's not a failure because of the people in it. It's a failure because of the way it was set up in the 1980s. We got a lot done.

Sacramento plus, people such as yourselves, your predecessors in elected office, organized additional trains with Amtrak and started service to Santa Barbara, which wasn't there before. Railpac did that division of rail, and Sacramento did that not the counties in the counties thought they knew better in the 90s. They thought that local control was the answer to solving these problems, whereas the real problem was that there was insufficient capital investment to go to the next step in improving this corridor.

So what we have now is a complete mess. And a perfect example is the gentleman here this morning who's trying to come here from San Diego. In 2002, I wrote an editorial in our magazine Steel Wheels, talking about the Berlin Wall in Oceanside, where the trains come into Oceanside from north and from south and don't connect with each other. That's just one example of the inefficiency in this corridor caused by the poor organizational structure.

We need a single organization not to do more studies, but to implement studies and to give us the kind of service that the two largest cities in the state, number two and number eight in the nation deserve. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello. Thank you. Hello, everyone. My name is Steve Quirk and I'm one of the founders of the Surfline Trail project which is seeking to convert this struggling portion of the LOSSAN rail line from San Clemente to San Diego into a 601 mile coastal walking and biking trail.

We believe this trail would have 10 times the usage of the current rail line and do a much greater job of getting cars off the road and vehicle miles travel reduced while providing an amazing resource for these communities throughout Southern California. The inspiration for this vision is, of course, the New York High Line and the Atlanta Belt Line which have been transformative trails to those regions and those were previously vibrant rail lines at 1.0. But we're struggling.

But those, of course, aren't the only rail to trail conversions. The Washington, DC based rails to trails conservancies has helped convert 2000 different abandoned or struggling rail lines totaling over 25,000 miles long. Everyone loves a trail, including, I imagine, most of the people in this room.

I know some of you may scoff at this idea but when we take a look at the larger picture of the challenges of this southern section of the LOSSAN Rail line the trail becomes a more feasible and attractive idea and perhaps even inevitable. The primary challenge of the coastal train, of course, is the prospect of building massive, expensive and risky two and a half mile tunnel in Del Mar and a 10 mile tunnel here in San Clemente. Despite the fact that ridership is so Low.

We are talking about 9500 daily riders across the entire 350 miles length. The San Diego portion is only 3500 daily riders. This is a tiny number, relatively speaking. The comparative I five highway stretch carries 250 times more people. In fact, most people would be surprised to note that the Low sand carries about half the people it did 20 years ago. It's half of what it was 20 years ago on just the Amtrak Surfliner portion. LOSSAN projected that ridership would grow exponentially.

I'm sorry, your time is up. Thank you.

From 5000. But it's not.

Thank you.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Senator Blake Spear. Dan Quirk. I'm a Council Member for the City of Del Mar speaking on my own behalf and there are a lot of great comments today. Particularly, I want to focus on the ridership numbers. I've attended a lot of meetings for Sandag Octa. I'm pleased to be here today that we're shedding community interest on this issue.

The ridership is incredibly Low and I believe that the local agencies here in California, whether it's Low sand, Sandag, OCta, they are courting dramatic risk by basically using significantly false and misleading statements. If you get billions of dollars in federal funding and it's later determined that it was based on false information about ridership. Second busiest rail corridor. There's no way this is anywhere close to second busiest. That's impossible.

When the trains are mostly empty, there's a very real risk that the Federal Government will come back, investigate and claw back that money, and then the local agencies are really in a sticky wicket. So that is a huge risk. We might be able to think we can get the money from the feds right now, but there will be a potential consequence. So I want everyone to recognize that risk.

As the earlier speaker spoke, a trail along the coast here could be absolutely spectacular and solve a lot of the problems. Thank you.

Thank you, Dan.

Senator Briggs there.

Good morning.

Good morning to everyone that's here.

Good morning.

First, I'd like to say I am a supporter of many options. I remember going to school and my teacher said, whenever you're going out, you should always have more than one option. So the train line is an option and private vehicle is an option. We should not eradicate one for the next. Also know that public transportation is a main factor in preventing a lot of the environmental crisis. So the privilege that I'd like to bring forward are.

The solution is that the trains are a bit huge. The way they were made them. There were big vehicles, they were powerful. We see them every day. One solution can be making the trains much lighter or mixing between heavy rail and light rail. For example, you have a train come down 08:00 you can have a light rail coming up by 830. Instead of we can have trails to San Diego, we can have the train to San Diego and we can have our cars.

A part of the train is that if I could take the train this morning up here, I would not have driven. I would have taken the train. And if I can grab the train down back, that's what I would have done. There's no way I'm going to say, hey, totally eradicate the train. But what I can say for a solution, we can look at the design on the wall and we can say, that's a pretty bad design.

Instead, you run the train on the top of the hill, you go joke the thing and go joke the thing. I know you have two way to create landslide. One over by the beach there and one above the train track. So I think that if everyone who is in the solution process. Look for solution and look at the things that are the problem, such as the train line being on the beach in certain areas, not everywhere, certain areas.

Move those areas inland rather than saying totally eradicating the train, because the problem that's going to come from that. You may not see that now, but you'll see when the train is gone. And that is why I recommend using all the options and finding a solution in that way.

Thank you so much for your comments. Thank you.

My name is Steve Stewart and I'm a longtime resident of South Orange County living in Dana Point. I had planned to make some comments about the low ridership and the incredible costs that we're incurring environmentally, both with falling slopes and particularly with the coastal erosion effects that come from armoring the rail track to keep it viable. I think a lot of people have made better points about that, so I'll keep that down, won't go through that.

I would ask you to consider that the population, particularly in south Orange County, is demonstrably getting older. The cohort of people between 25 and 40 depreciated about 35%, while the cohort of people over 65 went up by 35% over the 10 years ending in 2020. What that points at is that rail commuters don't live here and rail commuters don't need commuting resources. And there's a lot of aspiration that's expressed in these conversations.

I heard a woman say that we just need to market the commuter train aspect of coastal rail more, and then more people will come back to it. We all grow up with the mysticism of trains and how wonderful they are in our heads. I think it's time that we look at the reality and understand that maybe it's just not feasible to have rail connections between San Juan Capistrano and San Diego, even though LOSSAN is super busy.

It's just not busy there, and it's time to let go of that idea. If it doesn't work now, it won't work by spending $20 billion on tunnels in Del Mar and San Clemente. Maybe it's just time to forget about it.

Thank you, Steve. Hello, Madam Chair. My name is David Martinez and I'm a Costa Mesa resident and a USC student. I got here today by using the LOSSAN corridor and just want to also express my frustrations with using this service that is meant as a commuter service. I really do think that we need to have a unified regional rail system, and I emphasize the word regional and not a commuter rail system. Like sometimes we have right now.

Regional is also an important word because I don't think that we can be hampered by certain local interests that may want to prevent some great things from happening for the entire corridor. So we need to make sure that we focus on benefits to the region at large. I also know that we need more passenger integration with Amtrak, Metrolink, coaster, the sprinter, and who knows what else is going on in this corridor.

It's pretty confusing to the average rider to know how to use this network, and based on what we've seen in the Bay Area with their seamless Bay Area campaign, we know that a better integration system is needed and hopefully possible based on some other systems that we've seen across the globe. And I also think that we need to further encourage integration with local transit services such as La Metro and Octa.

The Laguna Nigel Mission vehicle station where I got off today off the train, does not even have a octa bus connection. So this is obviously a way that we can encourage further ridership on the Low sand corridor so that we can bring more riders in, use the corridor and build it up to what it can be. Thank you. Hello, my name is Yusuf Kadesh. I'm part of Strongtowns OC, a county wide coalition of mobility advocates here in Orange County.

I echo a lot of the sentiments by railpac, by streets, for all that it's essential to protect and enhance the quality of service here. I also echo David's comments on ensuring that we can achieve something meaningful on a region if we concentrate on we have the potential to achieve some good public good here. If we focus on that aspect, higher ridership is contingent. With high quality service, we can't disinvest and then throw the baby out of the water by blaming Low ridership.

So there is a strong desire of what I call the silent majority of the public who would be riding transit, but it is purely a matter of convenience.

I also believe that we need to rethink the governance structure and more in giving the state more unilateral power to ensure the viability and quality of service on LOSSAN in an era of climate change, with most of emissions in the state coming from transportation, the quality of rail service is absolutely critical and it does trickle down to every local agency's ability to reduce ghg emissions. I urge you to ensure the short term viability of LOSSAN and maximize public interests of the region as a whole.

Thanks.

Hi, I'm Sahan.

I'm a local resident and I just wanted to highlight that non automobile transportation in Southern California suffers from a serious condition of jurisdictional fragmentation, whether it is the inability to take the train directly from an exclusively metrolink station to an exclusively coaster station, something which, by the way, is essentially mandated by the Public Resources Code, the fact that arrival displays at Metrolink stations do not display the arrival times for Amtrak trains or that infrastructure is owned by different agencies in different counties, something which does not exist on the freeway and expressway system.

The State of rail in Southern California is a disgrace. I also want to respectfully remind you that this line sees less service and lacks electrification and is utilized less than passenger rail lines in countries such as South Africa, Kazakhstan, and India, even though the United States is the richest country in the world with these tracks usually sitting empty due to a lack of operation.

Also, I go to school in the Inland Empire, and it's quite a shame that there are only two metrolink trains a day which run from Riverside to Oceanside, not even San Diego. Thereby, I and others who would have used this rail corridor are essentially forced by the state to pay De facto tax to the auto and oil industry to be able to get to San Diego, among other situations.

I would love to spend more time in San Diego with friends or just to have fun, but that's something that is basically impossible for me with the current State of rail in Southern California. And I thank you for taking your time to listen to my comments.

Thank you.

Good morning. My name is Steve Noelblock. I'm speaking not as a City Council Member here in San Clemente, but as a private citizen. And I want to mention that our existing rail line, it allows for a very unique, beautiful, and scenic experience for the public along our spectacular and breathtaking coastline. It provides an experience that's not possible by driving the freeway, driving coast highway, or flying overhead.

The coastline can be protected and preserved by maximizing the efforts of placing sand on our beaches, which have slowly been eroding over the last seven or eight decades because of urban development. This increased sand will stabilize the existing tracks and the bluffs that are in danger. I also want to disagree with Professor Guliano's concept of singular government and governance and control. This is similar to the type of governance that we see in totalitarian regimes and should be avoided at all costs.

We have a diversity of opinion and interest, and while inconvenient for some, Anne takes time to consider. These opinions in a free society should not be ignored, and they should be honored and respected. And thank you for your time. All right, good morning. I'm on the working end of all this. My name is Michael Convey. I'm a Amtrak conductor of LA. I work the surfliners from LA to San Diego, LA to Galita, LA to San Luis Obispo.

Somewhat of an expert on the line, I would just remind all the stakeholders that myself and all my colleagues at Amtrak Metrolink coaster are a valuable source of information and insight into ways we can improve the corridor. That's all I have for you. Thank you.

Thank you for participating today, Michael.

You're welcome.

All right. Well, thank you to all the public who came and offered your testimony today, and also thank you so much to the panelists who were here today. I'd also like to thank my staffer Alex, who put this together for this Subcommitee. We're really grateful for the work that made this happen. If you are a Member of the public who didn't comment or you would like to submit comments in writing, you can do that.

Your comments are important to us, and we want to include your testimony in the official hearing records. So with that, thank you, and thank you for joining us today. And we have now concluded the agenda, and the Subcommitee is adjourned.