The California High Speed Rail Authority maintains a very small staff. Most of the work is done by consultants.
Regional Consultants
The planning and engineering work for individual segments of the project (like Fresno to Bakersfield) is done by different engineering firms who are called Regional Consultants. (“RC”)
Program Manager
Parsons Brinckerhoff (“PB”) is the Program Manager or Program Management Team (“PMT”). They manage the Regional Consultants and have broad responsibilities for the project.
Program Manager Oversight
Another consultant was hired to review the work of the Program Manager. TY Lin filled the role of the Program Manager Oversight consultant (“PMO”) for a number of years. This role was eliminated in 2013.
All of the consulting firms are contractually obligated to provide a monthly report to support their billings. These reports are also supposed to be a place to raise issues before they become problems. They are not designed to be polished reports but do provide important snapshots on a project where a lot is happening but official updates may only happen every couple of years.
The CHSRA used to discuss these important reports at their monthly board meetings and post the reports on their website. This practice stopped when Jeff Morales became the CEO in 2012.
We have used Public Records Act requests to try and make these reports available to the public.
A warning about the file sizes: some of these files came to us as large as 24MB. We did our best to OCR them (make them searchable) and to reduce the file size while maintaining acceptable quality. Some files are still quite large – up to 5MB.