‘There’s a public-policy failure,’ says a onetime candidate for governor who nearly lost his home.
After news broke last week that wildfires were tearing through Los Angeles, I checked in on Bill and Cindy Simon, longtime friends of my wife and me who live in Pacific Palisades.
Bill is the son of William Simon, the investor and philanthropist who served as Treasury secretary under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. By the time we spoke, the Simons had evacuated their home and checked into a hotel in neighboring Santa Monica. Around half of the houses on their block had burned to the ground, along with the Catholic church at the end of the street, the town library, the village theater and two large grocery stores.
“We’ve lived on the same street for 34 years. I don’t know why we got spared,” Mr. Simon told me. “In some areas it looks like Dresden in World War II, or Hiroshima. Just house after house after house destroyed. The amount of displacement. The amount of suffering.”
Mr. Simon is a businessman who has also dabbled in politics. He won the Republican gubernatorial primary in California in 2002 but lost the election to incumbent Democrat Gray Davis. The state’s poor infrastructure upkeep was part of Mr. Simon’s campaign message. At the time, California was experiencing energy shortages that resulted in rolling blackouts and dramatic increases in electricity bills. “When I ran back in ’02 I was saying, and other people since then have been saying, that our infrastructure is worse than bad. It’s dangerous,” he said. The state already had a lot of “deferred maintenance” to address 50 years ago, when the population was roughly 20 million. Now it’s close to 40 million.
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
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