Roelof van ark biography of michael
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The chief executive officer of the beleaguered California High Speed Rail Authority resigned abruptly Thursday amid mounting criticism of the agency’s current plans for building a bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
“The time has come to focus more on my family and other interests,” said Roelof Van Ark, who will step down in March. He was appointed in June 2010.
The shake-up did not end there.
The chairman of the authority’s Board of Directors, Tom Umberg, announced Thursday he would be stepping down as chairman in February. He will stay on the board as a member.
Umberg nominated Dan Richard, a recent appointee of Gov. Jerry Brown, to take over as chairman.
The officials were tasked with executing an ambitious plan to build a bullet train that can travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco in less than two hours and 40 minutes.
Public support for the project has been eroding, however, since estimates of the cost tripled from $33 billion to $98.5 billion. It also faced the legal challenges from some agricultural interests and residents in the Central Valley, where the first leg of the project is slated to break ground in September.
Last week, an independent panel that reviewed the proposed 130-mile segment of track starting ne
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With Release of New Business Plan, is High Speed Rail in California on the Right Track?
The California High Speed Rail Authority (HSRA) released its most recent business plan this morning during a press conference held at the Sacramento Railroad museum. The business plan, which reassesses the costs of the proposal and provides updated ridership numbers, is the first to be released under the direction of Roelof van Ark, who became Chief Executive Officer of the Authority in June 2010. When voters approved the initiative to allocate $9.95 billion towards the project in 2008, the cost of the system was estimated at $43 billion. With the release of the newest business plan, the projected cost to build the first segment- from San Francisco to Anaheim- has now skyrocketed to $98.5 billion after the Authority “looked more deeply at engineering costs”.
Questions of how to afford the project were raised during the question and answer portion of the press conference as many noted that the original $9.95 billion given through the 2008 ballot initiative is now only one tenth of the funding needed. The plan assumes that nearly 20 percent of the total cost will come from private investment, leaving the majority of the investment coming from public borrowing. California has received app