Bureaucracy, Red Tape, and a Failed Gavin Newsom Project: Why California Moved Slowly in Wildfire Prevention

excalibur · Jan 11, 2025

You see, Trump was correct in 2018, and he is right correct now, in 2025.

Newsom and his "policies". And we see that Trump is right because the MSM closes ranks to defend Newsom while misrepresenting what Trump has said.

Newsom and the stupid environmental policies Democrats impose all across California.

The devastating wildfires in California followed decades of slow-moving fire prevention efforts delayed by bureaucracy and red tape. Those delays were magnified by a fire prevention initiative from Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) that went years without completing a single project.

The Los Angeles fires are already projected to cause up to $150 billion in damage while displacing hundreds of thousands of residents. At least 11 people have died in the fires as of Friday evening, though the County of Los Angeles Department of Medical Examiner said that number is expected to rise.

The disaster has renewed attention on California’s wildfire prevention shortcomings. Experts and lawmakers say wildfires in the state are made worse by multi-year permitting delays on projects that make woodlands and forests more resilient. Those types of projects—such as thinning out dense clusters of trees and prescribed burns to remove the conditions necessary for fires to spread rapidly—have also been stifled by climate groups that regularly challenge them in court.

Fire prevention projects located on public lands are often required to receive approval under the California Environmental Quality Act or, in the case of those on federal property, the National Environmental Policy Act. Those two 1970s-era laws, in addition to a handful of others, implemented a series of burdensome regulations that gave legal ammunition to activists seeking to block forest management projects.

The California law also frequently forces years-long environmental reviews on fire prevention projects. An independent state commission issued a report on the law in May, recommending reforms that allow "beneficial projects to proceed more rapidly, without sacrificing necessary environmental protections."

"We have too many fuels on the ground, too much vegetation, too many trees, grasses, that burn and go up in flames and lead to these catastrophic wildfire conditions," Property and Environment Research Center policy director Hannah Downey told the Washington Free Beacon. "We know we have a problem. We know what's causing it. What do we do? The answer is we need to remove those excess fuels."

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In fact, a separate interagency database created by Newsom’s California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force shows that state and federal agencies have completed forest management projects across just 54,647 acres in Southern California between 2021 and 2023. For context, the Angeles National Forest alone spans more than 650,000 acres.

In 2023, nearly all of the land in the Los Angeles area that was treated for fire involved roads and highways rather than wildlands and forests. The state transportation agency coordinated the efforts on more than 21,000 acres of the nearly 30,000 acres treated last year, which primarily consisted of urban weed spraying and roadway clearance.

California has, in the past decade, doubled its agency budget for firefighting and prevention to nearly $3.8 billion. Yet in the six months leading up to the Los Angeles fires, the agency treated just 46 acres in Los Angeles for fire prevention, primarily through weed spraying and goat grazing, and didn’t conduct any prescribed burning.

Chuck DeVore, a former Republican state representative for California who works for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, noted that not only do local air boards put fire agencies and property owners through burdensome permit processes to conduct prescribed burns, but doing so also opens people and officials alike to lawsuits from environmentalists or other property owners if the planned fires do any damage.

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