On a recent Friday, Mark Wasser, an eminent-domain lawyer from Sacramento, embarked on a one-day road trip of more than 500 miles. It is one that he has taken often over the past decade.
A tall and trim man in his 70s, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, Mr. Wasser folded himself into the driver’s seat of his car and aimed south. He drove toward dozens of California’s high-speed rail construction projects scattered across the vast farmland of the Central Valley.
No one has represented more eminent domain cases involving the rail project than Mr. Wasser. In the long distances between stops, visiting clients and seeing the changing landscape, he pondered something that Gov. Gavin Newsom had said a few days before.
Mr. Newsom was a guest on “Real Time With Bill Maher” when the host blamed lawyers, lobbyists, contractors, environmentalists, unions and others for the delays.
“The biggest delay on high-speed rail,” Mr. Newsom replied, “has been taking 2,270 properties under eminent domain and ultimately getting the environmental work cleared.”
It was a bold and pointed casting of blame for a project that is a running joke — a not-running joke — and a punchline for government inefficiency and bureaucratic entanglement.
California’s high-speed rail exists today mostly as a gauge for whether the country can build big things in the 21st century. So far, the answer appears to be no. Approved by voters in 2008 with the promise of connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco by now, no track has been laid. Initial cost estimates of $33 billion have tripled.
“The Governor is correct to note that right-of-way acquisition has been the biggest delay in the 119-mile initial operating segment,” the authority said in a statement.
The project’s ambitions have been reduced to having trains run 171 miles between Bakersfield and Merced by 2033. Bakersfield? Merced? What happened to Los Angeles and San Francisco? Someday, maybe. Mr. Wasser does not expect to see it in his lifetime.
But he and his 70-some clients — farmers, dairies, irrigation districts and so on — are not to blame, he said. Most are people who had been farming in the Central Valley for years, even generations. Then they were told that progress was coming in the form of a bullet train, and they needed to get out of the way.
“In my opinion, it is not factually accurate to blame eminent domain for slowing the process,” Mr. Wasser said. “It’s part of the process, but it hasn’t slowed anything down.”
On he drove, past the bustle of Fresno and into the rural heart of the Central Valley, to the center of the rail project.
Diepersloot’s Farm
Much of California’s interior is a table-flat landscape lined by ruler-straight roads stretching toward distant mountains. It is an earthen version of graph paper. In the spaces between the lines is some of the world’s most valuable farmland, row after straight row of fruits, nuts and produce.
But the planned route for high-speed rail is a diagonal squiggle, as if someone dropped a length of yarn on the map.
“Farming here is all squares and rectangles,” Mr. Wasser said. “But high-speed rail is at an angle, every single time, so you’re carving things up into little triangles and trapezoids.”
He stopped at the farm of John Diepersloot, between Kingsburg and Laton. Among Mr. Diepersloot’s crops are about 1,000 acres of stone fruits — peaches, apricots and so on — including patented varieties shipped daily during harvest season to Japan, Singapore, China and elsewhere.
The high-speed rail bed — a smooth, wide berm, trackless for now — cuts diagonally across those orchards.
“It carved up all the farmland,” Mr. Diepersloot said. “And it left a lot of remnant pieces that are useless.”
Today, from his piece of agricultural paradise, Mr. Diepersloot sees two fresh overpasses built to carry county roads over the planned rail line.
On one side of the rail route is a flourishing crop of prized nectarines, soon to be picked and packed for global destinations. On the other is a 35-acre triangle-shaped graveyard of dead trees, marooned from the water supply.
Mr. Diepersloot is satisfied with the undisclosed settlement he received for the farmland he lost and the years of headaches he endured while rerouting roads, power supplies and pump stations. He has trouble imagining trains zipping past his nectarines.
“I’m 62 years old,” he said. “If I make it to 90, there’s a chance I’ll see it. But San Francisco to L.A.? Never in my lifetime.”
Mr. Wasser continued south. Born, raised and educated in California, he knows the complexities of the valley from seven years spent representing rural Madera County. He knows eminent domain, both sides of it, from 10 years spent working for the city of Las Vegas.
He voted for high-speed rail in 2008, like a majority of Californians. At the time, details were scarce and dreamy. It was a promise that people would glide at 220 miles per hour and get between California’s two largest metropolitan areas in under three hours. The drive takes twice that, at best.
“I assumed they would go up Interstate 5,” Mr. Wasser said, on the west side of the Central Valley, against the coastal mountains. After all, that path was already blazed as a public right-of-way. The follow-the-interstate strategy is one that a company called Brightline is using on I-15 to connect Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Brightline plans to have that line in service in 2028.
I-5 might have been the more sensible idea — it might still be, sunk costs be damned — but that is a different story, murky and convoluted and long ago. It has to do with the quest to loop in cities on the more populated east side of the valley, such as Bakersfield, Fresno and Merced. (And, someday, linking farther north to Modesto, Stockton and Sacramento.) Officials thought it might provide millions of interior residents quick access to the bigger coastal destinations and would stir investment in a part of the state that could use it.
Another issue still debated, too late, is why high-speed rail began construction in the middle of the route and not at the end points. Officials wanted to bring jobs to a chronically overlooked region and wanted to show progress quickly, hoping momentum would lead to more funding and support.
The Central Valley is flat farmland, mostly. How hard could it be?
How It Works
Eminent domain is how the government acquires private property for a public purpose — highways, railroads, parks, airports, schools, military bases and so on. A landowner can challenge whether a project serves a “public purpose,” but none of Mr. Wasser’s clients have made that argument against high-speed rail.
“That’s not the fight,” Mr. Wasser said. “The fight is to get your money. Not to be cynical, but get what you can get.”
The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states, in part, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
In this case, the California High-Speed Rail Authority gives notice and makes an offer. The landowner, in nearly every instance, declines it. The rail authority, then, files an eminent domain lawsuit and, shortly thereafter, a “motion for possession,” routinely granted by the court, so work on the project can proceed while the amount of the landowner’s compensation is negotiated.
That’s the key, Mr. Wasser said, so he repeated it: Design and construction move ahead during the haggle over money. This dynamic, he believes, counters any claims that eminent domain is responsible for delays.
The rail authority confirms this process in its 2025 Project Update Report. “If landowner offers remain unaccepted and parties are unable to reach a mutually acceptable settlement within 45 days, the Authority initiates condemnation to prevent delays to early works and construction,” it reads.
Each side appraises the land and any other damages the landowner will suffer. The amounts rarely match. Negotiating begins. Cases can go to a jury trial. So far, high-speed rail has settled every case before that happens, Mr. Wasser said. Juries in the conservative heart of California might favor farmers, not government.
The authority reports that it has paid more than $1.5 billion in real-estate acquisition just on this middle 119-mile stretch of the project, where construction is happening. (Mr. Wasser bills by the hour, he said, and does not receive a percentage of the settlements.) Some landowners have multiple cases. Some cases have taken a decade to settle. Some are reopened abruptly, or new cases are filed, when high-speed rail revises plans, even slightly, during construction. It happens a lot.
A project of this scale was bound to create vexing circumstances on the ground. But appraisal of agricultural property can be especially complicated. Theoretically, if a farmer has 1,000 acres and is forced to hand 100 acres to rail, he or she should get a tenth of the value of the property. Right?
Maybe that 100 acres (always in a triangle, complicating matters) contains the farm’s primary well, vital retention ponds, farmhouses, processing facilities, equipment storage. Where are the irrigation canals? The pumps? The utilities? The employee housing? How much does it cost to rework or rebuild all of that?
Are all crops equal? Are Mr. Diepersloot’s exotic nectarines worth more than someone else’s field of hay? Are thousands of mature walnut trees or old-vine grapes different from a field of cotton or rows of peppers replanted every year?
Each case is unique. The rail route cut some dairies and farms in half. It split houses from barns and bisected processing facilities. It turned some 100-year-old roads into dead ends, stranding homeowners on inaccessible islands and forcing farmers and their equipment to go miles out of the way simply to work their own land.
“Some schmuck 15 years ago said, ‘This is the route we’re going to take,’” said Bruce Howarth, one of the clients that Mr. Wasser was on his way to see. “And they had no idea of the impact.”
‘I Hope You Can Swim’
Around lunchtime, Mr. Wasser got to Hanford, a neat city of 60,000, where downtown feels replanted from the Midwest, circa 1950. High-speed rail does not plan many stations (fewer stops, faster trains), but one is being built a couple miles east of town, atop a long viaduct about 60 feet high and as long as an airport runway.
In such a rural setting, the pilings look out of scale and otherworldly. Mr. Wasser pointed out where a small subdivision had been moved out of the way, where a farmer lost 25 acres of cherry trees to a construction yard, where a cheese company was bumped off land it had bought six months earlier to expand its operation.
Mr. Wasser parked in front of Kahn, Soares & Conway. It is a major firm in the world of agribusiness, operating from a modest downtown storefront. The firm began getting calls in about 2013 from people in the area who had received right-of-way notices from high-speed rail. Soon, the firm enlisted Mr. Wasser’s help.
Now Jan Kahn was behind the wheel. Born and raised in Fresno, he co-founded the Hanford firm in 1973 and is co-counsel with Mr. Wasser on rail-related cases. He wore well-shined black shoes and a tie with a crisp, white shirt. Mr. Wasser rode next to him. The duo continued south, bantering and pointing out the windows at the changes taking place.
Mr. Kahn turned west. The road dead-ended at the future rail line, a swath of compacted dirt as wide as a highway, in front of one of the region’s biggest dairies, a 24-hour-a-day operation.
A dozen construction workers in orange vests were preparing to bore a tunnel under the rail line. It will be big enough for semi trucks and solely for the dairy’s use. That is part of a settlement still being negotiated. The rail authority obtained its order of possession in 2019.
Mr. Kahn knows firsthand how high-speed rail’s arrival can alter quiet lives in unassuming places. More than a decade ago, he attended a community meeting where high-speed rail officials unveiled maps of the proposed route. Mr. Kahn’s family lived in a century-old farmhouse outside of Hanford. He learned that the line would cut through his front porch, literally.
A rail official explained that the line in that area would be dug below grade. An old farmer overheard. “I hope you can swim,” he said.
The water table is unusually high there, he explained. Sure enough, some months later, the rail authority flipped the route from the west side of Hanford to the east side.
Mr. Kahn’s house was saved. Now the rail line cuts across the farm of one of his partners. He lost part of his front yard and some corrals so that the road out front could be rerouted for an overpass. It is complete and visible from his front door. Negotiations over a price continue.
“Most people around here think this is the stupidest thing in the world,” Mr. Kahn said.
And he turned toward Alpaugh.
Alpaugh, Calif.
Bruce Howarth is general manager of the Alpaugh Irrigation District, established in 1915. He took over the driver’s seat, since he knew the way, and soon parked on a new road overpass, not yet in operation, above the wide stripe of high-speed rail. It slices through what looks like dry, fallow land.
“Everything you look at on paper isn’t the same as the real world,” Mr. Howarth said.
These are massive retention ponds, shallow reservoirs between berms that fill up during non-drought years, during California’s spring runoff.
The lagoons, as Mr. Howarth called them, are the major water supply for hundreds of area farmers. Other options include pumping water from the ground. That is not cost-effective or environmentally friendly, given the region’s major issue with subsidence.
Of three district lagoons, the rail path now cuts two in half. Another is considered part of a wetland, which caused the rail authority to build another sky-high viaduct over what looks like nothing. Mr. Howarth laughed. “I’m the one who makes it wet,” he said.
Mr. Howarth’s latest frustration was timing. Rail construction has forced the lagoons to remain dry the past two years. That coincided with wet years, meaning no stored water and lots of pumping for area farmers. This spring he learned that rail construction is further behind, so Mr. Howarth faces another year of watching his reservoirs sit dry as nearby Deer Creek swells with spring runoff from the Sierra Nevada.
Mr. Howarth stood on the overpass and looked down at his dry lagoons and the clean stripe of rail bed that cut them in half. He is satisfied with the settlement — $30 million for the irrigation district, he said, much of it for new pumps —but he is certain that he will never see trains run this way.
The overpass’s only purpose, he said, will be to remind people of a silly idea, unrealized.
“This is never going to be completed,” he said. “We’re standing on a monument.”
Conclusion
The others now gone, Mr. Wasser was back in the driver’s seat. He headed north, thinking about Governor Newsom and eminent domain’s role in the tangle of delays that have plagued California’s high-speed rail.
The rail authority later declined to cite any examples “in which right-of-way acquisition” — a process that includes eminent domain — “caused delay to construction activities.” But it noted many secondary reasons the project is so far behind schedule.
The agency “has faced many challenges, including pre-construction activities like third party agreements to acquire right-of-way and relocate utilities in the system’s path, various permitting requirements under state and federal law, time consuming and redundant state and federal environmental review processes, legal challenges related to those reviews, and a lack of full project funding which has resulted in costly delays and inefficient delivery,” it wrote in a statement to The Times.
Those issues have stories of their own. Mr. Wasser thinks most of them are far bigger reasons for the delays than eminent domain.
After dinner in Hanford, Mr. Wasser got back into the car. The sun was sinking to his left. He would be home in Sacramento in about 3½ hours.
Imagine getting there in less than half the time, sitting carefree in a comfortable train car. Imagine zipping past all the places Mr. Wasser had visited over 12 hours, a 220 mile-per-hour blur under all the overpasses and over all the bridges, through the orchards and vineyards, past the headlights of cars stuck in traffic, beyond the twinkling lights of valley cities.
We can dream, can’t we? But if it doesn’t happen, Mr. Wasser thought to himself, it’s not our fault.
