Facing another cost spike, Gov. Gavin Newsom stunned a joint session of the Democrat-controlled Legislature by proposing to slash the 520-mile voter-approved and taxpayer-funded system that would have stretched from Anaheim through the Central Valley to San Francisco, while keeping the 119-mile stretch from Bakersfield to Merced.

Gov. Gavin Newsom told the California Legislature the bullet train was so over budget that he would kill 73 percent of the track and still spend 100 percent of the taxes.

In his formal appearance as governor in front of lawmakers, Newsom claimed that his priorities are combating the state's homelessness crisis and improving care for California's rapidly aging population. Newsom told lawmakers, "Let's be real" — there "simply isn't a path" to build a high-speed rail system to connect Northern California to Southern California, because cost over the decade rose from $33 billion to at least $77 billion.

Newsom knows that the California High-Speed Rail Authority's new chief program officer, Roy Hill, cautioned last March in a 114-page "2018 Draft Budget," that the likely "High Case" cost to build the 520-mile bullet train had almost tripled from $33 billion in when voters approved the effort in 2008 to $98.1 billion or about $189 million per mile.

Newsom's speech humiliated Democrat Assembly members Todd Gloria (San Diego), Ash Kalra (San Jose), Marc Berman (Palo Alto), Rob Bonta (Alameda), Wendy Carrillo (Los Angeles), David Chiu (San Francisco), Laura Friedman (Glendale), Eduardo Garcia (Coachella), Reginald Jones-Sawyer (Los Angeles), Robert Rivas (Salinas), and Mark Stone(Scotts Valley), who pushed through Assembly Joint Resolution 7 last week to back the "Green New Deal" introduced by 29-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Über-environmentalist Tom Steyer teamed with his Next Gen Climate to saturate to the airwaves in Democrat districts for weeks with $7.3 million in ads promoting Ocasio-Cortez's green manifesto that promises to stop sea level rise and extend life by replacing fossil-fueled cars and airplanes with zero-carbon high-speed trains manned by millions of local gender-neutral union workers making high and sustainable wages.

But Newsom may also have been desperate to stop a voter initiative being circulated by Reform California to divert high-speed rail's billions of dollars in annual taxes and fees to local government to rehabilitate the state's crumbling highway system.

Unions officials and their contractor fellow travelers are howling that the initiative is shortsighted and would ultimately hurt California residents.

Anti-tax crusader and Reform California chairman Carl DeMaio blasted Newsom's speech as an effort to fool voters into believing the high-speed boondoggle was dead:

Make no mistake about it: Gov. Gavin Newsom's announcement today is not about killing the wasteful High-Speed Rail Project, it is about keeping it very much alive. Newsom wants to spend tens of billions on a rail line between Merced and Bakersfield — a complete waste. Once this segment is done, politicians will argue that no one is riding this route because it doesn't travel far enough and voila: the entire project will continue.

Reform California expects to easily gather the 586,000 signatures by May to qualify for the 2020 statewide ballot and let voters finally end California's high-speed rail fantasies.