In order to understand the magnitude of the position in which we find ourselves, we must first understand the magnitude of the deception and the machinery. We must look back at all of the components and contributing factors that may have seemed unrelated, but which we can see today are anything but. This means starting at the mouth of the river and tracing all the tributaries, in order to effectively analyze the terrain. 

Take bad policy, add bad politicians, decaying infrastructure, pulled funding, bad management, institutional failure, anomalous and disaster-level weather, mismanaged funds (we’ll call it that), mismatched skillsets (we’ll call it that), yes incompetence, yes lack of preparedness, and inability to distinguish priorities…Now add malfeasance. And you don’t even need to add that much malfeasance at that point.

It’s never as easy as “blame” or “fault” or stringing up the bad guy, and then we can all go home. This is a policy problem and a system problem, which is way bigger than any one individual in that system. Tug on that thread and the whole sweater comes undone. However, if you want to peel back the layers and unwind the architecture and infrastructure, this does lie squarely at the feet of our elected officials.

It comes down to priorities…What are your priorities as a leader? I understand it’s complicated and nuanced and overwhelming and there are conflicting and often irreconcilable needs, and that’s before you add optics. I understand that we wanted to get in to save trapped animals, but we were also in the middle of a 72-hour body recovery. I understand that all of the conflicting needs make it murky at best. 

And I understand this is triage, not student counsel, under not optimal circumstances. But Disaster Preparedness 101 means these people needed to be able to chew gum and walk, and they didn’t. You don’t toss one set of needs to the wolves to accommodate the other, and one set of priorities does not supersede the other. This is why governing is hard and why, presumably, we elect officials and leaders who are equipped to distinguish proper priorities, make these decisions, and execute effectively. This is distinctly their responsibility, as elected leaders.

The Santa Ynez Reservoir, which held 117,000,000 gallons of water, was emptied in February of 2024. It could have been repaired by employees, but it sat empty for 11 months. Because safety was not a priority. 

Everyone knows California is a desert climate.  Everyone knows about the Santa Ana winds.  The reservoir holding over 100 million gallons was emptied because there was a tear in the cover, the repair was not expedited, and the decision was made to drain it for maintenance before the Santa Anas in the middle of a drought.

Additionally, why didn’t the LADWP find it prudent to alert Cal Fire that the reservoir had been emptied so they could have been prepared with mitigating arrangements for water in the event of a disaster? Such mitigation efforts, I am told, would have taken a few hours. Had Cal Fire KNOWN the reservoir was empty and could not be depended upon, they would have sprung into action with available alternatives.

The sock puppets all keep repeating the same party line that the problem wasn’t the water, and that a full reservoir wouldn’t have made a difference. My question for our officials would be: would over 100 million gallons of water on the first night of the fire have HELPED the situation? I don’t believe any official can answer no to that question with a straight face. Why wasn’t repairing and bringing the reservoir back online quickly prioritized?

The CEO of the LADWP is a woman named Janisse Quinones. She was an officer in the Coast Guard Reserves involved in bringing power back to Puerto Rico after the hurricane, and she was a senior executive at Pacific Gas and Electric which, in 2022 and 2023, experienced dozens of fires caused by PG&E equipment. Her history would indicate that she has experience in and understanding of the risks involving fire, and has extensive experience working with state officials on fire and fire-related issues. She clearly has an understanding of the intersection between electricity, fire and fire prevention, trees, and wind in California.

Quinones is the highest-paid city official in the state. The city wanted a DEI hire, and she leveraged that and squeezed them for an extra $300k. She’s getting paid $750k a year. Her predecessor made less than $450k. For the past 6 months, Quinones has been focused entirely on 3 things:

1. Obtaining approval for a recycling sewer water plant, at a cost of over $750 million.
2. Research (using ratepayer funds) converting an existing gas-fired power plant in Utah to hydrogen.
3. Reorganizing the DWP around, and prioritizing, DEI.  Her quote: “Equity is my number 1 priority.”

First of all, why is the DWP spending ratepayer money to develop technologies and research, to the detriment of public safety measures? Spending ratepayer dollars to figure out how to use a new technology, while our own utility infrastructure lies decaying, untended, and unsupported, is at best outside the scope of the contract.

Next, why are we prioritizing DEI at the expense of the readiness of resources that my 8-year-old godson could predict we will need in California? If anyone should have had us prepared, it’s Quinones…but that wasn’t her priority…DEI was, by her own admission. Five percent of the LA city fire personnel are women. The 3 most senior people holding leadership positions all came out of that 5%. Not impossible…but neither is rolling a 12 six times in a row. DEI is Quinones’ stated priority…so I guess it’s not necessary to mention but I will, that all 3 are also LGBTQ+…

Quinones has the history, so she was aware. During her tenure she certainly gained knowledge of the fire risks and, if not, then she is willfully ignorant. That would be like a football coach rising to the pros and saying they are unaware of a thing called a forward pass.

Mayor Karen Bass appointed Quiñones. LADWP is a city department with oversight by our elected officials. Sexy priorities like DEI and new technologies superseded public safety priorities, and now we see what those priorities got us. Keeping our infrastructure in repair and ready was not the executive decision, and our elected officials own those executive decisions because they appoint these positions and have oversight. They failed to adequately prepare a known fire corridor for the world’s most predictable emergency.

On the first day of the fires, immediately, in the morning before the wind that later made it impossible, the helicopters could have been deployed if not for Secret Service flight restrictions due to then-President Biden being on the ground in Los Angeles County. There is a 30-mile flight restriction/airspace restriction when the President is on the ground…and that order superseded firefighting protocol. Another executive decision.

We have a budget problem. Over $1 billion was spent last year on homeless nonsense that didn’t help the homeless. Meanwhile, there was a $17 million cut to the fire department – about which Chief Crowley sent a letter in December saying, essentially, we aren’t going to be prepared for a major disaster. She explicitly said that there is equipment we can’t repair because we don’t have the money for maintenance. Now, $17 million is not insignificant. If you are already cut to the bone with the budget…any more cuts will invariably affect levels of service. A fully funded police and fire is non-negotiable. This is necessarily the department of our elected officials and their oversight.

The spin of the budget showing a net increase is ridiculous. Budget establishes a workflow. You can’t plan and execute repairs to a complex apparatus when you find 5 extra dollars in your pocket. If you have dozens of pieces of equipment that all need repair, you have to establish a timeline. By reducing the budget you’ve just eliminated the workflow.

Fire hydrants are not a side issue. Water to fight fires is not a side issue. Recycling pee and new technologies in Utah are a side issue. Fire and disaster preparedness was not a priority if that reservoir was empty. The bottom line is they are playing politics with public safety, and it needs to stop.

DWP has an article on their site: “Pacific palisades fire: correcting misinformation.” That is misinformation. The repair did not require the reservoir to be out of service or drained, and could have been repaired by employees. Additionally, the CEO had the ability to sign it; it did not require a bid. But actually that’s deckchairs on the Titanic because PRIORITIES are expedited. Always. Bid or no bid, if it were a priority, it would have been done in 30 days, not 11 months.

The LADWP said that emptying of the reservoir began in February 2024 due to a tear in the floating cover measuring several feet. State regulators ordered DWP to drain the site to avoid contamination. Again we see…officials have oversight. Additionally, who interpreted the rules to mean that the reservoir needed to be emptied? Fixing a repair and draining it are two entirely different directives.

The DWP sought bids for the repair in April and, in November, signed off on a contract for $130,000. They’re making it sound like it’s millions of dollars of repairs, not a rip in a cover. Even the union stated the repair could have and should have been done by department employees. The DWP is blaming the open bid requirement, but in actuality, this expenditure did not require an open bid, because the CEO has the right to sign for any contract under a given amount. (I believe that amount is $5 million).

The reason it wasn’t fixed in a timely manner is that it was not a priority. It would be similar to not driving your car for a year because it had a flat tire that required one penny of repair.  We have a mitigation of damages law in California for civilians; why is this not an expectation when it comes to our bureaucracy and elected officials?

Researchers said urban water systems like DWP’s were not designed to fight wildfires that overtake whole neighborhoods…Is there a reason we are not making that a priority over, say, hydrogen research in Utah? There was zero attempt at mitigation, alternative, or course correction for a known liability in a known risk corridor during a known risk to prevent the state’s most predictable disaster. I’m baffled as to why the person with presumably the most expertise when it comes to downstream liability and blowback couldn’t predict this exact downstream liability and blowback.

I submit to you that ANY conversation but the 117,000,000-gallon reservoir being empty is a shiny object…to avoid talking about that subject.

Gavin Newsom also has oversight and makes appointments. He appoints boards, and the boards have been failing, and he vetoes or passes things, and has created failing and failed policies. Fire, water, utilities…are all connected to the problem of failed policies.

The Governor and the state used the smelt thing to hijack and leverage a different priority. There is a hub out of Plumas County with community-based templates for both fire management and watershed restoration to stabilize water within living landscapes. This should be modeled from the headwaters to the ocean. This template allows for the broadest scope of priorities and practical solutions by balancing the needs of the communities across the board INCLUDING the smelt fish…and everything else. 

We talk about the underbrush and the fire break issue, but the truth is there is a government-funded pilot project that was community developed by all stakeholders, which is all about understanding and implementing vegetative fuel management. The project pioneered making defensible fuel breaks, environmental resilience, and rural community development, all priorities.

We don’t actually have a water problem in California, we have a water management problem in California. We need to manage water in the state, and that’s not happening, and it’s not happening because it’s not a priority.

All of that would seem like quite enough without the punchline, but I’m sad to report it’s only the beginning. 

Enter SB222, downstage left. The predictable authors and lost-the-plotters of this bill have created a fun little bait-and-switch to execute the globalist agenda by locking in diktats citing environmental protections (that don’t protect the environment). That’s the thing about magic tricks…always pay attention to what the other hand is doing. 

Opportunistically, SB222 aims to go after the oil and gas companies by attempting to congressionally lock in environmental protections based on the (untested, uninvestigated, unsupported) conclusion that the fires were caused by climate change, which was ultimately caused by the big bad oil and gas companies. Remember the gas stoves? The problem with the environment wasn’t your 57 masks a day or your 72 gloves a day, or your 200 plastic water bottles, or your single-use everything, or your meal delivered wrapped in a bag wrapped in a box wrapped in another bag and all tied together in a bag brought to you in a box. It was the gas stoves; those were the real threat. 

I think I have exhibited enough evidence above to meet a burden that the disaster that became this disaster was not caused by climate change…but that’s not actually the point. Though I wish it were. 

The problem with locking in this kind of precedent congressionally is that it can be used to then change zoning (and other) laws which affect rebuilds. That means potentially no more single-family builds in coastal regions. They are already talking about “multi-purpose” rebuilds in those regions…how long do you think it would take that scope to expand to include non-coastal regions for some other as-of-yet unidentified climate change threat? There is an ethics experiment in law that takes every potential action through to its extreme, and in this case, the extreme is: you lose your land rights because you didn’t understand the implications of a bill being passed across the country in another state. 

Disaster will happen again, and again, and what’s to come will only continue to get worse if we set an extremist precedent in California to lock in templates that can be duplicated throughout the country. There is GOING to be another fire. There is GOING to be another hurricane. Another tornado. Another flood. If we lock in the California standard that the California Democrats are currently pushing, it will only be a matter of time before the rest of the country follows suit. 

Yes, this is a slow process made slower by corrupt government agencies (the Coastal Commission, etc.), interference, and the elected officials playing politics with public health and the legislature. Yes, this is the NGO model – the solution is the problem. If your business model is built on solving a problem and you solve that problem…no more business. And yes, efforts to set a baseline to rebuild are arduous, toxic, and complicated. That said…once that finally IS accomplished…if we allow California Democrats to lock in Jekyll and Hyde bills like SB222 in the state, it’s only a matter of time before we start to see the same thing in places like North Carolina, Louisiana, or, worse, federally. 

At best, regulations and regulatory compliance increase cost. The cost to rebuild is already so prohibitive that insurance is pulling out of the state. Democrats’ policy is demonstrably focused on ideological extremism, not forward-moving, common-sense solutions and policy reform. Governor Newsom has announced that he is suspending SeqA and opposing the coastal commission’s unilateral rule change (which is NOT legislative – not a law) around rebuilds which sounds good but it’s just a diversion; he proceeded to say the quiet part out loud with the “California 2.0” comment, and now they’re coming in the back door with SB222. 

Same with the property tax issue, because that’s next. Additionally, by being prohibitive, these terrible policies are making efforts unsafe when they don’t need to be, and the vigilantism becomes a problem that makes it even harder on everyone involved, from first responders then, to removal and remediation now, to effectively execute an already impossible job. 

It matters who our elected officials are in this state, and you can dismiss it as just “those crazy Californians, that would never happen here in (insert state)”, but you shouldn’t. Because it’s not just about (stupid) recalls that provide extended grift runway by removing the limitations for fundraising and providing unlimited ink for a 2028 federal hopeful sock puppet for the DNC. 

And it’s not just about the photo-op-y governor and mayor of LA…it’s about the California Senate, and Congress, and the looney tunes extremist ideologies they are espousing and, when challenged, on which they are doubling down as we speak. (See: voting against making the sex trafficking of minors a felony. Again.)

Really though, the discussions about the minutiae are deckchairs on the Titanic, and the granularity doesn’t matter. Our elected officials have clearly identified their priorities, and one of them isn’t disaster preparedness or helping their constituency; they’re focused on extremist ideologies and on authoring and passing bad bills that make it worse, not better, for people in this state.

I would argue that their priority is to set a precedent for the rest of the country. We need real change and real leadership in California, and people should very much care what happens here, because we are the beta-test state, and what happens in California does not stay in California.