TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

County supervisors are scheduled to vote Tuesday on whether to oppose California's high-speed rail project as currently proposed.

Two competing resolutions -- either of which would be the county's first official position on the $98 billion project -- were released Thursday as part of the board's agenda packet. One of the resolutions would explicitly oppose construction of the project; the other would merely withhold the county's support until more information about its cost and environmental impacts comes forward.

County Supervisor Mike Maggard said the board could also vote to support the project. He predicted that which way the vote goes will depend on what kind of answers the board gets from rail project staff invited to make a presentation at Tuesday's meeting.

"Based on answers to those questions," Maggard said, "I will be evaluating whether I ... can support or whether I cannot support in its current form this package that is high-speed rail."

The proposed resolutions come amid heavy local criticism as well as estimates out of Sacramento that the project would be far more expensive and take much longer to build than officially estimated even a year ago. A county staff report released Thursday said that although the project holds potential local benefits such as jobs, improved air quality and better connectivity with the rest of the state, it would also incur substantial debt and probably disrupt local schools, churches and other property owners.

If the board were to oppose the project, it would add Kern County to a growing list of local governments up and down the proposed bullet train route -- including Bakersfield, Wasco, Hanford and Chowchilla -- explicitly against what would be the largest single infrastructure project in California history. Merced and Fresno counties officially support the project.

A vote of opposition by the board would represent a turnaround of sorts. At a downtown luncheon in May, county officials stood with local economic development and transportation planners in an informal but very public pledge of support for the project.

That event was part of a countywide lobbying effort to support Kern's three bids -- two in Shafter, one in Wasco -- for a train maintenance facility projected to create 1,500 or more direct jobs and some $250 million a year in economic benefits. The rail project's executive leadership had called for communities vying for the facility to express their support for the rail proposal or risk falling out of favor with project staff.

Even now county officials are mindful of what impact the board's vote next week could have on Kern's chances for the maintenance facility.

County administrative analyst Teresa Hitchcock said she hopes that any vote by the supervisors "would really not affect the direction of the project."

A similar sentiment came from Richard Chapman, head of the Kern Economic Development Corp., which has worked to build support for the Wasco and Shafter facility proposals. He said he believes Kern has the best proposals anywhere in the state, and "I don't see why (a vote by county supervisors) would have an impact" on Kern's site proposals.

Maggard said it may be a moot point. The project may run out of money before it gets as far south as Kern, he said, and so the maintenance facility may need to be built further north.

"What has become pretty apparent is that it's very, very unlikely that we're ... going to get the heavy maintenance facility," he said.

The rail authority's outgoing CEO, Roelof van Ark, disputed this assertion in 2010, saying no decision on where to build the maintenance facility will be made until long after high-speed rail tracks run through Bakersfield.

The rail project is planned to connect San Francisco and Anaheim with trains traveling as fast as 220 mph by 2030. Construction on an initial, $6 billion segment is scheduled to begin in the Central Valley later this year.