Quentin Kopp’s legislative career in the Senate
Bob Zadek introduced Quentin Kopp as a man whose career in government had been long and productive, and as having served as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, a member of the California State Senate, and a California State Court Judge. Zadek said Kopp had been an effective judge and an effective legislator at both the city and the state level, and that everything Kopp had done was independent of political influence. Zadek also noted that Kopp just missed beating then-mayoral candidate Dianne Feinstein for the mayoral post in San Francisco in 1979. What Kamala Harris Hopes We Will Forget (2020)
Kopp himself dated the high-speed rail effort to his time in the Senate. He told Zadek that in 1992, as a member of the California State Senate, he introduced legislation to create the California High-Speed Rail Commission. He said he had first experienced high-speed rail in France, traveling from Lyon to Paris in 1985 or ‘84, and was impressed with a system that had begun in Japan in 1964 in preparation for the Olympic Games in Tokyo that summer. That bill, Kopp said, was approved by both the Senate and the Assembly, both houses of the California legislature, but was vetoed by then-governor Pete Wilson on the theory that California had enough governmental agencies. Let’s Talk About California’s “High-Speed” Rail (2018)
The 1994 study and the 1996 Authority
Kopp continued the account with two further bills. In 1994, he said, he introduced a bill to establish a committee to evaluate the desirability of high-speed rail in California and the feasibility of building it. That bill passed and the governor signed it, Kopp said, because he appointed all the members of the committee. The committee rendered a report to the legislature a year and a half or so later and to the governor, concluding that high-speed rail was both desirable and feasible in California. Thereupon, in 1996, Kopp introduced a bill establishing the California High-Speed Rail Authority, which passed both houses of the legislature and was signed by the governor. It allowed the governor to appoint five of the nine members, the State Senate two, and the Assembly two. Let’s Talk About California’s “High-Speed” Rail (2018)
Zadek pressed Kopp on whether the committee’s conclusion had been a sincere study or political cover. Kopp answered that it was not political cover, that it was a bona fide study from an intellectual standpoint and from a standpoint of the integrity of the findings and recommendations, and that when the study was completed nobody criticized it from an intellectual standpoint or from the genuineness and honesty of its conclusions. Kopp noted that he became a Superior Court judge in San Mateo County on January 1st, 1999, and was not a participant in the study itself. Let’s Talk About California’s “High-Speed” Rail (2018)
Proposition 1A and the bond measure
Kopp described the next step as a change of the word “commission” to “authority,” which then appointed an executive director and had a very small staff of about five people. It recommended the initial financing and the initial approximate estimated cost of a system, in two segments: the first from San Francisco to Los Angeles, then to Anaheim in Orange County, about 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles; the second extending from Los Angeles to San Diego on the south and from Merced in the Central Valley to Sacramento. A state senator then initiated a general obligation bond issue, which is the ballot proposition Zadek had asked about. Kopp explained that in California a general obligation bond must be approved by voters, and that a bond is the borrowing of money. The bond totaled $9 billion 950 million and was supposed to be on the 2004 November ballot. A state bond requires only a majority approval, while local bonds require two-thirds approval. It was postponed to 2006 because the 2004 ballot carried a recall of the then-incumbent governor and the election of a new governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 2006, Kopp said, Schwarzenegger asked the legislature to postpone it to 2008 because he had a general obligation bond he wanted to present to voters on a different subject entirely. It was on the ballot in November 2008 and was approved on a 52% to 48% vote, providing seed money for the authority to begin implementing the first part of the plan, San Francisco to Los Angeles. Let’s Talk About California’s “High-Speed” Rail (2018)
Promises in the ballot measure
Zadek asked what promises Proposition 1A made to voters. Kopp said the bond measure was different from any other bond measure he could recall because it had many specific provisions designed to protect taxpayers and to implement the promised system. It contained a series of mandatory speeds, one example being San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours and 40 minutes, another being Fresno to San Jose in 65 minutes. It also contained a provision preventing the commencement of construction of any segment unless all the money needed to complete it is guaranteed. Kopp described two essentials of high-speed rail: that it is an electrified system, not a diesel system, with operational speeds up to 220 miles per hour in Japan, Germany, France, Spain, South Korea and China; and that it must have track dedicated only to high-speed rail, not shared with a commute rail system or a freight rail system. He said the ballot measure also contained a prohibition against using any taxpayer money or subsidy for the cost of operation, and that almost every system of transit in California has to be subsidized by taxpayers, the exceptions being the rail system from San Diego to San Ysidro on the Mexican border and the BART system to San Francisco International Airport. Let’s Talk About California’s “High-Speed” Rail (2018)
The route and the Peninsula opposition
Kopp described the route of the first phase as going south to San Jose, then over the San Luis Pass to Merced in the Central Valley, then down Merced following Highway 99 as closely as possible into Fresno, from Fresno to Bakersfield, Bakersfield to the Los Angeles Basin through Palmdale, and then to downtown Los Angeles with a stop at the Burbank Airport, Bob Hope Airport. He said the route was destined to produce enough money from riders to cover expenses, and that the reason not to go down Interstate 5 is that there aren’t cities on Interstate 5, while Fresno had a population of over 500,000. He then described what he called where it went wrong: expensive communities on the San Francisco Peninsula in San Mateo County and Santa Clara County, among them Atherton, Palo Alto and Menlo Park, got their politicians to prevent the taking of any more right-of-way to create a separate right-of-way for high-speed rail. He named a member of Congress, Anna Eshoo, from Atherton, though he thought she now lived in Palo Alto; a then-state senator who was now on the Santa Clara Board of Supervisors, Joe Simitian; and a then-assemblyman, Richard Gordon of Redwood City in San Mateo County. Kopp said the three sponsored legislation and took every action they could to make sure there would be no legal ability of the High-Speed Rail Authority to buy land for its own right-of-way, and that about 50 feet is needed for a right-of-way. He noted that Caltrain, the commute system from San Francisco to San Jose, is operated by the three counties on the route, Santa Clara, San Mateo and San Francisco, and is still subsidized to the extent of about 50% of its cost by taxpayers. Let’s Talk About California’s “High-Speed” Rail (2018)
Private investment and government risk
Zadek asked why, since the project was destined to make money and had been found feasible, the private sector did not undertake it without the bond measure and without government having anything to say except perhaps eminent domain. Kopp answered that the custom and practice in all of the twelve or so systems throughout the world, even to an extent in China, is that private investors will not commit money until a system is at least 50% built, and sometimes not until it is 60% or 75% built. The financing plan contemplated that the $9 billion bond issue would be the predicate and foundation, that federal funds would be available, that some regional funds would be used because high-speed rail stations produce economic activity, and that private investment would amount to maybe 25%. Kopp said that in the Congress in the 1980s legislation had been passed by both houses laying out seven different high-speed rail routes in the United States, including California, Texas, Florida, Illinois (Chicago to St. Louis), and the East Coast Amtrak line from Washington, D.C. to Boston, Massachusetts. The author, he said, was a woman named Lynn Schenk from San Diego, still a member of the California High-Speed Rail Authority Board of Directors. Congress eventually appropriated money for it in 2009 as part of the so-called stimulus bill after Obama became president. Zadek observed that private enterprise wanted government to make the riskiest part of the expenditure, the initial expenditure, because as the project gets built the risk goes down. Kopp replied that most of the risk has been shouldered by taxpayers who are borrowing money to do it. Let’s Talk About California’s “High-Speed” Rail (2018)
Ray Haynes and the Senate as a political vantage point
A later episode turned to the Electoral College and the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, with Ray Haynes as guest. Zadek described Haynes as having had a stellar career in politics, in the California State Senate and State Assembly for many, many years, and said that Haynes had shown through his conscientious focus on just doing a good job how it is appropriate, when it works and when it fits, to label a politician a professional politician. Zadek said “professional” describes not source of income so much as a high level of skill in carrying about the occupation, and called Haynes, in the very best sense of the word, an insider who understands more than most people how politics really work. Haynes responded that Zadek was way too kind, and said the job of any politician is to listen to what other people say, because he figured out early in his career that he was not the fountain of all wisdom, unlike many politicians who think all great wisdom begins and ends with them. He said he always thought that was the strength of his being in politics: listening to what people actually had to say and then taking his experience and synthesizing it and trying to come up with a policy outcome that took into account all of that. What’s Wrong with “Winner Takes All”? Another Look at the Electoral College (2020)
Across episodes: the Senate as a source of legislation
Two episodes touch on the California State Senate, and they do not show a development in the treatment of the chamber itself. In the 2018 episode, Kopp describes the Senate as the body in which he introduced the 1992, 1994 and 1996 high-speed rail bills, and as one of the two houses whose approval those bills required, with the Senate allotted two appointments to the nine-member California High-Speed Rail Authority. In the 2020 episode, Zadek’s introduction of Kopp again lists the Senate among his offices, and in the later 2020 episode Zadek’s introduction of Ray Haynes places Haynes’s career in the California State Senate and State Assembly. The excerpts show no change in how the institution is characterized between the earlier and later treatment; the Senate appears throughout as the setting of legislative careers and the origin of bills, not as an institution whose rules or composition are examined.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the Senate’s current membership, leadership, committee structure, or rules, nor do they give the chamber’s founding date or constitutional basis. They do not state the outcome of the bills Kopp describes beyond his own account of passage and signature, and they do not name the specific bills. The excerpts also do not say what became of the Proposition 1A project after the events Kopp recounts, and they do not give Haynes’s party, district, or dates of service.