One-woman operation behind Las Vegas-to-Calif. maglev train

The proposed $12 billion magnetic levitation train connecting Las Vegas to Anaheim, Calif., conjures images of engineers, administrators and environmental experts huddled over room-sized maps and computer modeling.
In fact, headquarters for the California-Nevada Super Speed Train Commission is in Richann Bender's suburban tract home, a couple of miles from U.S. 95 on the west side of Las Vegas.
There, a chipped cherry-wood desk stands against the wall of Bender's spacious living room, across from five tall bookshelves, and under a framed poster celebrating Germany's maglev trains. Shelves hold various studies of maglev trains, along with a book Bender prizes detailing the struggle to build the Chunnel rail tunnel under the English Channel between England and France.
Bureaucracies don't come any simpler than this.
Bender, 60, is the commission's executive director and only staffer -- and an unpaid one at that. She retired from her Las Vegas city job last year and has headed the project for free since.
The commission, a public-private partnership, pays for the Internet connection for her Dell desktop but won't reimburse her for mileage she drives for the cause. The commission has less than $50,000 in the bank.
"Someone told me long ago that it would take 20 years to do this," Bender says. That proved wrong. Bender has been attached to the project since 1981.
She was hired into a temporary job as project coordinator for the proposed train shortly after moving here from Chicago, where she worked at a printing company. She took the job shortly after then-Las Vegas Mayor William Briare conceived the idea for a high-speed link between the tourist centers of Southern California and Las Vegas.
Her salary was funded by a federal grant. The city soon brought her on full-time in a job that had many other duties. She acted as a liaison to the city council, lobbied for Las Vegas, promoted business retention and helped plan the centennial celebration -- all while pushing the fledgling maglev project.
For the proposal to move forward now, the commission needs to find $7 million to complete an environmental study of the route. Next would come persuading the federal government to fund much of the $12 billion in construction costs. (Orange County jurisdictions and nearby agencies are contributing $2 million toward the environmental study).
That's not an easy task, even if $13 billion in federal money could be available for high-speed trains under President Obama's stimulus package, signed into law last month, and his proposed budget for next year.
The projected 300-mile-per-hour maglev, which could travel between Las Vegas to Disneyland in 86 minutes -- including stations along the way -- drew controversy during political debates about the best uses for those federal funds.
"It's very expensive -- very expensive," Bender says. "But compare it to building a couple of lanes on a highway in developed areas. They're very comparable."
Bruce Aguilera, vice president and general counsel of MGM Mirage's Bellagio, assumed chairmanship of the commission for a year in the mid-1990s. He expected swift approval. "I thought, 'This is cool, this is going to be built,'" says Aguilera, who returned as chairman a few years ago.
Not only did Aguilera's prophecy prove incorrect, Amtrak in the late 1990s discontinued service between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Las Vegas has been without a rail link to any Southern California city since.
The Federal Railroad Administration held a competition for regional maglev projects in 2001, but did not choose the Las Vegas application. Aguilera soon learned that every few years the project gets some ink, local politicians tout its merits and hopes are raised -- only for it to fizzle when federal funding can't be corralled.
Still, Bender pushes on. She expects to get a salary from the commission someday, but that's contingent on the project moving forward.
She believes that will happen and finds the current circumstances the most promising in years. In her view, a maglev train is true to the spirit of Obama's stimulus bill: It would create construction jobs in the short term and modernize the United States' crumbling and obsolete infrastructure.
"And it would bring a whole new industry to the U.S.," Bender says.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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