California Official: Wild Fires Rebuild Going “Worse Than People Expected”

Guy sits down with Will O’Neill, Chairman of the Orange County Republican Party. Will has been active in Southern California politics for many years and was the mayor of Newport Beach, California. Orange County is just to the south of Los Angeles County. They had a front row seat to a lot of that destruction earlier this year with the Los Angeles Wildfires. He chats with Guy on how the rebuild is going.

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Full Transcript:

BENSON: Time for the happy hour on the Guy Benson show Thursday edition. Glad you’re listening guy Benson showed dot com is our website podcast always free always on demand when the program is over in just about an hour. This radio hour sponsored by the finish long drink we’re fans of that delicious beverage, it’s alcohol so 21 plus only please always drink responsibly the long drink dot com for more information there. This will be a conversation of particular interest to our listeners on KABC in greater Los Angeles, but I think it will also be very relevant and interesting to listeners across the country because Gavin Newsom wants to be president of the United States. It’s very obvious. That is his ambition. He’s a very ambitious person, always has been, and he is planning to run, win his party’s nomination, and then become president. In 2028. That’s the game plan. I don’t have official confirmation of that, but everything about this man exudes that ambition. And he wants to effectively impose his state’s model on the rest of us. He wants to California-ize. He want to preside over the Californication of the United States of America, and I suspect a lot of voters might object to that. One thing that we’ve talked about is the excessive government and regulation and taxation out in California. And then, especially when those horrible wildfires hit, a lot of important questions were raised. What did all of that tax money actually buy for the people of Southern California? They paid for the most expensive government practically on the face of the Earth. And then when a real crisis hit… The government failed badly. Mismanagement of water resources. I mean, you go down the whole list. The mayor was on the other side of the world, despite warnings at the time. And Gavin Newsom asked about some of these problems. At one point, just sort of shrugged and said, well, it’s someone else’s fault. Now, you’ll have to talk to the locals about that one. California is presented as this pinnacle of progress by its defenders and its leaders. So, I would love a progress report. You might say nothing could have been done about the fires back in January. I’m not sure that’s true. I think many better preparations could have be undertaken. They could have managed things much better. They could’ve had far better and more effective leadership in the moment. You can go down that checklist and I think very reasonably argue that this was a pretty big failure. But just for the sake of the argument, let’s just say it was completely an act of nature. Setting aside the arson and all of that, and their criminal problems that they have in Southern California, another component to all of this, let’s just say it was beyond everyone’s control. What are we seeing in the aftermath? What are the updates when it comes to the recovery? Here we are months later, almost a hundred days later, actually. The politicians ran to the microphones and said, we’re going to rebuild, it’s to be better than ever, and we’re gonna make sure we’re California strong and all that stuff. Well, how’s it going? Could some of the red tape and leadership failures and overregulation and all those burdens, could that be potentially getting in the way of a timely and reasonable rebuild? Let’s ask our guests, Will O’Neill is the chairman of the Orange County Republican Party. He’s been active in Southern California politics for many years. He was the mayor of Newport Beach, California. Orange County is just to the south of Los Angeles County. So they had a front row seat to a lot of that destruction earlier this year. Will, welcome to the show. Glad to have you here.

O’NEILL: Thank you so much for having me.

BENSON: All right, so let me ask you the question that I just broadly posed to the audience, but make it more specific for you. Here we are about 100 days later. What is the update? Where do things stand when it comes to rebuilding after these fires?

O’NEILL: It’s going so poorly that it’s actually worse than people expected. And to put it in context, I think people sometimes forget this Los Angeles County, 10 million people, literally one in every 34 Americans live in LA County. So what happened there is really important for the rest of the nation. And so in Palisades, when you saw that fire completely devastated and I’ll just say real quickly, guy, I will not take that presumption that nothing could have happened only because we know that there was over a hundred million-gallon reservoir that should have been full. And it was empty because of incompetence in Los Angeles. And that caused, yeah, fire hydrants to run dry, which I will just say real quickly to your point, I was mayor of Newport Beach twice. Our firefighters went up and hooked up to dry hydrants. So there are a lot of us in Orange County as furious as anybody else. But when Palisades burned down, over 5,400 homes burned with it. In Altadena, in Los Angles County, over right around 7,000 homes. Burned. And so your question is, how’s it going? Well, in Los Angeles, the city of Los Angeles they have issued four, and I don’t mean like 40 or 400, I mean literally four permits to rebuild and in LA County they have issues zero.

BENSON: So, Los Angeles City, four permits. Los Angeles County, zero.

O’NEILL: Zero. And we’re talking about 100 days later. It’s not like they have not received permits. NBC reported last week that around 1,500 properties in the LA County area. So just a real quick note, Palisades, City of LA, Altadena, County of LA. So in Altadena, 1, 500 properties are ready for rebuilding, but zero permits have been issued and already 173 applications were submitted, but actually they just found last week only twenty three had even been initiated by the county a hundred days later and so it is just it’s it’s mind-blowing how badly they are handling this and so the most populous county in the in the nation

BENSON: Right, and a very expensive place to live, where the government takes a ton of your money. And the argument is it’s what you need for progress and good services. And we saw how the good services were handled during the fire itself. Now in the aftermath, we’re seeing more of this evidence. When you did the quick math, I was jotting it down. In terms of homes, forget businesses, just homes. Did I hear you correctly that between Palisades and Altadena, that was about 12,000 plus homes.

O’NEIL: Yeah, that’s the estimate is it’s over 12,000.

BENSON: Okay, so 12,000 plus homes destroyed, four, 100 days later almost, four permits have been issued to start rebuilding. Why? And why are they just very slow to even begin the process of approving the permits? What is going on?

O’NEIL: Yeah, you mentioned right at the top the discussion about the regulation and problems cutting through red tape. And the problem is all of these folks in leadership right now in L. A county and L.A. City have been building this red tape up for so long that they don’t know how to cut it. And this is true also, I would point out for the state. So when Gavin Newsom is talking about trying to cut red tape and he’s issuing executive orders, even the one he tried to expedite the one talking about environmental regulation, um, he actually still forced multiple agencies to be working with one another and create comprehensive plans. And I will just say real quickly, anyone who has ever dealt with government bureaucracies, especially ones as far away as Sacramento to LA, knows that when you direct agencies to create comprehensive plan. That is codeword for it’s going to take a long time and but yeah it is a habit And it is taking forever. So California has its own environmental protection agency, its own natural resources agency, and they have to be involved in debris removal. You also have the California Emergency Operations Center, which Newsom has directed to work with LA County, the cities of LA, Malibu, Pasadena, and Sierra Madre to even start to create this comprehensive removal and rebuilding. But even more than that, it just came out two weeks ago that they realized, Oh, in order for us to even do the utilities like electric and gas and water and sewer and basically anything that a first world country would have, they are being delayed because California has the Environmental Quality Act and also the California Coastal Act. And so Gavin Newsom issued another executive order saying, oh, okay, they don’t have to comply with those either. And so it’s just one of those things where you see over and over again in good times, just how long it takes to get through regulation in California. But in bad times when we expect them to actually step up and do the right thing They’re either they can’t even get out of their own way now

BENSON: I remember at the time because Newsom was really patting himself on the back like look at me. I am cutting through this red tape We’re like, why does that exist? Why is there the red tape if you’re so proud of yourself for getting rid of the red Tape, why did it need to be there in the first place? If you’re gonna get rid of it during an emergency Maybe it wasn’t actually Serving a good purpose. That’s something that apparently never crosses their minds But even when he did this through executive order, it still didn’t actually have the intended effect because of all this other residual red tape, just your state is awash in these regulations and the result is almost 100 days after the fires, four building permits for homes in these communities. It’s just, it’s incredible. I want to ask you about this as well, because in Los Angeles, the mayor had a recovery czar, right, so had someone in, installed this man to oversee and facilitate the recovery in these devastated communities. That man has just resigned. What’s going on there?

O’NEIL: Yeah, so this one is a good reminder of what L.A. Had available to them when they were making their last vote for mayor, right, because it was between Karen Bass and Rick Caruso. And Rick Caruso’s properties didn’t burn, and, you know, and so Rick Caruso has been incredibly critical of Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, over and over and over again.

BENSON: The one who was in Ghana?

O’NEILL: Exactly. I mean, what are you doing? I was mayor twice of a city in fire-prone areas. I knew exactly when we were having these winds coming through in Southern California, and there is no scenario where I would have been gone, let alone halfway across the world. But that’s what she chose to do, and that is indicative of her leadership, and it’s why people in Los Angeles are furious with her.

BENSON: Well, she’s launched an investigation into herself. So we’ll wait with bated breath for the results of that one. But go on, because now you have this recovery czar. She won, right? Elections have consequences. She won. And now what?

O’NEILL: Yeah, so now she hired a gentleman named Steve sober off and he’s been around in real estate a long long time in LA And hired him as the recovery star But his tenure like you noted was very short and very volatile and he resigned last week And the reason for it was I mean it’s you couldn’t have written it Because right after she announced him then she immediately went out and hired an Illinois firm as if there’s no such thing As a California firm but an Illinois firm to handle rebuilding management for up to 10 million dollars and then said, oh, now Steve Soboroff is going to be overall ambassador to Palisades, whatever that meant, but also announced that he’s gonna be getting $500,000 for three months of work, until he didn’t, because a lot of people were furious with him getting paid that much. And so then she announced, well, nevermind, he’s going to doing this work for free. I’m not sure she talked to Soborof, though, because he then went to a very fancy private school event, invented in front of the crowd, apparently, and said that he was lied to, that he was supposed to get a contract, that he didn’t get a contract, and that news broke. But the mayor found out, and Soboroff had to apologize. So if you fast forward five weeks, Soborof has now quit. And he told the LA Times that Bass, Mayor Karen Bass, shut him out of high-level planning from the start. He said, quote, they haven’t asked me to do anything in a month and a half, nothing, zero. That is the recovery star of Los Angeles.

BENSON: And I guess he was not doing the job because they wouldn’t let him, and instead they hired at great expense a firm from another real fabulously run place, Illinois. It’s just like, again, you cannot make this up. Meanwhile, turning away from the recovery from the fires, I want to ask you about this as well. There’s this new move in California. This is a Gavin Newsom project to give full healthcare coverage funded by taxpayers to every single illegal immigrant in California And surprise, surprise, the price tag for that has come in way above expectations. And Newsom has said, actually, we need tons of more money. And so he’s asked the legislature to fund a bailout, and the number goes up and up and up. It looks unsustainable to me, but this is something he is now embracing and that they’re pursuing in Sacramento, and I think they just passed it. Tell us about this misadventure.

O’NEILL: So a year ago, Gavin Newsom signed legislation that, to your point, allowed for Medi-Cal, which is the California version of Medicare, to fund healthcare for everyone in the state, regardless of immigration status. And so, at the time, there were a lot of questions about, wait, how much is that going to cost? Because none of that, if the person is in the country illegally, can be refunded by the federal government or funded at all. So it’s all coming out of state taxpayer dollars. And the answer was, we think we know what it is, but we’ll have to see. Well, to your point, all of a sudden, out of the blue a month ago, Gavin Newsom’s administration came out and said, hey, we’re gonna take out a loan for over $3 billion that’s only gonna get us through the end of April, and we need another two and a half billion. So in total, $6.2 billion more than they anticipated spending. We need to take that out as a loan just to get us through June 30th of this year. And so, because of that, a state that is already in a deficit is now taking on loans to cover health care costs for people in the country illegally. You cannot make this up, but it’s California, so I suppose the reality is always stranger than fiction.

BENSON: Well, and that brings me to the next point, which is the political future of Governor Newsom, because you can agree or disagree with what I said at the top, where I postulated that based on at least my perception, my eyes and my ears, watching this man operate for the last couple of years, he absolutely has designs to become president of the United States as soon as possible. And we’ve seen him make this attempted pivot on this podcast that he’s doing and elsewhere. And actually, no, he’s not this crazy raging leftist that he has governed as for years. He’s someone who wants to talk to everyone and be a moderate and find solutions and talk about what’s effective and what really works and not being overly partisan or ideological. That does not bear any resemblance to the way that he is run the state and the outcomes in the state. But that’s, I guess, the political facelift that he’s trying to perform on himself looking ahead to 2028. But then there are just these little obstacles to that. For example, what you just described, multi-billion dollar loans to pay for his policy of free taxpayer-funded free taxpayer funded health care for every illegal immigrant in the state. I just don’t know how you reconcile the Gavin Newsom makeover he’s trying versus the Gavin Newsom, not just record in the past, but record ongoing. What’s your view on what Newsom is trying to pull here?

O’NEILL: Yeah, clearly he’s trying to run for president and it is the strangest thing for us in California watching him want to run president while anticipating that Kamala Harris is actually gonna be running for governor. They’re just flip-flopping and it’s not a good situation for any of us.

BENSON: Good luck!

O’NEILL: You know, he’s his biggest problem with trying to do, as you pointed out, a political facelift is 25 years of being in the public spotlight and taking position after position. Even CNN went after him for trying to claim on his podcast that he’s never used the term Latinx. And then they ran a montage of him doing exactly that. But you’re looking at an absolutely failed governor when you talk about how long it’s taken to even talk about putting high-speed rail into California when you realize that the most important thing for us to get the message out to people is to have them travel outside of California so they can see what gas prices are like in the rest of the country compared to California when you realized that he is trying to force electrification of all cars by 2030 in California without anywhere near the infrastructure set up to be able to do that Yeah, but, well, hang on, to be fair…

BENSON: Well hang on to be fair to be fair the record is only two and a half decades it’s only 25 years that might be too small of a body of evidence to rely on because he said a few things that sound different on a podcast so hold your horses there Will that’s very judgmental of you. Will O’Neill is the chairman of the Orange County Republican party he was twice the mayor of Newport Beach just south of Los Angeles Will thank you for these updates I think it is illustrative and important for not people in California. And KABC land to know because they’re living this, but for the rest of the country to know about it as well. So thanks for joining us with all this information. Thank you, Guy. More of the Guy Benson Show happy hour coming right up after this break. Don’t go anywhere.