Dianne Feinstein's Husband Bags High-Speed Rail Construction Contract

Sen. Diane Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum won a construction contract for California’s high-speed rail project, reports the California Political Review.

Author Laer Pearce says Perini-Zachary-Parsons, a construction group partially owned by Blum’s investment firm, Blum Capital, and their investors, bagged the nearly billion dollar contract:

The Perini-Zachary-Parsons bid was the lowest received from the five consortia participating in the bidding process, but ‘low’ is a relative term. The firms bid $985,142,530 to build the wildly anticipated first section of high speed rail track that will tie the megopolis of Madera to the global finance center of Fresno. Do the division, and you find that the low bid came in at a mere $35 million per mile.

This is not the first time Feinstein has come under scrutiny for cronyism using taxpayer dollars. 

A recent study by the Reason Foundation found that the California High-Speed Rail System will lose between $124 million to $373 million a year.