How California’s Incompetence After Wildfires Woke a Sleeping Giant

In a podcast episode for the upcoming one-year anniversary of the California wildfires, Palisades resident Elaine Culotti lays out the state’s inept response and how the outrage over it is bipartisan.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Contributor Elaine Culotti. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of her videos.

Hi, my name’s Elaine Culotti, also known as the “Lipstick Farmer.”

I am presenting my first podcast for The Daily Signal. The subject of the podcast today is the Pacific Palisades’ celebration of the one year anniversary of the fires. Now, I’m not calling them a celebration, but some people are. We are about to be descended upon here in the Pacific Palisades and in California on Jan. 7 by media from all across America.

I’ve had multiple phone calls from different media outlets asking if I had a place where they could post up and where they could spread the news about what’s happened and what has not happened in the Pacific Palisades. I’m here to tell you, not enough has happened. I’d like to just kind of give everyone a rundown so you know what to expect, and then I’d like to give you my take on what I think this means for California going forward.

So as it sits, the Pacific Palisades has lost about 7,000 structures, of which about 180-ish permits have been issued. There’ll probably be a mad push out to get some more so that those numbers look better, but at the end of the day, it’s not going to work. We also have Altadena, which has a little bit more permits, but it’s also a bigger area.

And in addition to that, the houses are smaller and they are easier to permit than the more complex houses on the hillsides by the ocean. Malibu, unfortunately, is so far behind, and this is a product of being on the water and not having any sewage that has been there, historically. Instead it’s been septic and septic tanks, they rot, and then once they’re gone, it’s difficult to put them back because the rules and the laws have changed, and you have to have sewage and there is none in Malibu.

So, with that, it looks like PCH is not going to be rebuilt anytime in the future. What does this mean? Well, sadly, to me, it means that it’s going to take a minute for my town and our community to come back as a community, and this should not be the case. And I know that, and I think that other people are starting to realize it too.

The only thing I can say about all of this is that there is somewhere in there a blessing. Number one, we are finally, for the first time, I think in California, truly aware of the mismanagement of the resources in the state. No one is going to argue with you that this has been handled well, and anyone that digs into it on any level can see that there is mass dilapidation, mass broken infrastructure from decades prior to the fires.

Anybody that looks into it with even a little bit of a lens can see that we did no fire mitigation, no brush clearance. We didn’t clean our forests. We did not repair our reservoirs, and we did not take care of our fire department. So a plethora of reasons caused the fires, but the primary, the real primary—as much as people want to blame it on a fire on a hillside—was that Sacramento has strip mined the state of California and left nothing for us to take care of our towns. And that is not lost on me. I am traveling the state, and I’m talking to a lot of town and city leaders, and what I’m finding is that this is not synonymous only with the fire zones. What I’m finding, actually, is everywhere from Northern California as far as Humboldt County, all the way down to Chula Vista and the border, mayors and towns are struggling to have Sacramento participate in any way that is meaningful in their needs, lifestyle and promises that they have made when they’ve stepped into office. When, and if you do come to the Pacific Palisades on Jan. 7, or if you are watching the news or you are seeing what’s happening, remember this podcast and remember that these are real people that lost everything and have absolutely no one to turn to for help.

Nothing has happened. Our mayor, while I know a lot of people want to blame her, has four million people that she needs to take care of in Los Angeles. And our governor is absolutely nowhere to be seen. I have not seen him in the Pacific Palisades since a few days after the fires. He may have come back by dark of night, but he certainly hasn’t come back to help or talk to anybody.

We have been absolutely left to fend for ourselves, and what I would like to say on that is, well, if that is the case, then we should do that. We should fend for ourselves. And what does that mean? Should we take back our Pacific Palisades from Los Angeles and from the state? Should we go around to all of the cities and see if we can’t talk to each member of these cities and create a coalition to get rid of Sacramento’s quagmire and money stealing game that they do every single day?

What should we do about it? Do we want to be in a society where the government that we hire and employ with our taxpayer dollars is working against us? Is that what we planned on when we elected these officials? And now, as you can see, the other issue is that there are a lot of people that are looking for the money.

And I hope by Jan. 7 that they’re going to figure out what happened to the $100 million that was raised at a musical event by people that lost everything—four people that lost everything. That money has also not been recovered. They haven’t recovered the $24 billion in homeless money, and we don’t have an accounting for it.

They haven’t recovered what happened to the Operation Homekey money. I know they arrested a couple of people in Brentwood, but none of us have heard. Where’s the money? Where did the money go? And I’m sure now, after looking into the COVID funds that have been missing in other states, they are going to turn to California and find that we have the same problem.

The best I can say about the fires in the Palisades is that we now have this golden opportunity. We are on the precipice. We have a moment in time where we can quote, unquote, flip our state. And I don’t mean make it a red state. I mean get rid of what is ruining our state. Get rid of it. Stop voting for people that are self-serving and trying to get reelected.

I think we have to all come together, and this is going to include people on the left and people on the right. One of the things I’ve discovered about being a Palisadian is that we’re not a divided group. I’ve talked to so many people in the Pacific Palisades, some deep blue Democrats. I’m not saying that they’re not.

There are lots of deep blue Democrats. I used to be one, but that’s not what it’s about. What I mean, we’re not divided, we all want the same things. We want fiscal responsibility in Sacramento. I can tell you that. There’s no question about it, and we want safety in our streets. We don’t want to be fighting, and crime, and homelessness, and stores that are closing, and people that are driving through our town stealing that don’t belong there, and not being able to do anything about it.

We don’t want that. And the other thing we want more than anything is economic development. We want true economic development, but economic development in our towns with the people that live in our towns. We don’t want economic development from the outside, groups that are coming in and taking advantage, and that’s what we’re getting. Because Sacramento is so oppressive with its rules and its new legislation and its crazy bills that it passes.

It doesn’t consider anybody in a place like the Palisades. It doesn’t consider anybody in Malibu, or Altadena, but it also doesn’t consider even downtown. At the end of the day, they pass these bills because they owe favors to people, I guess, and they’re looking to get those favors repaid for.

How do you go about that? Well, you create an oppressive bill and you take the power away from the people in the town that live there, and that’s what they’re doing. They’re doing it with SB 79. They did it with Proposition 50, they did it with the transit districts. I could go on and on. Heck, they even did it with Prop 36, which was passed overwhelmingly, the crime bill.

They haven’t funded it. I look forward to talking to you on this podcast as we move forward, and I look forward to seeing you on Jan. 7, if you make it to the Pacific Palisades. If you don’t, and you watch a lot of podcasts about the Pacific Palisades, just remember one really good thing: everything burned down and you can see everything that they didn’t do.

The emperor truly has no clothes.

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