It’s ‘budget dust.’ Paradise calls out Gov. Newsom on proposal to rescind Camp Fire funds
Leaders in fire-scarred Paradise say Gov. Gavin Newsom is stifling their chance of rebuilding their town by reneging on an agreement to provide the local water agency with state bailout funds this year.
Faced with a major budget shortfall from the coronavirus economic shutdown, Newsom has proposed eliminating a previously planned $7.4 million the state was to give the Paradise Irrigation District this year to maintain its operations while it worked to restore the water system in the Butte County hill town.
Assemblyman James Gallagher, R-Yuba City, said the money amounts to nothing more than “budget dust” in the state’s multi-billion-dollar budget, but represents critical funds to help the decimated district maintain operations for another year.
“This is not where you skimp – when a community is already on its knees trying to recover,” Gallagher said at a press conference in Paradise on Tuesday.
The town, once home to 27,000 people, was largely destroyed during the November 2018 Camp Fire. That wildfire, caused by a failed Pacific Gas & Electric transmission tower, caused 85 deaths and left multiple traces of harmful chemicals in the drinking water.
The catastrophe left the town’s water company with minimal income as 85 percent of its customers’ homes had burned down. Paradise leaders asked the state to back fill their water district operations and maintenance budget for three years while it and the town got back on its feet.
In response, the state last year agreed to allocate $14.7 million, a two-year operating budget buffer, as the district worked to clean its contaminated system. That cleaning project is being funded by federal disaster funds.
The state has been funding the irrigation district for fiscal year 2019-2020. In his proposed 2020-21 budget, Newsom, however, did not include the second year of funding.
A spokesman for the governor Department of Finance said the governor’s budget-cut proposal was done because of the anticipated need to close a $54 billion budget shortfall caused by the COVID-19 recession, including $13 billion in the fiscal year that ends in June.
“One of the steps required to do that is to redirect money that was put in last year’s budget, but which hasn’t been spent over the past 11 months,” spokesman H.D. Palmer said. “That’s the case here. A total of $14.7 million for this project was approved last June, but only half of that has been spent since then. We’ve proposed redirecting the unspent balance to help close that $13 billion shortfall in the current year. And we’ve also proposed doing the same thing for other projects across the state where unspent funds this year total more than $200 million.
“The immediate necessity to close this shortfall is what drove this proposal – not politics, and not any policy disagreement. And along with the other projects with unspent funds this year, the decision to do this still requires a vote by the Legislature.”
That has prompted Gallagher and state Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Red Bluff, to push his week to get the legislature to include that funding in its proposed budget.
At the same time, Gallagher, Nielsen and the head of the local water district, Kevin Phillips, challenged the governor not to turn his back on Paradise, a town they say is determined to make a comeback.
“The story of Paradise will not be the fire. It will be how the community will come back,” Nielsen said. “All of this effort is for naught if we don’t have water.”
At the moment, some 1,500 residences are occupied in Paradise, using water from pipes that have been cleaned of benzene residue from the fire. There are another 1,000 building permits have been issued, Phillips said.
This story was originally published May 26, 2020 at 4:18 PM with the headline "It’s ‘budget dust.’ Paradise calls out Gov. Newsom on proposal to rescind Camp Fire funds."