It will cost roughly $87 billion to build between Gilroy, about 80 miles southeast of San Francisco, and Palmdale, about 37 miles north of Los Angeles, the High Speed Rail Authority’s report says. That section is expected to start running in 2038.

“While challenges remain, so too does the potential to deliver a modern transportation system worthy of the state’s ambitions — one that reflects the scale, complexity, and promise of California itself,” Authority CEO Ian Choudri wrote in the report. “Let’s go build it.”

The project is designed to shuttle riders across nearly 500 miles between San Francisco and Los Angeles. When voters approved a proposition in 2008 to authorize a bond to fund a third of the project, the cost was estimated at $33 billion and was to have been up and running by 2020. It could now cost up to $128 billion to build, the authority estimated last year. Officials will release an updated estimate in a business report next year, authority spokesperson Micah Flores said in an email.

There is 119 miles of construction underway in the Central Valley. But the state needs to make progress to build toward larger population centers near the Bay Area and L.A. and secure stable sources of funding to attract potential private investors, the report says. The project desperately needs help from the private sector. The authority recently heard back from 31 potential private investors who expressed their interest and started meeting with them this month.

A 171-mile section in the Central Valley between Merced and Bakersfield is expected to cost nearly $37 billion. That’s up slightly from a previous estimate, but the authority said that figure would have ballooned to $51 billion had it not taken recent cost-saving measures.

The project has received nearly $24 billion in funding to date, most of which has come from the state through a voter-approved bond and money from the state’s cap-and-trade program. The rest has come from the federal government. But the Trump administration said in July it was pulling $4 billion in funding from the project, which the authority quickly sued to try to get restored.

The authority has spent about $14 billion on the project through May of this year, according to the new report. Dozens of structures have been built in the Central Valley, including viaducts, underpasses and overpasses, along with 70 miles of guideway, the report says.

President Donald Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy both have slammed the project as a “train to nowhere.”

“The Railroad we were promised still does not exist, and never will,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in July. “This project was Severely Overpriced, Overregulated, and NEVER DELIVERED.”

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom wants lawmakers to reauthorize the state’s cap-and-trade program through 2045 and ensure high-speed rail receives $1 billion a year from it. The program is set to expire at the end of 2030.

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But in California farm country, his comments about water are also getting top attention.

The Golden State grows three-quarters of the country’s fruits and nuts and more than a third of its vegetables, largely thanks to a complex network of dams and canals that funnel water to the state’s fertile Central Valley.

In recent years, farmers have faced more limits on how much water they can access from this network because of environmental concerns, as well as on how much groundwater they can pump after years of overuse and drought.

Now, farmers are hoping the second Trump administration will ensure more stable water flows to their fields from the federally managed Central Valley Project and a plan for future water supplies. Trump recently posted on his Truth Social platform a criticism of the “rerouting of MILLIONS OF GALLONS OF WATER A DAY FROM THE NORTH OUT INTO THE PACIFIC OCEAN, rather than using it, free of charge, for the towns, cities, & farms dotted all throughout California.”

“It is the number one issue,” said Jason Phillips, chief executive of the Friant Water Authority, which represents more than a dozen irrigation districts serving a large swath of the crop-rich valley. “You only need labor and you only need the products and the equipment and everything else to grow food if you have water.”

California relies on water supplies from the Central Valley Project and the state-run State Water Project. The federal project provides 5 million acre-feet of water to farms each year and 600,000 acre-feet to cities, as well as water to maintain water quality in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which provides critical habitat to fish and wildlife.

During the prior Trump administration, government officials issued rules to allow for a greater flow of water to California farms.

The move was blasted by environmental groups. The Biden administration pushed back on those decisions and has been working on new rules aimed at balancing farming with protections for endangered wildlife such as the delta smelt, a tiny fish that is an indicator of the health of California’s waterways, and Chinook salmon.

In recent years, California farmers said federal water allocations have been more limited than they feel is necessary after two years of ample rain boosted the state’s reservoirs. The state previously grappled with a yearslong drought that in 2022 saw the driest January-to-March period in at least a century, with scientists saying weather whiplash will likely become more common as the planet warms.

That is a big concern of environmentalists and commercial fishermen, who want to see less water diverted to agriculture and more flowing to the delta. Salmon fishing has been banned off the California coast for the past two years because of dwindling stocks, and critics say Trump’s prior decisions moving water away from salmon-spawning areas are to blame.

“They delivered all the cold water behind Shasta Dam. It literally cooked the baby salmon before they were hatched,” said Barry Nelson, policy advisor to the Golden State Salmon Association, a nonprofit focused on restoring California salmon. “Math is a brutal master, and we’ve hit physical limits on the amount of water we can take from the Bay delta, and the sign of that is the collapse of the ecosystem.”

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a long-time Trump critic, recently called on California lawmakers to gear up ahead of another Trump presidency to safeguard the state’s progressive policies.

Environmental advocates, however, contend Newsom has not done enough to improve the situation in the delta for fish and wildlife. During Trump’s prior administration, Newsom opposed his rules for water flows, filing a legal challenge, but since then put forth his own rules, which Jon Rosenfield, San Francisco Baykeeper’s science director, said “were never that much different.”

Competing demands on California’s water have led to numerous battles over who gets how much. Advocates for fishermen, environmental interests and farmers all say more must be done to shore up future water supplies. But what that looks like depends on who is asked, with proposed solutions spanning from more conservation to expanding water storage to technological upgrades.

Aubrey Bettencourt, who oversaw Department of Interior water policy during the prior Trump administration, said she would like to see the system updated to respond to swings in climate rather than setting water releases based on the calendar. One of the issues, she said, is not how much water you get but knowing how much water you will get.

“It makes it very hard to plan not just as a farmer but as a city manager,” she said. “I would expect an emphasis on restoring operational certainty.”

The incoming Trump administration has discussed a series of economic policies that could also affect agriculture, including tariffs that could wind up affecting some exports and push up input costs for growers, according to a recent Rabobank report.

But when it comes to water, many farmers in California are hopeful.

Daniel Errotabere, a third-generation farmer and previous Westlands Water District president whose family grows tomatoes, garlic and almonds, is among them. As California ramps up limits on groundwater pumping, it is even more important to ensure a stable flow of surface water to grow the food the country is counting on, he said. Farmers have had to fallow fields and often don’t plant as much as they could because of water uncertainty, he said.

“If electricity was delivered this way there’d be a revolt,” Errotabere said. “This is not any way to operate resources.”

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