LOS ANGELES _ The California bullet train project's heavy reliance on consultants could be coming to an end.
In the widely anticipated project update for the bullet train, issued to legislators Wednesday afternoon, rail authority Chairman Lenny Mendonca said the state is set on upgrading its own staff and reducing its reliance on a large network of consultants.
In his revised state budget proposal later this month, the governor "will announce that critical oversight and management functions will be brought back in-house, replacing consultants with state staff," Mendonca wrote in a letter at the beginning of the report. "The Authority will also initiate an office-by-office review of other functions more appropriately performed by state officials _ not private consultants."
The rail authority has been warned repeatedly since 2010 that it was overly reliant on consulting teams. The state auditor, the legislative analyst's office and the peer review panel for the rail project all urged the rail authority to beef up its in-house staff, saying too many critical functions were under the control of consultants.
The Los Angeles Times reported last week on how the use of consultants has resulted in flawed and mismanaged work, and on Tuesday it reported that costs for the Central Valley portion of the bullet train would rise by $1.8 billion.
Mendonca's letter did not say how quickly the governor will scale back use of consultants. It also did not define which "critical" oversight and management functions will be brought back under state control, but it could include contract management, construction oversight and high-level engineering.
In 2008, when the rail project was shifting into high gear, the rail authority had a staff of just 10 people. By 2010, it remained under a dozen, according to former top officials. And the authority still had a relatively miniscule staff as it was preparing to issue the first major construction contracts in the following year.
But the difficulty of undocking from the consultants is not clear. WSP, the state's so-called rail delivery partner, has 470 people on the project and more than a dozen other consultants are spread out in offices in Sacramento, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and Fresno, doing critical work on its day-to-day operations.
Top engineering experts say the state should have started to build up its expertise years ago, though it is clearly not too late. But it will take a lot of effort and a long time to establish a competent and sizable organization, they say. Currently, the rail authority has more than 40 vacancies, a rate of 20 percent of its authorized staffing level. The key question is whether top talent will want to work on the project.
