In the aftermath of the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles, the city is requesting more money from the state and promising to punish residents for not cleaning up fast enough.
Los Angeles had already been wrestling with budget problems before the fires, though Democratic Mayor Karen Bass found enough money to throw $316 million toward unionized city employees for raises even as she cut the fire department’s budget. The city is facing a near $1 billion budget shortfall, with “thousands” of “nearly inevitable” layoffs now on the horizon.
Bass is now requesting another $1.9 billion from the state government after the state had already approved $2.5 billion. The state of California is already dealing with its own budget problems, and now taxpayers across the state are being expected to bail Los Angeles out for its mishandling of its budget and fire prevention.
Meanwhile, Bass is castigating more than 1,000 Los Angeles residents for not yet choosing to opt into the city’s debris removal plan. Residents who do not make a choice will have their “properties … be declared a nuisance and owners will be responsible for all abatement cost without the possibility of FEMA reimbursement and possibly be subject to a lien on your property.” The city’s program will only clear areas that were burned, though, so properties with “concrete slabs, driveways and retaining walls left behind” will “need to be addressed” by property owners in order to rebuild, according to local media.
If you want to do the job yourself, rather than rely on the incomplete work that the city is going to do, you are entirely on your own. Just over 564 people have opted out of the program, with Bass telling them they will receive no help from the city in finding a place to dump the debris. “You also have to figure out what you’re going to do with that debris,” Bass said. “That’s some of the problem owners have gotten into, where they come to us and then say, ‘OK, where am I supposed to put it.’ So we encourage everyone to opt in.”
‘WOUNDED BASS HAS LONG PATH TO REBUILDING PUBLIC CONFIDENCE IN LEADERSHIP AFTER LA FIRES: POLL
Compare that to Florida’s hurricane response, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered landfills open and allowed everyday civilians to bring in their own debris. Bass instead wants to force Los Angeles residents to wait until the government gets to them and threaten them with punishments if they don’t sit there and wait for the government to half-clean their properties.
Bass’s governance and the governance of other Los Angeles Democrats created this crisis in the first place. The very government whose incompetence led to the fires doing such damage and to the city’s budget woes is now demanding that residents let the government do all the work on their properties (unless it comes to driveways or concrete), all while begging for bailouts from taxpayers across the state.