What can the federal government do really for the recovery? The fed gov't doesnt rebuild houses after a natural disaster, they rebuild lost infrastructure and do preventative stuff. The federal dollars for Katrina were to rebuild levees, build new levees and improve drainage/pumping infrastructure. None of this infrastructure was lost in these fires. Maybe build more reservoirs except CA already has those approved and just refused to build them. There's not much a federal response can do here.
The problem is not that California's government simply refused to build them. If they did, that would be stupid, but not necessarily insane, since the massive fucking bond for digging new reservoirs (a walloping 7.2 Billion, holy shit) was essentially approved by the Taxpayers. So the money's there, the need is there, what the fuck happened?
Bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy happened.
Every time a new spot was chosen for the reservoir to potentially be dug in, California's deranged EPA requires multiple studies be done on environmental impacts, multiple agencies get contacted on whether or not this qualified as gentrification or not, and only specific licensed contractors be allowed to do each step. The end result of this is an fucking confusing spider-nest of Red Tape that makes NYC look like a fucking joke in contrast. The fucking new Reservoirs were greenlit back when Trump was in his first term; they've spent 4.4 billion of the bond, and
they've barely begun groundbreaking. The fucking project is not due to be completed until at least 2028, and very likely will not be completed before 2030 barring federal intervention.
So.... Where did the money go? Why did nothing get done yet?
Endless lawsuits by environmental activist groups who wanted to stop it. They sued so often and so continually that
California actually fucking passed SB149 for the purpose of stopping these groups from dragging out these proceedings for half a decade or more while they pulled the fucking same tactic vexatious litigants the world over use. So when you have every one of these little fucking shithead groups all file their own individual lawsuits complaining about their own tiny, very specific issue not to win, but just to endlessly stall, you have these groups quite literally having land development, as it has been in California for over a decade now, by the balls, wasting untold millions of dollars of taxpayer money to fucking do it.
In the end, pretty much the entirety of this fire can be placed on the shoulders of California's systemic mismanagement, but if there is any party who is more guilty than any other when it comes to causing this travesty, making it worse, and actively preventing any attempt from fixing it, it's Californian environmental groups, and it highlights how most of the most aggressive ones almost certainly deserve prison time for this shit.
