Matt Mahan
speaker
2,299 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 22 May
Matt Mahan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 3.
Appearances
We have an incentives problem.
We have a structure that allows us to keep shoveling more money into things that aren't working.
Just take high-speed rail.
If a startup took 20 years, spent $14 billion and didn't deliver a product, people would have been fired a long time ago.
And we're just not seeing that level of accountability in our state government.
Is this theft?
It's contractors, it's lawyers.
Some of it has gone into actually building the project.
But belatedly, what happens in California and the reason we can't build, we can't do big things anymore, is that we've got endless process, years of environmental
review, the most litigious environment imaginable.
Anybody can sue under CEQA.
You don't even have to be a resident of California to sue under CEQA.
And so you just get years of litigation, bureaucracy.
When it comes to housing, just to slightly switch topics, the fees that cities can assess, one-time fees can add 20% to the cost of a project.
So we've bureaucratized the state to the point where it's total paralysis.
We can keep spending more and more and not getting anything for it.
So on that project specifically, and I haven't done the line item by line item analysis to be totally clear, but you have years of consultants doing environmental reviews and doing all of these studies and reports of the impacts it might have.
have so tons of consultants you have the cost of litigation you have an entire cottage industry of people doing design and studies and reports and managing litigation and buying right-of-way and managing community engagement processes and we just we take years to do to do anything and so it just gets vacuumed up into this sea of little groups of things so there isn't like one big thief in
I mean, let's be clear.
There is fraud.
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