On the menu today: It’s not often that this newsletter covers the same topic for five consecutive weekdays, but Los Angeles and Ventura Counties aren’t even close to being out of the burning woods yet. In fact, the forecast for the next two days from the National Weather Service is as dire as it can get. An “extreme fire danger” warning stretches from the outskirts of San Louis Obispo to Riverside, a stretch of more than 250 miles with Los Angeles in between. But you can already sense the national media itching to move on to other stories, because the catastrophe keeps proving to be a brutal indictment of California lawmakers and the blue-state model of governance.
Resource Mismanagement
A little-noticed detail in a news item about the California state government budget, dated January 10: “California has $16.9 billion in reserves. Some $10.9 billion of that is in the state’s rainy-day fund, with another $1.5 billion in the public-school rainy-day fund and the remaining $4.5 billion in a special fund for economic uncertainties.”
As noted yesterday, the current California state budget, signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom, cut “$5 million in spending on CAL FIRE fuel reduction teams,” cut “$4 million cut from a forest legacy program aimed at encouraging good management practices from landowners,” cut “$28 million from funds provided to multiple state conservancies to increase wildfire resilience,” cut “$8 million from monitoring and research spending, which had largely been given to CAL FIRE and California universities,” cut $3 million from “funding for an interagency forest data hub,” and cut $12 million from “a home hardening pilot program designed to make homes more resilient to wildfires.”
The budget also cut $46 million from a pilot program to develop “carbon-negative hydrogen and/or liquid fuel from forest biomass coming from forest vegetation management within California’s Sierra Nevada mountains,” well north of Los Angeles. The idea was to convert “woody biomass waste” — treetops and branches, undergrowth such as shrubs and other forest litter collected for wildfire mitigation — into sources of fuel. That program wouldn’t have directly affected the fires in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, but represents another state government incentive for wildfire prevention and clearing out growth that was put on the back burner.
You can find the numbers from the Legislative Analyst’s Office here. The LAO is a nonpartisan part of the California state government that provides fiscal and policy analysis.
It all adds up to $105 million in cuts to fire-prevention programs.
Why . . . does the state government of California have a “rainy day fund,” with nearly $11 billion sitting there, while simultaneously spending $105 million less on wildfire prevention?
Yesterday, AccuWeather “increased its preliminary estimate of the total damage and economic loss from the wildfires to between $250 billion and $275 billion.”
No, maintaining the level of these state programs would not have prevented the fires from starting. But when you add up those cuts, along with . . .
- the 117-million-gallon water-storage complex in the heart of the Palisades that had been empty since February 2024 over a tear in the cover;
- the $2.7 billion for new water-storage projects passed by referendum in 2014 that has not created any operable new or expanded reservoirs yet;
- the insufficient prioritization and spending on clearing of brush;
- the insufficient use of controlled burns;
- the U.S. Forest Service’s decision to stop prescribed burning “for the foreseeable future” in California; and
- the Los Angeles City Fire Department’s December 4 warning that it was “facing unprecedented operational challenges due to the elimination of critical civilian positions and a $7 million reduction in Overtime Variable Staffing Hours (V-Hours)”
. . . these small decisions start to add up. Again, even all these decisions together wouldn’t have prevented the wildfires, but they could have mitigated the consequences, at least on the margins.
Back in 2019, Governor Newsom announced, to great fanfare, a new “California Vegetation Treatment Program,” touting it as “ a long-term solution to increase the pace and scale of critical vegetation treatment in a way that safely and responsibly protects our environment. The scale of the wildfire crisis in California is unprecedented, and we need a response to match the scale and severity of this challenge.”
But by the end of 2022, little had been done:
A monthslong investigation by CapRadio and The California Newsroom found that projects across the state, like the one in Brooktrails, are encountering a bureaucratic bottleneck before shovels can even break ground. The state’s byzantine environmental approval process, required under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), is slowing projects from Mendocino County to the Sierra Nevada to the Central Coast. The landmark environmental law was intended to protect ecologically and environmentally sensitive landscapes. But foresters worry that the glacial pace of environmental approvals under CEQA may lead to a much worse outcome — extreme wildfires obliterating these areas.
Meanwhile, at the federal level, it takes anywhere from 2.9 years to 7.2 years for “the U.S. Forest Service to implement fuel treatment projects while navigating the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).” In other words, because of environmental regulations, once the U.S. Forest Service spots an area that needs to be thinned out to reduce the risk of wildfires, it takes anywhere from three to seven years to get through the paperwork to begin the action. No wonder the American West is full of piles of dry kindling.
You can sense the national news media is itching to move on from the southern California wildfires, eager to shift to more comfortable topics, like special counsel Jack Smith contending that if he had ever gone to court with his cases against Donald Trump, he would have won.
Or there’s the desire to turn the wildfires into a climate-change story, or the millionth version of the “can you believe what Donald Trump just said?” story.
It’s not particularly helpful for Trump to revert to his old name-calling habits in his tirades on Truth Social, calling the governor “Newscum” and so on. But I’m reminded of the people who wanted to treat the Covid pandemic as a Trump story. The statements and actions of the president or president-elect in reaction to a crisis are a story, no doubt. But they’re not really the story, compared to the crisis itself.
This is the Hurricane Katrina of our era. The southern California wildfires are a particularly embarrassing and uncomfortable story for the national news media that is used to treating any Democratic official as the de facto hero of the story and treating any Republican official as the de facto villain of the story.
Los Angeles’s Democratic mayor couldn’t even be bothered to cut short her trip to Ghana.
The closest thing to a Republican in Los Angeles is billionaire developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso — who just happens to be the one guy who figured out how to save his shopping center when the rest of Pacific Palisades was burning to the ground:
During the height of the fires, on Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, Rick Caruso, the billionaire developer who owns Palisades Village, was conferring with his security staff as they deployed several private firefighters from Arizona to save the shopping center (and who, Mr. Caruso said, tried unsuccessfully to save nearby homes as well).
Early Wednesday morning, after fire hydrants in the area went dry or lost pressure, Mr. Caruso called in private water trucks to assist.
“Our property is standing,” Mr. Caruso, who ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 2022 and lost to Karen Bass, said in an interview on Wednesday. “Everything around us is gone. It is like a war zone. . . .”
A central question is whether the city and county fire departments could have enlisted additional firefighters more quickly, and whether such a faster mobilization would have kept the fires from spreading so rapidly.
But some property owners did not rely on the public agencies, turning instead to private firefighters like those who helped save Mr. Caruso’s property and who have become a coveted resource in some of Southern California’s most wealthy — and most fire-threatened — communities.
Some people are griping that the use of private firefighting companies in Los Angeles is somehow a terrible demonstration of the privileges of the wealthy. I would note that Caruso prioritized protecting his properties from the risk of fire. By comparison:
Los Angeles fire chief Kristin Crowley warned city officials in November that her department had about half as many firefighters as it needed. When deadly wildfires struck the city two months later, Mayor Karen Bass’s administration pulled Crowley’s memo from its website.
Crowley wrote to the city’s fire commissioners — a five-person board appointed by Bass — on Nov. 18 and asked them to transmit the message to Bass and the city council. The fire department’s size, she said, hadn’t increased in decades despite significant population growth.
The blue-state model of governance has proven catastrophically incapable of differentiating needs from wants. California lawmakers may want a high-speed-rail system, and so far have spent $11.2 billion on a system that was supposed to be finished by 2020 but doesn’t yet have a single segment of the system completed.
But what the state needed was a far more widespread, far more extensive wildfire-prevention program, and the city needed a lot more firefighters and firefighting equipment.
To govern is to choose.
ADDENDUM: You’re going to want to read Dominic Pino, Jeff Blehar, and Andrew Stuttaford on the California wildfires as well.