Brilliant Sol Price MPP alum Teddy Minch sent this little gem along today from the Modesto Bee: California high-speed rail director to earn $365,000.

Because, you know, Californians don’t hate this project or agency enough yet, we have to make it even more hated by making sure the director of the train wreck makes about 4.5 times the median family income. The CalHSR Director needs to make $1,000 a day to explain to you why this massively expensive project will benefit unemployed Californians by eating up the state’s debt limit while its schools experience cut after cut after cut after cut. If I were him, I’d demand quite a salary, too, because that much spinning every day takes a toll on a guy.

So let’s deconstruct this sock in the eye blow by blow.

First off, I respect and like Jeff Morales. He was, I believe, the Director of Caltrans when I was in grad school at UCLA. I remember being pretty impressed by his self-promotional and agency-promotional way of presenting to the public “the New Caltrans”, which wasn’t some tired, old highway department, but instead, a new and improved public agency that was going support our new dreams of urban trolleys and whatnot. He has a fine ability to make a photo op out of just about everything. He’d drunk the New Urbanist Kool-Aid in a major way, and why not, really, since no other ready-made models of urban development have been able to make peace between the developers and the environmentalists the way New Urbanism and all its variants have. The guy had a job to do in a public agency, and this model offered a way out of anti-growth politics when anti-growth politics was still relevant (i.e. before the crash).

Here’s where the TEA Party folks find grist for their mill.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the smart types like Jeff Morales, who are good at retail politics (part of their job as agency heads, after all) figure out who all the money people are–that’s why they get the jobs they do. Once they leave public agencies like Caltrans, they are super, super valuable to the consulting firms like Parsons Brinckerhoff, where Morales went, because it becomes what we in the business rather vulgarly call ‘the sugar t*t connection.’ It’s a money pipeline. You get to play insider baseball because you know everybody in the agency awarding the consulting contracts by their first names. You were an awesome boss back in the day, right? When he’s angling for contracts, half the people making decisions about those contract owe him their jobs. So, of course, PB gets the nod. Guys like Morales are pure gold to consultants.

Now, Morales is going to jump back to head another agency. This move is fooling precisely nobody:

“An outside observer could be excused for thinking the CEO’s job is to grease payments for Parsons Brinckerhoff,” Tolmach said. “As capable as Mr. Morales is, this is just another negative reflection on the project of inside dealing.”

The argument for Morales is that he knows how to get stuff done in California. Which isn’t easy. They’re right. But $365,000?