SOME TRUMP FIRINGS THWART HIS OWN AIMS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 14, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“SOME TRUMP FIRINGS THWART HIS OWN AIMS”

 

It now clear that some moves President Trump has authorized his pal Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to make will thwart at least a few of Trump’s own often-repeated priorities.

 

Among the actions figuring to affect California most are three, so far. One was the abrupt firing of 20 judges from immigration courts in San Diego, where they decided on the legitimacy of immigrant amnesty claims.

 

Firing these judges will make cases pile up far beyond prior levels and increase the number of undocumented immigrants in federal custody. It will also cause a further pileup of would-be immigrants on the Mexican side of the border, likely spurring at least some to enter America without authorization.

 

Then there are two moves that figure to make the next fire season, coming up in late spring or early summer, as bad as or worse than recent ones.

 

Trump legitimately repeats the conviction that cleaning forest floors can reduce the intensity and frequency of wildfires. He consistently and falsely blames California’s state government for not doing this.

 

In fact, the federal government over which he presides owns about 97 percent of public lands in California, or about half the state’s total area. The state controls just three percent of public lands, much of it in state parks that are generally well maintained.

 

The federal lands are mostly governed by two agencies. One is the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a part of the Department of the Interior. The other is the U.S. Forest Service, run by the Department of Agriculture.

 

The Forest Service controls about 15 million acres in very rural areas, including the Sierra, Six Rivers and Eldorado national forests, and in national forests abutting urban areas, like the Angeles National Forest near Los Angeles, the Cleveland National Forest near both San Diego and some Orange County cities, plus the Los Padres National Forest near Santa Barbara. 

 

Their maintenance is critical both to recreation for millions of Californians as well as to fire safety, as the Eaton fire that burned much of Altadena in January amply demonstrated. It began in the Angeles forest.

 

Trump is right that raking forest floors regularly to remove dried out branches, leaves and other debris can be vital in minimizing wildfires. But with Musk’s aid, in mid-February he fired 3,400 Forest Service workers still on probation in their first year of employment, many of whom had been hired to do the job Trump calls critical to stopping fires.

 

That’s like firing the surgeon and expecting your operation to go well.

 

Trump also froze all contracts previously signed by both the Forest Service and the BLM for private companies to do such work, in part because their funding was part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, ex-President Joe Biden’s favorite measure.

 

The BLM quickly halted plans to clear hazardous overgrowth in the approximately 6 million California acres it controls. That includes most of the Mojave Desert and lands near Bakersfield, as well as a large swath of forest in the state’s northeast corner.

 

An open question is whether the notoriously non-detail-oriented Trump even knows which federal employees and contractors his campaign financier (to the tune of more than $250 million last year) Musk is firing. If he knew these firings completely contradict priorities he has trumpeted, why would he have okayed them?

 

The immigration judges, fired Forest Service workers and jilted BLM contractors were all critical to jobs Trump prioritizes every chance he gets.

 

To no avail so far, plenty of officials quickly objected to these Trump moves and others. This state’s Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff joined 12 other Western senators, mostly Republicans, protesting the cuts to what is known as “wildland treatment.”

 

 The chief of a union representing most California firefighters noted that Trump “acknowledges…vegetation management is a major driver in the prevention of firestorms.”

 

Which leaves at least two open questions: Even if money for jobs and contracts were restored, would anyone return after having the rug pulled from under them?

 

And does it matter more to the president that wildland maintenance can minimize firestorms or that the money to do it would come from a pet law of the predecessor he deeply resents?

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

R.I.P. ROGER DIAMOND, HUGE INFLUENCE ON STATE’S POLITICS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“R.I.P. ROGER DIAMOND, HUGE INFLUENCE ON STATE’S POLITICS”

 

If you’ve ever been accosted by an initiative or recall petition carrier outside a grocery, big box store a la Costco or Home Depot or voted for or against any California initiative in the last 50 years, you have been affected by Roger Jon Diamond.

 

Diamond, possibly the least known major contributor to California politics in the last century, died at 81 in February, exactly six weeks after he and his family lost their bluffside home in the early January Palisades fire.

 

The blaze destroyed Diamond’s hacienda-style home of 50 years overlooking the Pacific Ocean and two other homes just blocks away that belonged to his two daughters and their families.

 

Diamond was best known for his 20 years as head of a community organization called No Oil Inc., which successfully fought off several attempts to drill major oil wells below his bluff and in other coastal zones.

 

But his biggest political contribution came first in a shopping mall more than 90 miles east in San Bernardino and then in a series of courtrooms.

 

In 1970, Diamond took on as a nonpaying pro bono client a grassroots group called the People’s Lobby, headed by activists Ed and Joyce Koupal (no relation to Jonathan Coupal, head of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.). The Koupals’ group sought to put an omnibus measure called the Environment Initiative onto the 1972 ballot, and began to gather signatures for it.

 

This was long before the days when consultants offered anywhere up to $6 per signature for valid John Hancocks from registered voters.

 

Ed Koupal came up with the then-original idea of seeking out voters at indoor shopping malls, then a fairly new and growing phenomenon. Diamond among them, some Koupal associates began soliciting shoppers at San Bernardino’s Inland Center and were quickly kicked out by county sheriff’s deputies.

 

Diamond, who had been a lawyer just four years at the time, sued. He claimed shopping malls like the Inland Center – which at the time hosted upwards of 25,000 visitors daily – were de facto public places. He put his name on the lawsuit against 28-year Sheriff Frank Bland, referred to in one biography as “a John Wayne lawman.” It was known as Diamond v. Bland.

 

The case was quickly laughed out of San Bernardino County Superior Court, as the mall’s owner Homart Development Co., tightly regulated all activity in its 32-foot-wide corridors and the adjacent parking lots.

 

The bottom line: Diamond took the case to the state Supreme Court and won access. Eventually, a variety of other court cases and settlements reduced petition carriers to operating almost exclusively outdoors, but still allowing them on store and mall properties. Those settlements have been imitated in most states across the nation.

 

Koupal’s Environment Initiative made the ballot and lost, but Diamond’s lawsuit lives on.

 

If you’ve ever walked down a beach accessway between private properties, you were a beneficiary of the 1972 Coastal Initiative, one of the first measures to gather signatures on commercial property.

 

Then-Gov. Ronald Reagan used the same tactic to qualify a tax-cutting ballot initiative in 1973 also taking advantage of Diamond’s lawsuit. Reagan’s measure lost, but morphed into the landmark 1978 Proposition 13, which remains law today and keeps property taxes here well below national averages.

 

The consumer advocates who qualified the 1988 Proposition 103 to regulate insurance prices also circulated petitions at shopping malls. So did sponsors of later initiatives to ban smoking in most indoor spaces and tinkering with the definitions of felonies and misdemeanors.

 

Diamond loved all this. “I wanted California to have open politics and I’m glad I helped with that, even if I don’t always agree with the causes they push.”

 

Diamond was always vocal for the environment, accosting nearby smokers in the stands at countless baseball, football and basketball games. He never left a game early and would castigate friends who sometimes did.

 

Roger Diamond was a unique contributor to California politics, giving outsiders like himself influence they otherwise never could have had.

 

Rest in peace, Roger. May we sometime soon encounter more of your kind in politics.

 

   -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

PUSH IS ON FOR OTHER CALIFORNIANS TO SUBSIDIZE MANSION OWNERS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“PUSH IS ON FOR OTHER CALIFORNIANS TO SUBSIDIZE MANSION OWNERS”

 

It took only about three weeks for insurance companies to start their push for all California property owners and renters to subsidize the payouts going to burned-out mansion owners in the wake of the January firestorms in Los Angeles County.

 

State Farm General, California’s leading seller of homeowner insurance, applied as February began for a 22 percent rate increase on all its California customers to help cover payouts on at least 8,700 claims it received after the fires in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles. That would amount to a $740 million per year premium hike.

 

State Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara initially refused that application, but set an informal hearing later this month where he might reconsider.

 

How do we know this would be a subsidy from residents in areas that have never seen a wildfire and likely never will to mansion owners in places that are historically far more risk prone? Here’s an example: one burned-out beachfront Malibu residence sold three years ago for $85 million. That’s on the high end of the homes lost in January, but the affluent Palisades had hundreds of homes valued at $4 million or more.

 

Prior to its latest request, State Farm General last June asked for a 30 percent rate increase, or more than $1.3 billion. Essentially, the company wants premiums more than 50 percent above what it has charged under rate increases totaling about 27 percent in 2023. It has not provided sufficient financial data to justify either rate hike request. 

 

The entire idea of forcing all other California homeowners to subsidize payouts to those who lost property in January also departs from longtime national industry practices. One such practice: when state subsidiaries of national companies need extra money, they usually draw on the reserves of the parent company.

 

Parent State Farm Mutual Automobile Co., headquartered in Bloomington, IL, now has reserves of more than $134 billion, far more than enough to cover any and all losses from the January fires. It has sometimes used those reserves to aid state subsidiaries after hurricanes.

 

This did not stop Lara from demanding that all Californians pay added premiums to cover half the $2 billion or so that insurance companies must put out to cover losses of the state’s last-resort FAIR plan. The authors of the 1988 Proposition 103 insurance initiative estimate this would come to $60 from every policyholder in California. They say it’s illegal to charge consumers for any of this bailout. 

 

As it stands, State Farm and other companies having their way with Lara would almost double the insurance bills of Californians, even those living nowhere near wildfire zones.

             

State Farm is not alone. Allstate, which often doubles down on State Farm actions, estimates its January fire expenses at $1.1 billion. The national company has reserves of almost $21 billion, but will likely demand huge property insurance price hikes if State Farm gets them.

 

This may all seem grossly unfair. Not only are the big companies hitting Californians harder than residents of other states, but they seek to hang onto their huge reserves, supposedly gathered to cover the costs of crises just like this one.

 

The companies like to say they’ve suffered giant losses in California over the last nine years, State Farm claiming it’s more than $2.8 billion in the red in California in the nine years ending Dec. 31. That’s not necessarily so.

 

For one thing, it leaves out the large profits of other State Farm companies that sell auto and life insurance.

 

Not including those profits in their financial statement is plain dishonest. It’s also disingenuous to claim losses from previous fires blamed on power lines and towers. Why? Once electric utilities were forced to pay up for those liabilities, insurance companies recouped many of their fire expenses.

 

But State Farm, in its newest price increase request, piously said that “We must appropriately match price to risk. That is foundational to how insurance works.”

 

Also foundational is that when a subsidiary in one state has a shortfall, the parent company steps up, which State Farm Mutual plainly wants to avoid. Lara has evinced no inclination to force it to, either.

 

All of which means there’s something seriously wrong with the way California’s insurance regulator operates in this era of repeated crises.

 

 

-30-

 

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

 

Suggested pullout quote: “If all this seems grossly unfair, that’s because it is.”

DENSE REBUILDING WOULD PUT MANY MORE AT RISK

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“DENSE REBUILDING WOULD PUT MANY MORE AT RISK”

 

President Trump, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass rarely are unanimous on anything. But all three have taken steps toward allowing victims of the January firestorms in Los Angeles County to rebuild their communities essentially as they were before.

 

In both places, this would mean large quantities of single family housing and few multi-family apartment and condominium buildings.

 

But the seemingly innocuous aims announced by these leading politicians may soon run afoul of housing density factors playing no role in rebuilding that’s followed other major California blazes. Some of these were the 2018 Camp fire that leveled Paradise, the Tubbs fire covering parts of Napa, Sonoma and Lake counties in 2017 and the 2018 Woolsey fire that destroyed a large swath of Malibu.

 

The new factors include recent state and local laws demanding vastly increased density in new housing and a plethora of low- and middle-income units.

 

In the modern era, no other event has created nearly as much newly buildable land as the January infernos, which turned more than 16,000 structures to ash.

 

A clear majority of former residents in both Altadena and the Pacific Palisades district of Los Angeles want to rebuild their communities much as they were pre-fire.

 

But laws adopted since the previous huge burns demand both density and economic diversity. Newsom could suspend some of those laws if he chooses, just as he exempted properties leveled by the Palisades fire, which also decimated many extremely pricey Malibu homes, from normal coastal zone regulations. He has not done that.

 

Here's one basic reality the recent laws don’t recognize: If density increases in burn footprints, the number of prospective victims in the inevitable future fires there will also leap.

 

Some planners are already saying there should be less development, not more, in these areas because of their histories of repeated fires. The recent laws don’t figure this in.

 

For example, two 2021 state laws known SB 9 and SB 10 allow developers to erect three-story buildings along all major thoroughfares, regardless of locale. Permits for such construction are nearly automatic under the rules. They can sometimes rise as high as eight floors.

 

But the most important street in Pacific Palisades, the storied Sunset Boulevard, previously had virtually no buildings of more than two floors in the Palisades. Higher-rise structures might enable more economic diversity, but would also put many more residents at risk.

 

Yet, there’s little or nothing about risk in the one-size-fits-all laws that whizzed to passage.

 

Meanwhile, city ordinances in Los Angeles and other places go at density differently, focusing on economics. One local law dictates that all units in buildings put up before 1978 would need to be replaced with units “affordable” to low-income renters even if previous tenants had high incomes.

 

Another law, governing post-1978 structures, would require that landlords prove all pre-fire tenants were high income. If they can’t, new units could only be built if they’re affordable for extremely low income, very low income or low income households in direct proportion to city-wide percentages in those economic categories.

 

This might let some household cleaners and gardeners live much closer to work than before, but would also put many more people at risk in a place of frequent fires.

 

The new residents would fall into economic classes below nearby neighbors planning to rebuild in single-family zones. That is, unless developers buy up significant numbers of suddenly vacant lots and build up to six units on each, where there was previously just one home. That’s also permitted almost automatically by recent state laws.

 

On the other hand, few previously-burned communities have had as many residents with access to political, financial and cultural power as Pacific Palisades and Altadena, power that may be used to resist the new laws.

 

All of which means rebuilding these two communities may prove far more complex both financially and morally than after previous fires, where recent laws did not apply.

 

Legislators and local officials could change some of this and let the stricken communities try to recapture their former character. But how likely is that when many lawmakers were elected on platforms demanding ever more housing density and diversity?

 

-30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

QUESTION FOR NEWSOM RECALL BACKERS: WHY BOTHER?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“QUESTION FOR NEWSOM RECALL BACKERS: WHY BOTHER?”

 

Gov. Gavin Newsom has a bit less than two years left on his second term and cannot run for another. That’s a central difference between today’s political reality and the scene that faced organizers of the Newsom recall campaign that failed by a wide margin to oust him in 2021.

 

Here's some further reality: The current recall effort, which must gather more than 1.31 million valid voter signatures within 160 days of starting circulation on Jan. 23, would see a replacement governor guaranteed only a year or less in office. No one can do much in that short time.

 

This does not daunt organizers of the current recall, the eighth attempt to oust Newsom since his election in 2018. The 2021 effort is the only one to reach a vote so far, and Newsom slapped it down by a 3 million vote margin, a complete reversal of what happened when ex-Gov. Gray Davis was dumped in 2003.

 

Davis faced the famed muscleman actor Arnold Schwarzenegger in that vote, with just one significant Democrat on the list of potential replacements. That was then-Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, who had nothing like Schwarzenegger’s star power.

 

By contrast, there were no major celebrities among possible Newsom replacements in 2021, when ultra-conservative pundit and talk show host Larry Elder took 48 percent of replacement votes.

 

None of this daunts the current organizers. They want Newsom out, the sooner the better, and they hope to bludgeon him with his alleged poor leadership before, during and after the January firestorms in Los Angeles County.

 

They’ve also said they want to prevent him from using his current office to set up a 2028 run for president. They’re heartened by needing about 400,000 fewer voter signatures than in 2021 because of a low 2022 general election turnout.

 

Newsom, as he has done with most recall efforts, is so far ignoring this one. Organizers say they will try to hold him responsible for crime, homelessness, cost of living increases and supposedly excessive business regulation.

 

Those complaints are essentially the same used in 2021, and they didn’t succeed then.

 

In any case, the actual stakes are much smaller in this recall. If its petition circulation effort succeeds, signatures will be submitted to county officials around the state in mid-summer. It will then take about two months to verify that enough are genuine to qualify the recall for the ballot.

 

If the timetable matches 2021, when signature verification ended April 29 and the vote came Sept. 14, the new vote would likely take place sometime in late October or early November, the intervening time used for replacement candidates to sign up and campaign a bit. At the end, any potential new governor would have only about one year before the 2026 general election. Would that be enough time to become an established incumbent?

 

If such a recall were successful, it would surely eliminate  Newsom from running for president, which he’s thought to be planning after he’s termed out in early 2027.

 

But if Newsom fends off a recall vote, he could enter the 2028 race on a roll, perhaps even as a national Democratic hero. Meanwhile, the recall would need to raise at least $15 million to have any chance. 

 

Should Newsom lose, he would not be the first Californian whose political career was essentially ended by a crisis. One example was then-Gov. Pat Brown, vacationing in Greece and unable to respond promptly when the Watts riot broke out in 1965. He lost his reelection bid the next year. So did then-Lt. Gov. Glenn Anderson, in charge while Brown was gone and criticized for being slow to call out the National Guard. Both were Democrats.

 

Today's organizers are heartened by the success of two recall ousters in recent years, campaigns that toppled San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022 and axed Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao last fall.

 

All of which means that even if he won’t formally acknowledge this recall bid until and unless it qualifies for a vote, Newsom would be wise to take it seriously and perhaps even exploit it.

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WHAT WOULD IT TAKE FOR A BIG UTILITY TO LOSE ITS MONOPOLY?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

 

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“WHAT WOULD IT TAKE FOR A BIG UTILITY TO LOSE ITS MONOPOLY?”

 

The latest response of California’s top regulatory commission to a disaster caused by an electric company can lead to only one logical question: How badly must the state’s regional monopoly investor-owned utilities behave before they’re broken up or lose their take-us-or-go-off-the-grid status?

 

Make no mistake, these companies have behaved badly for many years, but only recently paid any price at all. So far, what they’ve been dunned is a pittance compared to the damage they periodically cause. The most recent examples of possible utility malfeasance were January’s Eaton fire, which decimated much of Altadena in eastern Los Angeles County, and the less damaging Hurst fire near the Sylmar district of Los Angeles.

 

So far, official blame has not yet been cast upon Southern California Edison Co. for either blaze, with events of Jan. 7 still under concentrated investigation. The fire that made ashes of Altadena appears to have begun under an Edison transmission tower in Eaton Canyon, which stretches into the San Gabriel Mountains north of town.

 

Edison may not have shut off power in the area even as ultra-dry Santa Ana winds in the browned and brushy terrain far exceeded hurricane force.

 

If Edison is found at fault, as it was for the 2017 Thomas fire in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, which also caused massively damaging subsequent mudslides in Montecito, and the even larger 2018 Woolsey fire in Malibu and Simi Valley, this will be its third recent offense. What happened to three-strikes-and-you’re-out?

 

But Edison is not out, and won’t be, if only because the state Public Utilities Commission (PUC) won't have that.

 

If the Thomas and Woolsey fires had taken place after 2019 and the creation of the California Wildfire Fund – mostly funded by electric customers of the monopoly companies – Edison would have been off the hook for damages caused by its equipment. But those fires were earlier, even though their final reckonings are coming only now.

 

Guess who’s supposed to pay for Edison’s failures? Not Edison, at least not much. Total damage from the Thomas fire came to about $2 billion. Under a late January PUC ruling, Edison will pay about $50 million. But its customers will be dunned almost $1.5 billion. That will cost them more than $1 per month per customer for at least 10 years, with the Woolsey fire’s reckoning not yet in. Overall, customers will likely be dunned an average of more than $3 per month for many years. All for fires they did not cause.

 

There’s a clear similarity here to the PUC’s original decision after a 2012 Edison blunder destroyed the San Onofre Nuclear Power Station. The PUC in 2014 decided customers would pay almost the full cost of Edison’s $3.3 billion error, which led to years of expensive decommissioning.

 

After consumer groups protested loudly and after exposure of the PUC president’s secret dealings with Edison executives, commissioners changed their ruling in 2018, forcing Edison to cover most costs of its error. Still, consumers are paying more than $1 billion for Edison’s mistake.

 

The new PUC action on the Thomas fire shows nothing has changed in the decade since that scandal. Not only will utility executives suffer no penalties, but Edison retains its monopoly, deserved or not.

 

It’s been much the same with California’s other two big privately-owned utilities, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric. Neither multiple manslaughter convictions nor several findings of steady negligence have dented PG&E’s monopoly. Nor have at-fault fire rulings hurt SDG&E.

 

The bottom line here is that today’s PUC members – all appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom – exercise as much favoritism toward these companies as previous commissioners named by ex-Govs. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown, who also let the companies off the hook for causing deadly fires.

 

If anyone wonders what it might take to alter or end the monopolies of these big utilities, the answer may be that it will never happen unless and until those companies can no longer make political donations.

 

   -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WLL TRUMP MOVES BOOST CALIFORNIA SECESSION SENTIMENT?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“WLL TRUMP MOVES BOOST CALIFORNIA SECESSION SENTIMENT?”

 

For every action, says one principle of both physics and politics, there is a reaction. So when President Donald Trump threatened to put conditions on disaster aid in the wake of California’s unprecedented January firestorms, there was a reaction.

 

Many Californians, according to a poll taken during those Southern California blazes, the most devastating in American history in dollars’ worth of damages, appear more favorable than before to the idea of divorce, or at least some form of separation, from the rest of the nation.

 

The question could even be on the November ballot next year, as an initiative that would essentially be a straw poll has been authorized to start seeking voter signatures. It would need signatures from 546,651 voters to qualify for an advisory vote. The sponsor is a group called Cal Exit Now, whose leader, Fresno-based Marcus Ruiz Evans, has spent years promoting secession.

 

Secession, of course, is not a new idea. It has been around at least 15 years without drawing much support. Most Californians agreed with Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said in a 2018 interview that “I’m not interested in secession, ever.”

 

He's certainly not in favor of it now, when the only political future he can anticipate after being termed out in late 2026 is a possible run for president.

 

But an unprecedented number of Californians like some form of the idea. The recent survey was conducted while fires were still active between Jan. 6 and Jan. 14 by the YouGov firm for another secession outfit, the Independent California Institute, based in north San Diego County. The poll of 500 persons found 61 percent believe most Californians would be better off if the state peacefully secedes. The survey had a margin of error of about 5.6 percent.

 

But a slightly larger majority, 62 percent, did not believe California can secede peacefully. Never mind that Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a close Trump ally, has called for a split.

 

“We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states,” Greene tweeted. “Everyone I talk to says this.”

 

Her notion suggests that states like Oregon and Washington would readily follow if California leaves the Union peacefully. It also implies Republican-led states might be glad to kiss California good-bye.

 

But a more popular idea, according to the January survey, is for California to try for some kind of autonomous status within the USA. The state has long had special rights when it comes to environmental law, the 1970 Clean Air Act granting authority that led to things like catalytic converters and electric vehicles.

 

 

Fully 66 percent backed the idea of California creating its own permanent government commission charged with helping the state gain more autonomy. And slightly more than half of state residents said they feel more Californian than American. Plus, 73 percent in the poll said it is accurate to call California a “nation-state.”

 

Consistent with this, 62 percent said Californians would be better off if all public lands in the state were under control of California government, reversing today’s scene where 97 percent of public lands are federal.

 

And a large majority (77 percent) of those polled thought California’s largest-in-the-nation House delegation should unite across party lines and refuse to OK new budgets unless the Trump administration gives California added autonomy. One tactic favored by that large majority is letting California control its borders like a country rather than merely checking for forbidden fruit at its network of existing checkpoints.

 

All this may surprise Trump, but it should not. A survey taken about one year earlier showed similar findings, but not quite so strong as this year’s, which came in as Trump threatened to withhold disaster aid.

 

Californians’ sense of identifying more with the state than the nation, however, is brand new, contradicting the 2024 finding on that question.

 

So far, no significant California politician has made autonomy a central cause, nor even hinted at this. But if Trump continues what some call his “war on California,” no one can predict what might follow, except that there will be a reaction of some kind, its exact nature and outcome yet to be determined.

 

   -30-

    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

SHOULD BUILDING PERMITS BE LOOSENED IN FIRE ZONES?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2025 OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“SHOULD BUILDING PERMITS BE LOOSENED IN FIRE ZONES?”

 

It was almost like a contest to see who could promise the quickest rebuilding when President Trump and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass sat down together barely two weeks after the hugely damaging Palisades fire, possibly the most expensive natural disaster in American history.

 

With more than 6,000 Pacific Palisades homes in ashes and most of the area’s business district destroyed, all this odd couple wanted was to make survivors feel they could soon be back in their homes, just as before.

 

They ignored issues that affect not only California, but Texas, Idaho, Arizona and the Pacific Northwest, where homes are often built on the edges of wild lands that can ignite almost as soon as underbrush has time to regrow after the last fire.

 

They also paid no heed to questions of fire insurance, where property owners in areas that will never be threatened by wildfires are about to be dunned hugely to subsidize payments for burned out mansion owners who had every reason to know ahead of time their homes were at risk.

 

Similar rushed rebuilding followed every significant recent wildfire, going back far beyond the 2018 Camp fire in Paradise, which destroyed almost as many homes as the January firestorms in Los Angeles County.

 

Perhaps someone should have acquainted Trump and Bass with local history. For example, the 1978 Mandeville Canyon fire destroyed 30 homes in the some of the same areas as January’s Palisades flames, all plush residences in suburbanized canyons that were quickly rebuilt. Everyone in those gullies and the surrounding areas was on notice they were vulnerable to wildfires.

 

There was also the 1961 Bel Air fire, which decimated 484 homes in the largest previous blaze affecting hundreds of spectacular mansions. Its footprint lies less than five miles from the ashes of the Palisades business district and is even closer to the eastern edge of the fire area visited by Trump.

 

The aftermaths of both those fires saw a similar rush to rebuild, just like local and national leaders are now encouraging. As today, no politicians wanted to discuss the possibility of leaving the land vacant because it will inevitably burn again.

 

Just as in January, the storied Sunset Boulevard was the main 1961 escape route and became congested far beyond the routinely stifling traffic jams that afflicted it daily both this year and 60 years ago. No one bothered to add traffic lanes or new routes as population increased.

 

With all this warning, Trump nevertheless ordered all federal regulations on building in affected areas suspended. Bass did much the same with local regulations, giving architectural firms huge authority to approve plans they themselves draw for rebuilding homeowners.

 

Trump even wanted the rebuild to begin before local agencies and the Army Corps of Engineers could clear toxic material from burned-out homesites. He wanted owners allowed to return immediately, not worrying about possible danger to them.

 

With the burned areas largely decimated and depopulated, maybe it should be time for some rethinking, rather than the same knee-jerk response that’s led to repeat disasters.

 

Instead of loosening permits, perhaps they should be tightened. Here are a few questions authorities ought to consider: Should laws require all new building materials to be fire resistant? 

 

Should new ordinances require heavier fines for failure to clear brush a respectable distance from each home? Should water systems in fire-prone areas be updated to assure water pressure stays up and hydrants keep operating in crises, which they did not at higher elevations in both the Bel Air fire and the two big January ones?

 

Should insurance settlements now being negotiated include added money for such improvements to homes, while new city and county budgets provide for more reliable water pressure?

 

It all depends on the priorities of politicians. If safety and survival tops that list, along with ultimate financial savings to both homeowners and their insurance companies, the answers will be yes to all these questions. Any other response would be an admission of politically expedient priorities to ease things in the short run, but surely expose residents and businesses to far greater long-term danger.

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net