Election Day will mark twenty-two months since the Palisades and Eaton Fires forever reshaped the lives of thousands of Angelenos, turning historic communities into war zones, destroying more than 16,000 homes and businesses, wiping out generations of priceless family heirlooms, and taking the lives of thirty-one individuals. Despite copious political promises to expedite rebuilding and relieve the suffering of survivors, our communities remain trapped in bureaucratic limbo. Locally, permits are being issued — albeit slowly — but even with permits and full insurance payouts, most survivors still lack the funds to rebuild.
As voters begin receiving their ballots and head to the polls for the first major election since the Fires, let us not forget that we have been failed at every level of government beyond the city: County, State, and Federal. A County proposal to offer rebuilding assistance in the form of “soft second mortgages” never materialized. State assistance beyond a handful of half-measures and executive orders yielded only the impossibly restrictive CalAssist Mortgage Program, which somehow managed to provide relief for virtually no one in Malibu or Pacific Palisades, while the lion’s share of the allocated money remained unspent. Similarly restrictive eligibility requirements for FEMA and SBA assistance have kept those Federal programs out of reach for all but a handful of survivors while tens of millions in FEMA reimbursement and compensation for survivors and communities have remained inexplicably stalled.
Recent revelations and a host of too-little-too-late legislative bills have only added insult to injury. An L.A. County after-action report from the McChrystal Group revealed that response to the fires was mostly improvised, with virtually no implementation of post-Woolsey Fire recommendations, while outgoing Governor Newsom managed to sign four mostly symbolic “wildfire recovery” bills only to subsequently veto two other bills which would have provided meaningful insurance reform. Meanwhile, our most pressing demands continue to be ignored.
The Palisades and Eaton Fires constitute the worst disaster in California history, the second costliest disaster in American history after Hurricane Katrina, and the ninth costliest disaster in world history. We urge voters and fire survivors in Malibu, Pacific Palisades, and Altadena to make their voices known between now and November 3, to ensure that elected officials prioritize relief for our families and communities. During Governor Newsom’s eight-year tenure, the California State budget has swollen 40% to $354 billion, almost none of it finding its way to survivors or their communities. That must end now.
Here, then, is a working list of priorities when our newly elected representatives are sworn in after November’s elections:
We demand a sales tax holiday for all purchases related to our rebuilds. It is obscene for state and local governments to enjoy tax windfalls at the expense of traumatized survivors who have lost everything and still can’t afford to rebuild. All purchases required to enable us to return home, from building materials to plumbing fixtures and furniture, should be tax-free.
We demand a property tax holiday until survivors receive their certificates of occupancy. It is unconscionable that displaced families must pay taxes on bare lots and risk incremental tax hikes on incomplete structures while still carrying mortgages and paying rent.
We demand that insurers who have yet to pay out claims filed in January 2025 be compelled to do so. End the stonewalling.
We demand assistance to cover the the underinsurance gap with which nearly every survivor must now contend through no fault of their own. Whether in the form of low-interest equity-backed loans. soft second mortgages or low-interest construction loans, survivors have a right to expect some form of need-based relief without being second-guessed and subjected to humiliatingly restrictive eligibility requirements.
We demand restoration of the Prop 58 exemptions preserving Prop 13 tax basis for inter-generational transfers of family homes, farms and ranches. These protections were deceptively erased by the fine print of Prop 19 in November 2020. Many of our impacted survivors are in their 80s and 90s. They are some of our oldest residents, many of whom fought for cityhood in 1991, who raised their families in Malibu and helped build our community and our schools. Without restoration of the Prop 58 exemptions, we are at risk of losing the very legacy families to whom we owe our city’s independence — families we most need to help us recover what was lost.
We demand statewide insurance reform — to restore a robust, responsible and affordable California insurance market — so no Californian ever again needs to fear being forced to choose between being underinsured or not insured at all.
7. We demand responsible, fully-funded and regularly scheduled resource management which obligates parks agencies and conservancies to share the burden of keeping our homes and communities safe — committed funding for regular maintenance (e.g. mosaics, prescribed burns, fire breaks, protective native planting) with fire departments granted a permanent, unrestricted easement to all state and federal parkland to execute that management.
We demand that the State of California and the City of Los Angeles immediately move to settlement of our lawsuits. Follow the example of Hawaii, where the incoming governor brought the parties together and settled the Lahaina lawsuits in an unprecedented 18 months.
We demand that all levels of government adopt a prescribed set of emergency measures to be followed in the wake of any comparable future disasters. Survivors should not have to wait ten, twelve, eighteen, or twenty months for city, county, and state bureaucracies to reinvent the wheel every time tragedy hits. A singular approach to financial assistance, remediation, permitting, and restoration of our communities should be set in stone and triggered on day one, including sales and property tax exemptions, emergency suspension of CEQA and Coastal Commission review, and rescission of Title 24 regulations and any other state codes or regulations which can be suspended to expedite rebuilding without compromising public safety. Post-disaster priorities should focus on bringing families home, not business-as-usual enforcement of regulations which were never written with disasters in mind. Time isn’t just money; time is harm — and the faster communities are able to recover, the less harm they and our children suffer.
We demand immediate attention to inadequate, deteriorated, or aging infrastructure — reservoirs must be filled, hydrants and water service must be modernized and robust, and electrical and telecom transmission lines must be buried everywhere in high or very high fire hazard severity zones.
We demand the creation of a single online portal for all disaster survivors to immediately guide them into andthrough the process of rebuilding their homes and lives. Too many survivors simply sell their lots and leave our communities because they feel overwhelmed and abandoned. For twenty-one months, we have been able to moveforward in spite of governmental failures because survivors came together, lifted each other up, and shared information most of us never would have found without help. That is inexcusable. The roadmap needs to be front and center, immediately accessible at all times. No survivor of a disaster should be retraumatized by the process of recovery.
We are blessed to live in one of the most beautiful places on earth, yet cursed by a lack of responsive leadership and institutions. We must do better and hold elected officials to account. Those who wish to court our votes for November need to make our relief — and future protection — their top priority.