Carl Cannon said the failure to rebuild after January’s Los Angeles wildfires is a “symbol of broken governance,” Thursday on the RCP podcast. “L.A. Mayor Karen Bass never followed through on it, but she initially said they’d waive construction and permitting fees,” he explained. “These fees range between $ 4,000 and $ 10,000, and the city council is saying this is going to ‘cost’ $ 86 million. No, it’s actually not costing them anything. If the Palisades hadn’t burned to the ground, they wouldn’t be collecting any fees.” “That’s sort of the mindset of a modern Democrat: the money that we might get by that is ours, even in the case of a fire,” Cannon said. “So there was a council meeting, and 100 people came. They allowed conversation for one hour and just cut it off. People who, because they’re not able to live in Los Angeles anymore, drove two and a half hours, waited for hours, and couldn’t speak.” “And this, to me, is just a symbol of the broken governance of some of these cities – in this case, Los Angeles.” “After Pearl Harbor was bombed, in the spring of 1942, President Roosevelt thought there should be a highway connecting the mainland to Alaska. It’s still there. It’s called the Alcan Highway. The Army Corps built 1,500 miles of road through this wilderness, the most forbidding landscape in North America, through rivers that had no bridges, dense forest, in eight months,” he said. “That’s what they did: 1,500 miles of road in eight months,” Cannon repeated. “My point is: Americans can do this. Government either should lead, or follow, or get out of the way. In this case, it seems to me like the local city council in Los Angeles is in the way.” “Americans can rebuild. They know how to do it. They’ve done it before. It’s just depressing,” he said.
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