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President Trump: Remember the Wollman skating rink in Central Park, when you took over the renovation project and re-opened the rink in less than four months when New York City could not do it on its own in six years? Time to scale that intervention, but on the other coast, and perhaps smash up and reform California’s government and political gridlock in the process.
Approximately 11,000 homes and an unknown number of businesses and churches, etc. were lost in the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles city and county this January. If very recent history is any guide, those who lost their homes last month are looking at a long and winding road to return—if ever. In 2018, the Woolsey fire destroyed between 450 and 500 homes in Malibu when it torched that coastal enclave close to the Pacific Palisades neighborhood. In the six-plus years since that blaze, less than half of those homes lost in 208 have been rebuilt.
Given the vastly larger scale of the destruction in 2025 than in 2018, expect even less responsiveness from the tangled snarl of federal, state, regional and local agencies going forward. The worst offender of all is the California Coastal Commission, which is a diabolical monster of a state “agency”—a quasi-feudal kingdom unto itself that simply does not care about property owners as it pursues its utopian dreams of a coastal waterfront stripped of humans where it can make such an end result so.
At every level, many if not most of California’s bureaucrats—and their California-located federal counterparts in the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—don’t want to expedite rebuilding. Some want to layer on their own visions of a “green rebuilding” or “affordable housing” future and are thus in the business of hindering the highest and best uses of private properties, even when those properties formerly were homes burned to the foundations, homes often occupied by a family over generations.
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President Trump knows the score when it comes to California land use laws.
He has experience with them. The Trump National Golf Club is hard on the Pacific on the Palos Verde Peninsula. (The golf course had been the Ocean Trails course when a landslide took out a large swath of the links and Trump stepped into the bankrupt property and got it fixed and reopened in three years. It’s a spectacular course.)
So here’s the plan. The president and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum seek from Congress in the budget and reconciliation process underway, say: half of the $40 billion amount requested as “fire recovery funds” by Governor Gavin Newsom last week.
WOMAN ACCUSED OF LOOTING FROM HOME IN PALISADES FIRE AREA WHILE WEARING ‘PALISADES STRONG’ SHIRT
Then Congress provides the $20 billion in aid along with an express and detailed preemption of all state, regional and local regulations governing the burn area of the three fires (Woolsey, Eaton and Palisades —goodbye commissars of the Coastal Commission and Regional Water Quality Control Board etc.). The legislation vests sole land use authority over those areas in the Department of the Interior, Office of the Secretary.
Then Secretary Burgum appoints one official in his immediate office to oversee the condemnation of all the burned-out private property at its current value—immediate checks to every lot owner—while also providing every home and business owner with an option to repurchase their lots at the market value of the property after the clearing and infrastructure rebuild at a price equal to the day-before-the-fire-market-value less the insurance settlement they receive.
Burgum hires five-star architect and law firms with experience in the area as well as a big, public works contracting firm, the sort of contractor that then-Governor Pete Wilson hired to rebuild the section of Interstate 10 that collapsed in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. That rebuild and reopening took three months because Pete Wilson wasn’t Gavin Newsom.
The Burgum-hired architects oversee the master plan of the infrastructure, the lawyers the options and the contractor the clean-up and infrastructure rebuild.
Upon completion of the initial condemnation payments, execution of the options and the clearing and rebuild of roads and related water-and-power infrastructure using the appropriated funds, the owners can either exercise their options and rebuild as they see fit, or sell their individual options on the open market. If a homeowner was made whole by private insurance and chooses not to exercise their option, the federal government can package the lapsed options and sell to the highest bidder with entitlements and a use—home, business or church, etc.—equal to square footage in the same place on the same lots prior to the fires.
Because of the policies pursued by the state government, especially California’s incompetent insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara, many of the home, business and church owners in the burn areas had lost their fire insurance policies as State Farm and perhaps other insurers fled the area in the year before the fire as the risk grew for the insurers but the premiums they were allowed to charge didn’t because California’s idiotic regulators wouldn’t approve rate hikes commensurate with fire risk.
Those homeowners were forced into a now basically bankrupt “California FAIR plan,” which was the insurance option of last resort for homeowners as fire insurers fled the state. The “Fair” plan isn’t funded to the amount needed to pay the policies issued much less cover the private insurance policy coverage that lapsed because of the government absent a big gift of federal funds.
Newsom and Trump face off (Pool)
The plan above would indeed represent a bail-out to the homeowners who suffered casualty losses because California destroyed the private insurance market. That might be a “moral hazard,” that is, a temptation to other homeowners at risk of fire elsewhere to forego insurance at market rates in the (wildly risky) proposition that what the federal government does once, it will do again and again. That’s a very bad bet as this is a unique situation. But the risk is there.
I think the president should take it and take on the project because Trump not only understands development, and he knows these homeowners are absolutely screwed unless he steps in, but he also knows the enormous public policy upside of his doing so and doing so quickly and efficiently.
If Trump greenlights the federal takeover of the rebuild of these three burn areas, and if Secretary Burgum succeeds in getting it done, the equities for private property owners deeply injured by dysfunctional bureaucracies at every level will balance out and—the key point—Californians will see with their own eyes that their state doesn’t have to be the government sinkhole it has become.
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California doesn’t have to have tyrannical Coastal Commission. It doesn’t have to have failing schools across most major districts. It’s doesn’t have to have an obscene waste of limited resources poured endlessly into the money pit that is the train-to-nowhere in the Central Valley. It doesn’t have to have a housing shortage, a vast crime wave, an absurdist crazy-quilt water delivery system that guarantees drought after drought or a deep and an irrational prejudice against desalinization plants. It doesn’t have to have hundreds of thousands of homeless people living in terrible conditions on the streets of every city, town and open stretch of land.
California could be golden again as a result of President Trump’s “Golden Age of America.” That would be a legacy for the ages as a California well-governed and free of the progressives’ irrational and elitist visions would be the wonder of the continent, as it once was and could be again.
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
