During the State of the State Address Governor brown went to bat for his biggest, unfinished project.

The California high speed rail was a major talking point during the speech.

This despite recent revelations that the first segment currently being built in the central valley is over budget by 35 percent for a total of 10.6 billion dollars.

Governor Brown implied that billion dollar cost overruns are just part of the process.

He said, “Like any big project, there are obstacles. There were for the bay area rapid transit system, for the Golden Gate Bridge and for the Panama Canal. I’ll pass over in silence the time it took to build the Bay Area Bridge, that was almost 20 years and by the way, it was over budget by 6 billion dollars, on a one billion dollar project.”

This week, democratic senator Jim Beall and republican assemblyman Jim Patterson, requested that the state auditor do an immediate review of the project.

The editorial boards at the Mercury News and East Bay Times have called for a stop to the high speed rail project.