Gov. Gavin Newsom misled the public in 2021 about his wildfire prevention efforts by 690%
SUMMARY: California’s wildfire crisis, exacerbated by mismanagement of forests and water resources, has led to a catastrophic insurance crisis. Governor Newsom’s overstated wildfire prevention efforts and inadequate funding for the California FAIR Plan have left homeowners vulnerable. The combination of environmental policies, regulatory hurdles, and water mismanagement has created a perfect storm, threatening the financial and emotional well-being of Californians.
By Katy Grimes, January 8, 2025 8:24 am
the Editor in Chief of the California Globe, long-time Investigative Journalist covering the California State Capitol, and the co-author of California’s War Against Donald Trump: Who Wins? Who Loses?
As wildfires tear through Southern California burning down entire neighborhoods, homeowners are reporting that insurance companies recently cancelled their fire insurance.
California’s perfect storm is a mishmash of destructive water policy, environmental policy, and a political insurance crisis.
The Southern California wildfires are devastating because of heavy winds, lack of water, and not enough forest management. As California Congressman Tom McClintock has long said, “Excess timber comes out of the forest in only two ways – it is either carried out or it burns out.”
But how did this happen, even after the devastating 2018 fires in Paradise CA, which killed 85 people and destroyed the entire town?
In 2021 the Globe reported:
The June 2021 report which exposed that Gov. Gavin Newsom misled the public about his wildfire prevention efforts by 690%, should have obligated applicable state agencies to act immediately.
The fact remains that California’s forests are still a lethal tinderbox as wildfire prevention efforts have not been ramped up to mitigate the now annual wildfire threat to homes, businesses and entire communities. Instead, 2021 is one of the worse fire seasons ever in state history, with wildfires still burning.
The joint CapRadio and NPR investigation unveiled in June 2021, Governor Newsom was found to have overstated the number of areas treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns by 690%, the Globe reported. Governor Newsom claimed that, due to his executive order, 35 of his priority projects had treated over 90,000 acres with wildfire prevention treatments. However, data from the state only showed 11,399 acres treated.
“The data show Cal Fire treated 64,000 acres in 2019, but only 32,000 acres in 2020 and 24,000 acres through Memorial Day this year,” CapRadio and NPRreported, explaining that the governor even “disinvested in wildfire prevention.”
“At the same time, Newsom slashed roughly $150 million from Cal Fire’s wildfire prevention budget,” CapRadio reported.
Newsom’s executive order on day one as governor in 2019 blamed the state’s wildfires on climate change and paid particular attention to “equity” — focusing on areas with high “poverty levels, residents with disabilities, language barriers, residents over 65 or under five years of age, and households without a car.” (Executive Order below)
Officially, the projects totaled about 90,000 acres. That’s well short of the amount of forestland experts say needs treatment in California, but it would have substantially increased Cal Fire’s prevention output compared to past years.
In early 2020, Newsom declared mission accomplished.
“The projects collectively have treated 90,000 acres,” states a January 2020 press release from the governor’s office. “Work included removal of hazardous dead trees, vegetation clearing, creation of fuel breaks and community defensible spaces, and creation of ingress and egress corridors.”
But the data analyzed by CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom show that Cal Fire treated a small fraction of that amount, 11,399 acres, or about 13% of the amount cited by Newsom.
Big hat, no cattle.
The Insurance Crisis
California’s insurance crisis is pushing Californians whose homeowners insurance has been cancelled to the California FAIR Plan, which is writing the highest-risk policies in California, but it is woefully underfunded, with only a few billion in assets and several hundred billion in liabilities, former state Senator Ted Gaines reported for the Globe.
“California is and has been a lower-cost state for insurance but that did not accurately reflect the risk insurers faced, as the devastating wildfires of 2017 and 2020 proved,” Gaines said. “Those fires wiped out decades of insurer California profits and shed critical light on what rate adequacy really looks like. The low prices were an artifact of Prop. 103, which is acting as a price control, which always leads to shortages. It is proving a barrier to its stated goal of ensuring insurance is available to all Californians.”
The real responsibility for California’s high insurance premiums lies in state politicians’ and the governor’s deluded “progressive” policy decisions and bad laws. Most insurers say because of California’s high cost to rebuild, they can’t keep premiums artificially low any longer.
What are the high costs to rebuild?
- The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA): As Ed Ring reported for the Globe, over 50+ years, “CEQA has acquired layers of legislative updates and precedent setting court rulings, warping it into a beast that denies clarity to developers and derails projects. When projects do make it through the CEQA gauntlet, the price of passage adds punitive costs in time and money.”
- Project labor agreements are one of the biggest obstacles to political collaboration between construction unions and groups representing business interests, Ed Ring explained. A PLA is “a pre-hire collective bargaining agreement with one or more labor organizations that establishes the terms and conditions of employment for a specific construction project.”
- federal, state, regional, and local agencies permitting, overlapping and conflicting regulations, and the agencies all have the power to halt building projects, allow a lawsuit, or rule change, require an entire new set of designs, and force and individual or builder to resubmit plans to every agency and start all over again (Ed Ring, summarized).
These reasons as well as incoherent water restrictions, preposterous “clean air” requirements, mandatory electricity requirements, mandatory solar requirements, mandatory interior sprinkler systems and the like. These state mandated regulations in home and commercial building have driven the cost of construction to unimaginable levels.
California’s water crisis
Add to all of this a lack of water in the southern part of the state. Fire fighters reported that there was not enough water pressure in some neighborhoods to fight the fires.
California’s water crisis is created by politicians and state government which allows the unelected, appointed and permanent bureaucrats at the State Water Resources Control Board to fulfill state water policy so politicians’ fingerprints aren’t on it. And, politicians and officials who adhere to radical environmental policies, have been killing off California agriculture lands by denying water, sending 80% of California’s water to the ocean in unimpaired flows for “environmental” purposes, resulting in entire Central Valley towns without water, farms drying up, and threats of rationing to urban water users.
And Gov. Newsom and Democrats have been slow-rolling the already voter approved Sites Reservoir and Temperance Flats Reservoir for water storage – water storage that would greatly help the southern part of the state.
California’s Perfect Storm will not end well. Homeowners will be shattered financially and emotionally.
It’s as if Governor Gavin Newsom and the state’s Democrats are trying to destroy the state – no one could be this incompetent otherwise.
1.8.19-EO-N-05-19Originally published by California Globe
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