John Moorlach, an Orange County Republican state senator from Costa Mesa, used a July 30 editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle, to advocate ways to help California fight an increasing number of deadly fires, including, for example, shifting $621 million this year away from the ridiculous boondoggle known as Gov. Jerry Brown’s high-speed rail project.
Moorlach also advocates appropriating “25 percent of state cap-and-trade funds to counties to harden the state’s utility infrastructure and better manage wildlands and our overgrown and drought-weakened forests.”
The former Orange County treasurer and conservative supervisor blamed both of last year’s major wildfires on “collapsing power lines” that sparked blazes.
Moorlach, a professional CPA who has long championed government pension reforms, additionally backs a bill by Hannah-Beth Jackson, a Santa Barbara democrat, that aims to reduce the destruction of wildfires by increasing the number of “prescribed burns” to limit damage during favorable humidity and temperature conditions.
The state’s proposed $100 billion high-speed rail line linking Los Angeles and San Francisco has garnered support from former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger but is plagued by massive cost overruns and incompetence.
Ten years ago, the plan was alleged to cost only $40 billion.
Gavin Newsom, a Democrat running for governor, has expressed conflicting statements about the project while John Cox, his challenger, outright opposes the plan as wasteful spending.
Nonetheless, it is scheduled for completion in 2033.
You can read Moorlach’s editorial HERE.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
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