Newsom Misled Public About Wildfire Prevention Effort Ahead of Worst Fire Season
capradio.org
capradio.org
So Newsom should've walked every acre to verify the figures for himself ?
Then there's the part where funding was cut because of anticipated economic disaster from COVID.
But,
>By late 2020, it became clear the pandemic would not have a disastrous impact on state revenues. On the contrary, Newsom said the state had a nearly $76 billion surplus.
>Now, Newsom is proposing $2 billion in spending on wildfires and emergency preparedness, with $1.2 billion going toward ‘wildfire resiliency.’ The state Legislature’s version of the budget allocates over $1.5 billion for a “wildfire prevention and forest resilience package.”
I'm not a great fan of Newsom or anything, but it's exhausting the amount of bad-faith clickbait that passes for news these days.
This sounds like he could be the 'fall guy', who is taking the blame that rightly belongs to someone else. The difficulty is that we know he's not super honest; either he stood by silently while watching his boss cite incorrect facts at a series of press conferences, or he said something at the time and he's being untruthful now. Either way, he's acted dishonestly.
And of course Newsom has had his own honesty issues in the recent past, including his high-profile restaurant snafu. In this context, it's hard to trust anything either of these guys says.
His ambitions in politics are very clear and longstanding. Mayor of SF, then an attempt at governor and when that was thwarted, biding his time as Lieutenant Governor. Now it is governor. His next step is clear, which is the Presidency.
His use of connections to obtain power and to broker power is also longstanding. He didn't grow up in wealth but used his connections with Getty to get wealthy. Getty funded his Plump Jack businesses. Getty gave him an interest free loan to buy his first house. That his maskless dinner happened with lobbyists from the California doctor's association is a continuation of this pattern.
He gauges political winds well and aligns himself so that it is a tailwind. In his first mayor's race, he ended up in a runoff with a far more progressive candidate. He shifted his political positions to be far more progressive while still obtaining the support of the business elite. He won by a landslide.
The last few years, he has aligned himself with the latest progressive movement. He isn't doing it out of the goodness of his heart or out of principle. He just gauged which way the political winds were blowing and aligned himself to be buoyed by them.
His administration of the state is only as good as it helps further his political ambitions. Once attention shifts away from a topic, expect his attention to shift away from it as well. Don't expect long term planning nor long term execution.
If you look at his administration of SF, what you see is basically muddling along with nothing much accomplished. I expect the same exact thing in California as a whole.
I hypothesize that there will be a lot of money spent and distributed with little to no actual improvement.
Look at transportation and education in SF over his time.
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.
This is very bad news, and it will surely impact Newsom's chances in the upcoming recall vote.
We'd still want to protect homes and people of course, but it seems like that would be easier if we didn't send fire fighters out to fight the remote fires.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40725-015-0013-9
>> Objectives for fuels management have not changed much over the years and generally aim to achieve the above-stated benefits at least cost. Even so, documentation is scant that specific payoffs are actually realized. Arguably, wildfire encounters with areas where fuels have been manipulated provide the best evidence of fuel treatment effectiveness, but limited information is available here as well.
Maximal fire suppression strategies have been the most prevalent approach to avoiding property damage and loss of life caused by forest fires for most of the past century, despite the known harm to ecological systems that rely on periodic burning, because nature is difficult to control/predict and prescribed burns (an alternative or supplemental approach) are time and labor intensive.
There was a pandemic. Rightly or wrongly, basically everything slowed to a halt. If you look carefully at the timeline, there was a pandemic slowdown, activity resumed when it was clear finances weren’t actually in peril as predicted, and the state got back on track.
Regardless, everyone is quick to point fingers about these fires, but the fact of the matter is people are putting houses in high risk areas on the wildland-urban interface. The state can’t realistically be expected to prevent that, and shouldn’t be using politics (e.g. preventing insurers from dropping risky clients) to encourage it.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/09/12/why-is-californ...
It doesn't even have to be a question about whether you like him as a person or not, or support his politics or not. He's just an ineffective leader, simple as that.