Newsom quietly enacted the half critics called anti-transparency; may veto the half his watchdog calls essential

…(cont) September sixteenth. The paper says the inspector general for the high-speed rail project found that the California High-Speed Rail Authority "has violated state contract" — and that is where my page stops. Mid-sentence. The line runs out on me and I'm not going to finish another man's sentence for him. What the page does spell out is what the money bought: nightclub outings for consultants. And escape room visits.

I'm sorry, I'm going to keep coming back to that second item, and I'll come at it from a different side each time so you don't have to hear it the same way twice. Start with where it sits on the page. The paper opens by saying the budget for this project keeps increasing, and then it lists the locked-room outing as one of the reasons. Not buried. First paragraph.

Now, my garage door has shut and locked itself from the inside twice this year. The key hangs on a nail, and the nail is inside. The second time, the neighbor's kid went through the side window for a dollar, and I felt worse about the dollar than the door. So here's a plain question, no trick in it: according to that page, who paid for a room you have to solve your way out of — the consultants, or the state?

Apologies, back to it again. What I can't get past isn't the room, it's the trip. Somebody wrote that outing on an expense line, carried the paper across a hallway, and handed it to somebody who put it through. The page says the authority was found to have violated state contract, and that's as far as the page goes. Does it say who carried the form?

Here's the pair that won't lie flat. Critics dubbed this thing California's high-speed rail anti-transparency bill. Then on the twenty-ninth, the paper says the watchdog report on wasteful consultant travel became a real-world test of that so-called anti-transparency law, and the headline says the report reveals why it isn't. So: what came out during the test? The page answers it. Nightclub outings. The room with the puzzle door.

I should say, one page calls it the inspector general for the high-speed rail project and another calls it the rail watchdog, and I can't tell from these pages whether that's one desk or two. I'll say watchdog and you can correct me. And which half of the bill did the report test? The page doesn't say. I have a guess, and I'm marking it a guess: the half already on the books. That's me, not the page.

Because there are halves. August eighteenth: the paper says Newsom quietly enacted the controversial part, and sources tell it he may now veto the part the rail watchdog says he needs. September eighth, same paper, still a question in the headline — will he veto the oversight bill his own watchdog calls essential?

Oh — excuse me, before that goes in the folder. One more thing and I'm out of your hair. If those sources have it right, which office is the one that loses the powers? The page says: the one that says it needs them for transparency and accountability. And what's the last thing that office is on the record finding? Escape room.