The California governor's race is heating up, and candidates are being asked the question that's haunted Sacramento for nearly two decades: what do we do about high-speed rail?

For the uninitiated, California's bullet train project was approved by voters in 2008 with a $9.95 billion bond measure and a promise to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles in under three hours for $33 billion. The current price tag? North of $100 billion and climbing, with a completion date that keeps sliding further into the future like a BART train you can see on the app but never arrives. So far, we've got some partial construction in the Central Valley and a whole lot of environmental review paperwork.

The candidates' answers range from "finish it" to "I don't know" — and somehow neither inspires confidence.

As one Bay Area resident put it, "You've gotta be a special kind of stupid to think walking away is the best option. But even among the supporters, no one mentioned fixing the broken environmental review system, which is what cost the most money so far." That's the crux of it. Whether you're for or against finishing the project, the real scandal is the process — a regulatory labyrinth that turns every mile of track into a decade-long legal odyssey.

Another local nailed the deeper problem: private cargo rail companies have "forced the government to build costly overpasses rather than allowing them to link onto existing cargo rail routes," while politicians talk up "public-private partnerships" that mostly amount to private companies fleecing taxpayers with overpriced contracts.

Here's what's maddening: this should be a softball question for anyone running to lead the fifth-largest economy in the world. Either articulate a realistic plan to finish the thing — including gutting the permitting nightmare that's bled billions — or have the guts to say we cut our losses and redirect the funds. "I don't know" isn't a platform; it's a confession.

California voters deserve candidates who can look at a $100 billion boondoggle and do more than shrug. The bullet train has become a monument to everything wrong with how this state spends money: grand promises, zero accountability, and a political class that treats your tax dollars like Monopoly money. Whoever wants the governor's mansion should start by explaining how they'd stop the bleeding — on this project and every other one like it.