It would be funny if it weren’t taxpayers money.

In an extremely unusual use of taxpayer money, the leaders behind California's $99 billion high-speed train quietly hired a lobbyist to sway the Legislature -- the same politicians who appointed them to build the project in the first place.

Documents filed this week show the California High-Speed Rail Authority last year paid $161,103 to one of the country's biggest public relations firms to lobby the state's politicians as they consider spending $2.7 billion to launch the polarizing bullet train project.

Rail officials paid the lobbyists by issuing debt that will total about $300,000 with interest. It must be paid back through California's impoverished general fund budget.

The good news is that the condemnation of this move is bipartisan.

The bad news is that the High Speed Rail bureaucrats haven’t learned their lesson.

In a statement issued Thursday, outgoing rail authority CEO Roelof van Ark said his agency hired the firm as "government affairs consultants who provided information about the authority" and the project. He called it a "vital need" and said the agency has since hired a legislative executive to do the work in house.

See, it’s OK now that they’ve in-sourced the lobbying, rather than hiring an outside firm. That they shouldn’t be doing lobbying in the first place doesn’t seem to have occurred to them.

Just to refresh your recollection on the numbers:

In December, rail leaders backtracked on their projections that the bullet train will create 1 million jobs, after this newspaper reported the project would create only 20,000 to 60,000 jobs during a typical year.

Since voters approved the San Francisco-to-Los Angeles rail line in 2008, the railroad's cost has tripled, expected ridership counts have dwindled and the start date of full service has been pushed back 14 years.

It’d be great to tie the politicians who go forward on this debacle to the tracks, but they’d end up dying of old age before a train ever got a chance to run over them.