Thursday morning, the Federal Department of Transportation is expected to announce it’s decision on how roughly $8 billion of federal stimulus funding will be allocated.

California hopefully awaits a response to it's application for $4.7 billion of the stimulus funds in order to proceed with a high-speed rail project that has long awaited realization.

California High-Speed Rail Authority Board Chairman Curt Pringle believes California is a strong contender.

“We can double the value of the federal government’s dollars by matching them with state bond funds approved by California voters last year.” He said.

By this, he referred to the narrow passage in November 2008 of Proposition 1A, allowing for a bond measure approval of nearly $10 billion in bonds to partially fund an 800-miles high-speed rail network between Northern and Southern California.

The bond act’s proponents include Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, California Alliance For Jobs, and the California High-Speed Rail Authority, who argue that the project will create jobs and boost California’s economy while relieving auto traffic and oil dependency.

Opposition campaigns were waged by tax-payer groups like Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and the California Taxpayer Protection Committee. They argue that the project’s cost is ballooning to prices higher than what the state can afford.

Preceding the vote, in November 2008, the Sacramento Bee denounced the act, stating:

"Until California fixes its chronic budget deficits, it can't afford to increase its debt for projects that, while desirable, are not of vital necessity.”

Nevertheless, Californian voters pushed the proposition through, enabling the California High-Speed Rail Authority to initialize project development.

Yesterday, the California High Speed Rail Authority hosted a scoping meeting at the Amtrak Depot in Sacramento in an effort to collect public input towards the early stages of project planning.

“Anyone that comes to something like this or offers comments, either through this type of meeting or through the website or by submitting a letter, they’re doing so at a time when we still have a lot of decisions to be made,” said spokesman Gene Endicott.

“We’re trying to reach as many people as we can with an interest in the project, whether they’re elected officials, community groups, people who live near the proposed alignments, businesses organizations…we’re trying as best we can to broadly communicate about the opportunity to be engaged in this process.”

In order to comply with state and federal laws, the California High-Speed Rail Authority must prepare a Project Environmental Impact Report, detailing project impacts and recommended mitigation measures. This scoping meeting was one of a series of public input sessions through the Central Valley; the state-wide rail project is split into eleven sections, each with its own project-level EIR.

“What we’re working on here today is the EIR specific to the section of the project from Merced to Sacramento,” said Endicott. “It’ll be a couple of years before we even have a draft of the Environmental Impact Report. The entire process will take about three years.”

In a revised business plan submitted by the High-Speed Rail Authority to the Legislature last month, three categories of major milestones are outlined: planning, implementation, and revenue services. According to the report, the completion of environmental reviews is scheduled for 2011, with construction scheduled the following year.

If implementation continues as planned, the plan’s projected passenger service date is 2017, with the completed system running from Anaheim to San Francisco by 2020.

Despite this projected time-line, uncertainty over what federal funding will be made available to the project and what Californian taxpayers are able to pay seems to have tempered the emotional campaigns waged over Prop 1A’s passage.

Attendees at the public input session seemed more curious about where the project stands than antagonistic to its existence.

City resident, Brian Hussey, was a proponent of the ambitious project and voted yes on Prop 1A. He came to learn about the progress being made towards realizing the train line.

“It’s a question whether it’s really going to get done or not. I’d really like to see them come up with a solid plan,” he said. “Right now it seems like a real political football.”

According to Endicott, disseminating information and collecting input is especially important at this stage of development, because decisions made during the stage of implementation are inevitably contentious. He named a number of issues the California High-Speed Rail Authority anticipates addressing when track alignments are finalized.

“Noise pollution is a big one for people,” he said.

But the project has not yet reached a point where these issues are addressed directly. It is unclear what California can afford to contribute to the project; Thursday's announcement of federal stimulus allocation could give project hopefuls a better idea.