This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire.
By Philip Wegmann , Susan Crabtree
The rubble that defined the Los Angeles landscape in the wake of historic wildfires has been hauled away, leaving behind acre after acre of empty dirt lots where homes once were and will be again. The all-consuming question: When?
The White House blames the lagging rebuild on California Gov. Gavin Newsom and accuses him of allowing bureaucracy to strangle the recovery while he is away in South Carolina stoking speculation about his own presidential ambitions.
“It is embarrassing,” said an administration official involved in the cleanup from the beginning, an effort widely considered the largest and fastest cleanup of its kind in U.S. history. But while the debris has been dealt with relatively quickly, the rebuilding permits have not. Another senior White House official complained that under Newsom, California is “dragging its feet.”
The numbers are undeniably staggering.
More than 2.5 million tons of debris, roughly double the amount removed from Gound Zero after 9/11, has been hauled away and over 13,000 properties cleared. According to early estimates, that job was likely to take between 12 and 18 months. Working with state and local authorities, Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers pulled it off in five.
The lots cleared by crews now sit vacant as residents prepare mountains of paperwork for a permitting process that moves forward at glacial speed. According to Los Angeles County data, 1,027 applications for zoning reviews have been filed. Just 442 building plans are under review. Only 90 building permits have been issued.
“The permitting process is moving at a snail’s pace,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told RealClearPolitics, “and while communities struggle to rebuild, Newsom fled the state to kick off his presidential campaign after pathetically trying to claim credit for President Trump’s success.” The governor’s recent trip to South Carolina, Jackson added, was more evidence that “Newsom is a failed leader who cares more about his own political ambitions than delivering for Californians.”
A spokesman for Newsom, Daniel Villaseñor, dismissed the criticism as “the usual spin from the White House.” As the recovery process moves into the building phase, he added, it comes under the control of the city and county, not the governor.
While Newsom and Trump regularly lash out at one another, the governor has not been stingy in his praise of both the president and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin for fast-tracking resources. But Villaseñor noted that much of the governor’s work, his executive orders clearing regulatory hurdles for cleanup efforts, came before Trump took the oath of office.
“The governor’s work – initiated on Jan. 12 (predating the Trump Administration) – cleared any state barriers to cleanup and paved the way for the historic work done in the proceeding months. And this followed the Major Disaster Declaration President Biden issued on Jan. 8 that approved the bulk of this recovery work – before President Trump was even in office,” he told RCP.
Newsom insisted at a Tuesday press conference that he wasn’t “passing the buck” and stressed that he was “governor of California, not mayor of California.” The work of issuing construction permits falls to the city and county where “the state’s vision is realized” but ultimately “localism is determinative.” His job, Newsom explained, was “clearing any thickets” like his executive order to suspend the California Environmental Quality Act.
Newsom also appeared to take joint credit for the debris removal – credit the White House says belongs to Trump, FEMA, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
“This has been the fastest recovery in terms of debris removal in modern history leading into the next phase at a historic pace,” Newsom said at a press conference earlier this week.
While the county lags, the permit process inside city limits has moved far more quickly. Mayor Karen Bass’ office told RCP that more than one-third of the building permits have been approved out of the 674 applications for 451 addresses. It’s a relatively small number of applicants given the thousands of residences destroyed inside the city limits, a factor Bass’ office attributes to many personal factors, such as homeowners working with architects to redraw plans for their homes or make changes to the previous structures, or to delay those decisions. According to the mayor, 234 plans have been approved and 172 permits issued. The first was granted just 57 days after the start of the wildfires.
“Rebuilding is a deeply personal choice,” a Bass spokeswoman told RCP. “Mayor Bass has worked to cut red tape and expedite the permitting process so that, when homeowners are ready, the city is ready to support them in rebuilding as quickly and safely as possible.”
All the same, the administration is not impressed and insists that more must be done. The federal intervention, a White House official fired back, only became necessary “in the first place” because of the governor’s “reckless land management policies and shortsighted environmental mandates that directly contributed to the scale and severity of the wildfires.” Republicans and Democrats have been arguing over the severity of the fires since they started. The right blames Newsom and Bass. The left often cites climate change as a main culprit.
The administration official involved in the cleanup from the start scoffed at Golden State efforts. “They had literally zero input into the debris removal process,” the official said before pausing to correct themselves. “They helped by telling us what landfills we could send debris to.”
Hanging over the disagreement is the ongoing battle for federal funds. Newsom argued in South Carolina that just as North Carolina “should get every penny that they need” to recover from the floods there during Biden’s tenure, his state deserves the same. He puts that figure near $40 billion. Trump has said he is ready to offer additional support but is pressing for environmental reforms, and possibly other conditions.
This puts Newsom in an odd position. He has gone hat-in-hand to Republicans in Congress while criticizing their colleagues. The governor slammed Trump, Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during a tour of a migrant detention center in that state last week as “right-wing three stooges.”
On Monday, Newsom called the administration and its congressional allies “weak” and “pathetic” for pursuing immigration arrests and deportations over providing California the $40 billion requested for wildfire rebuilding costs.
The White House sees the response to the California wildfires as an early crowning achievement, an example of Trump pushing the limits of what career civil servants see as possible. Trump balked at the initial time frame during a January briefing with staff in the Oval Office. According to a source with direct knowledge, the president told staff that a year of debris removal was “unacceptable.” Career staff at EPA and FEMA groused in private to administration officials that a six-month pace was so ambitious “it’s bananas.”
Trump later made his expectations official during a contentious meeting with Mayor Bass. Newsom met the president on the tarmac on Jan. 24, but the mayor was on her own later that day to navigate a townhall with the newly inaugurated executive.
When Bass insisted that local officials would waive notoriously lengthy regulations “so that people can begin the process right away,” the crowd erupted. Numerous homeowners reported directly to the president, and on national television, that local authorities told them to prepare for an 18-month timeline. Trump balked.
“That will not be the case,” Bass pledged adding that after hazardous waste had been handled, anyone who wanted to rebuild their house “essentially the same, maybe a little bit longer, a little bit higher, they really shouldn’t have to go through much of a process.”
“You have emergency powers, just like I do, and I’m exercising my emergency powers,” Trump replied. “You have to exercise them also.” Bass insisted she already was.
In the meantime, to meet the accelerated Trump deadline, the administration embraced two “innovations.” First, they surged EPA resources to the region to remove hazardous material but also sent FEMA and the Army Corps in on their heels so that debris cleanup could follow immediately. Second, the administration did not wait for entire neighborhoods to grant right-of-entry; they went parcel by parcel. When they saw a neighboring property cleared, an administration official recalled, “it spurred all the other homeowners to come to the FEMA town halls and sign off.”
The work served as its own advertising. Outside every property cleared: a yard sign courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers detailing the work done and left to do. After six months, the White House says it is up to California to take the lead. “You want to do the initial response and cleanup,” an administration official said, “but then turn it back over for the community to control its own destiny.”
For now, destiny has been defined by delay. Los Angeles has waived permitting fees and streamlined the permitting process for construction projects to rebuild homes “like-for-like” as they were before the fires. That paperwork reportedly takes as little as 30 days. Los Angeles County, however, has not moved as quickly and only recently approved a motion to defer permit fees. The average for approval in LA County: 51 days.
“I want to see our planning department move with a sense of urgency, not be bureaucratic, something that I continue to struggle with,” LA County Supervisor Kathryn Barger told the local outlet LAist.
One immediate problem for rebuilding a home just as it was: Most homeowners don’t have the original blueprints, and neither does the city or the county, Richard Green, director of USC’s Lusk Center for Real Estate, told RCP. As a result, he said, most homeowners have had to hire architects to recreate them from scratch.
Other problems are beyond the control of those who have lost everything, namely a sclerotic system. “This is endemic to California,” Green said before explaining that other than Hawaii, the Golden State already had “the slowest permitting process in the country” before the disaster. For comparison, he pointed to Dallas where the median time-to-permit for a single-family home is just eight days.
Green described a process by which homeowners are forced to move their paperwork from “one desk to another desk to another” in pursuit of a signoff. He doesn’t blame an individual politician because “to be fair, all these people inherited a system that hasn’t made sense for a very long time.”
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ national political correspondent.
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