Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
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to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so
much for your support. So we got the wildfires out
in California. As I was going over in the last hour,
we went through a lot of the details there. Bad policy,
bad politics, bad priorities. I have a bunch of emails here.
I will read through a couple of the only the
best ones, only the best. But I also just saw
the there's a clip here and I'm hesitant to play
it just because it's on the Joe Rogan podcast. Remember
when Donald Trump in the election. It's like a couple
I guess a couple months ago, two months ago, he
went on the Joe Rogan podcast. And because it's a
podcast and it's Joe Rogan, I'm afraid because I haven't
screened it yet. So I don't know if there's any
cussin involved, but this clip, it's like a seven minute
clip of Trump talking about this exact problem, this exact problem.
He talks about the Delta smelt. He talks about how
they have all this water. He specifically discusses that the
rain water is being wasted by being directed into the
Pacific Ocean. He says, you know, in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2: You can't get proper amounts of water in order to
protect a tiny little fish. The water up north, it
gets routed into the Pacific Ocean. Millions and millions of water,
of gallons of water gets poured into the Pacific.
Speaker 1: And then he says he got it all done. Nobody
could believe it. It was the bestlah blah blah. You
got so much water. And he says to Governor Newsom,
all you have to do is sign a contract or
an agreement or something. And Newsom wouldn't do it. He
didn't want to sign. He says. Every time I go
to California, I say, you have so much water. They
don't know it. I'm telling you, people living in Beverly Hills,
they turn off the water. Same thing with the electric
These are choices, These are choices that are made by
politicians who are pandering for reelection, pandering for money so
they can get re elected, right, pandering so they can
keep their salaries. Some of them believe this stuff, sure,
although I don't know what you I don't know, Like,
how do you defend this? How do you defend what
we are seeing right now? How do you defend that
to say, no, no, we're going to We're going to
dehydrate you know, the state of California, or half of
the state of California. We're gonna just send all the
water away because of some little tiny fish to save
this little tiny fish. And this isn't just a California problem, obviously,
this happens everywhere in North Carolina. Remember the heels splitter muscle,
remember that one, right, And look, I understand, you know,
protecting ecosystems and the amount of damage that can be
done and that sort of thing. But if you want,
like if you want to stop development, then just stop development,
that's what you need to do. But what you're doing
right now is creating really dangerous circumstances. And until people
are held accountable for it at the ballot box or
maybe even criminally or civilly liable. This doesn't change. And
I don't live in California, never have lived in California.
I've only visited it once. That was enough for me.
But I mean that was San Francisco. So no, they
didn't have the Pooh map at that time. But I
would have actually gone around. I would have gone to
check to see how accurate the poop app was. But
I digress. Brett writing into Pete at thepeteclendarshow dot com,
he says, Pete, where did all the massive snowfall in
California go? Answer? Not the reservoirs. It was sent to
the Pacific Ocean. I got an email from a friend
in California. Their fire hydrants are empty. Citizens are using
garden hoses, David says, with respect to the fires in LA.
When solar panels burn, they leave behind toxic ash. All
these LA homes with solar panels are polluting the air
and land. Should the EPA step in and find California
for poor environmental management by limiting water supply, poor forest management,
and pushing solar panels in fire hazard areas? I before it. Seriously,
I don't know any other way at this point to
combat this kind of stuff because the people who are
making these decisions have incentives that align with a continuation
of making these really bad decisions, and until they are
punished in some way, I don't know how that changes. Now.
Maybe voters wake up and they're like, you know what,
We're going to choose a different direction. But I don't
think they will, because politics and political alignment, particularly in
a state like California, and particularly in an area like
Los Angeles, it is their identities. People have adopted their
politics as their identity, and so they can't divorce themselves
from it. Like if you've been out there advocating for
the Delta smelt right, if you've been out there saying no,
it's okay for us to turn off our water, and
your neighbors are grumbling that they can't water their lawns
or something, and you're the one that's out there, you know,
morally preening to the neighborhood virtue, signaling that you're better
than they are because you're okay with dehydration, You're okay
with the increased fire hazards. You know, you're okay with
with this approach and these policies. How do you turn
around and go back on that right because you've elevated
it to not only your identity, you have a personal
stake in this, but you've also gone on the record
of saying that this is the better way to go
and that this is what the environment requires. So how
do you change your mind for any other reason? Like
because there wouldn't be any new science about this. Everything
is already known about why these fires accelerate. Oh, by
the way, I also saw where was it here? Ah? Yes,
libs of TikTok, did you know in Los Angeles last
year or I guess twenty twenty three? Two years ago,
there were almost just shy of fourteen thousand homeless fires
in LA. It was thirteen thy nine hundred and nine
fires that were started by homeless people. Beginning in twenty
twenty one, Homeless encampment fires accounted for eighty percent of
fires in downtown Los Angeles. Just three years prior, there
was an average of seven encampment fires every day, seven
a day in twenty eighteen. By three years later, that
number had tripled. In twenty twenty three, a massive fire,
likely started by a homeless person, shut down a major freeway,
putting LA's notorious traffic into a gridlock for days, and
just a quick reminder, California spent twenty four billion dollars
on homelessness and the problem got worse because the entities
and individuals making money serving the homeless have an incentive
that the homeless problem get worse because if the homeless
problem gets better and there are no homeless people to serve,
then you don't get paid and your organization is no
longer necessary. Right, So you want to serve more clients,
You want to have more customers. Right. The incentive structure
is aligned to not solve the problem. And that doesn't
mean there aren't people with good intentions and doing it
for the right reasons and really trying to make a
difference and an impact. Sure there are those people. Absolutely,
there are entities and organizations that try to help people
like the Absolutely. The problem is when government becomes the
funding agent and these organizations then get hooked on that
government grant, the incentive is for them to keep getting
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Got a message here from Seth to Pete at thepetecleanershow
dot com. First, I'd like to say it's good to
hear your voice on the radio again. Thank you, Seth.
I appreciate that the people on the West Coast need
to pretend that it's Donald Trump telling them not to
burn the underbrush and give a big middle finger to
their government, just like they do to anything. Trump says
that whole sesspool of the US has none to blame
but themselves for all the problems they have for lack
of action. This is different than the disaster in western
North Carolina in that they knew these types of hazards
were coming right. This is a regular occurrence, and there
are all sorts of mitigation programs and such that they
know can work, and Californians have decided to not do
those things. They keep electing people that continue to not
do those things, and so there is a bit of
a difference here. Now, I'm not interested in checking people's
voter cards, you know, before getting them evacuated from these
disaster areas. Obviously, it doesn't matter to me, if the
home that a firefighter is trying to save is the
home of a Democrat or a Republican, it doesn't matter. Right,
the emergency response does not take into account the political
identification of the people they're trying to save. That being said,
there needs to be a recognition that the policies that
have been enacted and the priorities that these leaders have
adopted are incorrect. I said it after COVID, right after
the pandemic, and Governor Roy Cooper here in North Carolina,
and he opened everything back up but grudgingly that there
needs to be an after action report. There needs to
be what is often referred to as a post mortem,
an autopsy, if you will. There has to be some
sort of an assessment about what they got right and
what they got wrong. And that's not to drag and
criticize the people that made the decisions. I mean, yes,
those things will happen, no doubt. In fact, I would
probably we participate in some of that criticism. However, the
more important reason why you do those types of reports
is so you don't make mistakes again. So if you
have another situation that arises, you have a blueprint of
things that work and things that don't and if you
unless you're going to tell me, which apparently Roy Cooper
and to my well, I am, I am still amazed.
I am, and I don't know why. Maybe I'm a
Pollyanna on this. I expected some media people to at
least ask the guy before he left office, did you
get a single thing wrong in your pandemic response? That's
the question that needs to be asked, whether it's the pandemic,
or it's Hurricane Helene recovery and relief, or it's the
wildfire situation in California? Did local leaders, did politicians, did
policies get anything wrong? I know you want to talk
about all the things that you've done that look good
for you, right, you want all of the good press.
I get that. I don't care. Okay, I don't care
to listen to all the things that you want pats
on the back for. I am more interested in an
honest assessment that identifies things that you got wrong. Not
so I can criticize, but so we can say, don't
do that again, don't do that again. Hey, you know,
we postpone that controlled burn in this area and then
oh my gosh, a wildfire came through and has destroyed
thousands and thousands of acres and thousands of structures and
probably killed a bunch of people. Like, well, let's not
do that again. Maybe we should do some controlled burns
from now on, right, Maybe keep them on a schedule,
remove them from some political whim that apparently the administration
had that the FED said, oh, we don't want to
do this because if it's out of control, it could
hurt the Democrats reelection chances. So why don't we take
that decision away from these politicians? Just spitballing here? All right,
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create a Video dot com. So from fires out in
California to the flooding in western North Carolina from Hurricane Helene,
we have some updates there. Leslie Coolba writing at the
tribunetrib Papers dot com as the website. On October thirtieth,
HUD informed the City of Ashville that it was going
to be getting an additional one point seven five million
dollars from the CDBG fund that is Community Development Block
Grant and part of that fund is the Designated Disaster
Recovery Fund. Before receiving any money, however, the staff says
that the quote council City Council will need to authorize
the submission to HUD of amendments to their annual action Plan.
And they have to update their goals for the disaster
recovery in some twenty twenty through twenty twenty four consolidated
plan and that'll give a concise summary of the actions
and activities that'll be used to address the disaster recovery. Right,
so they need to have a plan. And part of this, look,
I understand why GOVC does this stuff because it's a
grant program. And if they were to turn around and say,
all right, here's a check for one point seven million
dollars to the City of Ashville, and there's no plan
to spend it, there's no plan for you know, what
it's going to be used for. And then the City
of Ashville does something really stupid and uses it to replace,
you know, sidewalks because fat tourists jump up and down
and break the sidewalks. And I'm not kidding, by the
way on that, and I mean not that fat tourists
to breaking sidewalks, but that's what the City of Asheville
years ago. The city council blamed all the tourists for
why their sidewalks were in such disrepair. They blame tourists,
like guys a sidewalk, people walking on a sidewalk, it's
going to take about seventy years for that sidewalk to decompose.
The life cycle on a sidewalk is like seventy to
eighty years. And so no, it's not because of a
whole bunch of tourists walking on your sidewalks. It's because you,
guys have not what prioritized the spending. You've taken money
that you should have spent or should have set aside
for sidewalk repairs and replacement, and you've used it for
other things. You see, and this gets too a fundamental
difference in the way people see spending, whether it is
at the governmental level or even in their own household budgets,
which is, see a penny, spend a penny, and that
is not a long term viable strategy. You will eventually
go bankrupt, you will eventually become insolvent if you are
doing it in your household. If you are gov co well,
you could just keep taxing people until, of course you
hit sort of that death spiral right where now people
don't want to live in your place because it's too
expensive and it's too crummy, and so people leave and
then you have to raise taxes, which creates, you know,
more of an incentive for people to leave, and you
end up in this death spiral when you get the
revenue in. And they know this, by the way, they
do reserve studies on the long term replacement costs for
sidewalks and roads and all this stuff. They have all
of these plans, they have all these projections, and they
take the money in and rather than designate it for
the reserves to fund adequately the replacement on infrastructure, they don't.
They spend it. They see a penny and they spend it,
and then they're like, we don't have any money to
replace sidewalks. Yeah, because you're spending all of this other
money on other things that you shouldn't have been spending
it on because it is not one of your core services.
You have prioritized other things above the core service. When
Los Angeles cuts its fire department by seventeen or twenty
million dollars whatever it was in this year's budget cycle,
that is a deprioritization. And you could say, well, they
had a budget crisis or crunch and they needed to
fill a deficit. I get all of that, sure, But
as Joe Biden's dad told him, Joe, guys having got
a right and we all know what that means. Don't
tell me what your priorities are, show me your budget.
That's what Joe Biden has said for decades, right. I
don't know if his father actually ever said that to him,
but it does make sense. It's one of the few
things that Joe Biden has probably ever uttered that is true.
And if you have a budget that is diverting money
away from sidewalks, police fire, the courts, right, these are
the things that the government is supposed to be doing.
Although some would argue against the sidewalks and roads, and
that's a whole different debate, but most people concur that
these are the core services that government needs to do.
And if you're not doing those things, right, do you
really think you've earned the right to start doing all
these other things. You keep spending more and more and
more and more money. And Charlotte is the same way, right,
Charlotte is under this exact same pressure. They keep spending
more and more money on all of these nice to
have things or want to have things and not need
to have things. Out in Asheville, same thing. There is
a common denominator in all of those jurisdictions, but I digress.
Asheville's Community Development Vision Manager, James Shelton, explained to the
city council that the high administrative burden was needed for
expedition and oversight of disbursements. Shelton said that Helene cost
the Ashville metro area about eighty two hundred jobs, or
four percent of the labor force, which would raise the
unemployment rate to almost eleven percent. That's the whole area.
To help the City of Ashville contributed about seven hundred
thousand dollars from the CDBG funds that it already had
on hand to an organization called Mountain biz Works, and
they have a Rebuilding Together grant fund and so the
idea there is to get people jobs and training and
that sort of thing. To council surprise, no funds had
been drawn down from that grant, though, Shelton said that
Mountain biz Works, which was the pass through agency for
the funds, was currently reviewing and scoring the applications and
interviews would begin later this month. What's the hold up?
City has the money? They passed it on to Mountain
Biz Works. Mountain biz Works is now going to pass
it on to some other organizations. But they got to
do all of the applications and they're totally going through it.
I mean, it's been what four or five months since
Helene hit. What's the hold up? Well, they don't have
the capacity. In other words, the catastrophe was so big
that these organizations don't have the infrastructure to get this
stuff done in a timely manner. One of the many
challenges in this kind of disaster recovery and relief operation.
All right, if you're listening to this show, you know
I try to keep up with all sorts of current events,
and I know you do too, And you've probably heard
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Bill says in an email to Pete at the Pete
calendarshow dot com. Pete, I have quite a few relatives
in California. There are a lot of conservatives. They're just
outweighed or outnumbered by the wackos. Much like Mecklenburg County.
We are suffering under the Democrats city and county rule
by a thin majority, and then they get to gerrymander
the districts. We're going to become California Mecklenburg County if
we don't watch out. Love you so glad you're back
from vacation. Thank you, Bill, I appreciate it. I'm glad
to be back.
Speaker 2: Glad to be back.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a problem and so when I say,
you know, people need to realize that these are the
ramifications of their decisions. I'm not really talking about conservatives
on this stuff. These are Democrats. But look, Republicans do
this as well. Republicans, you know, when they run the
roost in a certain town or county, they will also
lose sight of their core service mandates and their priorities.
Absolutely you look at you know, Republican run jurisdictions all
over the country, and they do things that are outside
of the core services. So it's not strictly limited to Democrats. However,
it is way more pronounced long Democrats, just because they
have a different philosophy when it comes to the spending.
As I said, see a penny, spend a penny, which
Jan says, Come on, Pete, see a penny, spend a penny.
You used to live in Ashville, You've seen gov Co
work for years. It's not see a penny, spend a penny.
It's see a penny, spend a dollar and malign anyone
who disagrees. Okay, that's fair. So see a penny spend
a dime. How about that? Jan says, I have two
degrees in forestry, fire ecology was part of my education.
While intensive management cannot stop the fires out west, because
it is a fire maintained ecosystem, it will lower the
degree of catastrophic events. I saw a bumper sticker that said,
being stupid should hurt it most assuredly does in this case, right, Like,
this is true? So what they found. I remember reading
a story about this. Gosh, it must have been twenty
years ago or something, I don't even remember. It was
so long ago, and it was talking about some massive
wildfires that had raged across like the mid West or something,
and these scientists were all surprised to see this growth
occurring of some kind of tree that they thought didn't
exist anymore or something, because the tree was not reproducing
except like the extreme fire. The temperatures were needed for
this particular tree to procreate something like that, and so
they were astounded to see this. And it's like, well,
you had a wildfire that burned all this stuff. And
so when they were trying to just prevent all wildfires,
that used to be what they did, just prevent everything,
no wildfires, and then they realized, oh no, we can't
do that because it's actually going to kill these ecosystems, right,
so you have to have, as Jen just said, a
fire maintained ecosystem. Fire has to be part of this
of the ecosystem. But that doesn't mean you don't control it.
That's why you have the controlled earns. And for some reason,
just like nuclear the quote, progressives don't want to see
that happen, but that's the natural order of things out
in western North Carolina. The Business North Carolina Daily Digest
their daily newsletter that they put out Business NC dot com.
They say that it remains unclear how many properties are damaged.
It's not a criticism, it's a reflection of conflicting information.
In the most recent Office of State State Budget and
Management Report, one hundred and thirty three page report quotes
officials saying that they expect about seventy three thousand, seven
hundred homes total to be damaged, so seventy four thousand homes.
A few pages later, it suggested that based on individual
assistance claims to date, the estimate could be between one
hundred and twenty one thousand and all the way up
to one hundred thirty two thousand homes damaged. They just
don't know at this point. The smaller number refers to
homes that have FEMA verified damage, but the state believes
the actual number could be much much higher. Meanwhile, the
new governor, Roy two D two aka Josh Stein, he
did a tour the other day and on his first
day in office, he announced five executive orders and he
is sidelining the Roy Cooper created ENCORE, the North Carolina
Office of Recovery and Resiliency. That's the department or agency
that Roy Cooper set up when the hurricanes hit down
east and was at Florence and Matthew and there are
people and it's been over eight years since Matthew and
they still haven't gotten replacement homes. So what's going to
happen in Western North Carolina is going to be run
through the Governor's Recovery Office for Western North Carolina, So
right out of the Governor's Office g the Governor's Recovery
Office or GROWNC or as I like to call it
grow N See. Yeah, well that makes sense. All right.
That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much
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and don't break anything while I'm gone.