Did you ever wonder why California is always in an emergency?
Bird flu is the latest one. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a declaration of emergency on Dec. 18 after a severe case in a human was documented.
In Louisiana.
But Louisiana didn’t declare an emergency. According to the news release from Newsom’s office, “the virus has spread in 16 states,” but a week later, no other state had called it an emergency. The Centers for Disease Control said the “current public health risk is low,” but it is “using its flu surveillance systems to monitor for H5 bird flu activity in people.” The CDC says there have been “several” recent human cases.
H5N 1 bird flu has been spreading in the U.S. for the last few years, mostly infecting poultry and wild birds. In March, it was detected in U.S. dairy cattle. Newsom’s declaration said testing has detected bird flu in 641 of the state’s 1,100 dairies in Central California since August, and on December 12, the virus was detected in four dairies in Southern California.
Nationwide, there have been about 55 cases detected in humans, mostly among farmworkers exposed to infected animals, with mild symptoms. The CDC said 29 cases were in California, including one child with mild symptoms who was recovering after being treated with antiviral medication. The individual in Louisiana who experienced the severe case, described as having underlying medical problems, was exposed to a backyard flock of sick and dead animals.
Is this a situation that is beyond the ability of local and state officials in California to handle with their normal powers and operations?
Newsom said it is. He declared that “conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property” now exist, and “local authority is inadequate to cope with the magnitude of the damage.”
An emergency declaration is sometimes needed to enable government agencies to coordinate quickly, but the governor’s proclamation said the state had already been doing that. The California Department of Public Health and other state agencies were working with “local affected health departments to coordinate, implement and ensure timely surveillance and investigation of potential cases of Bird Flu, its potential spread, and potential measures to mitigate such spread.”
In addition, the state has been “working in close collaboration” with federal agencies: the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Nonetheless, according to Newsom, the emergency declaration is needed because “additional flexibility around staffing, contracting, and other rules will be critical to support the State’s evolving response.”
The state has already distributed “millions of pieces of PPE” to workers at dairy farms. So if you missed out on the chance to get a no-bid contract for mask manufacturing during COVID, you’ve got another shot at it.
This need for “flexibility” is telling. California is strangled in laws, regulations and rules. You can’t even cut down a dead tree in this state without declaring a state of emergency.
In fact, California has been in a Tree Mortality State of Emergency since Oct. 30, 2015. It was declared by Gov. Jerry Brown following his proclamation of a drought emergency in January 2014.
The dead-tree emergency enabled Brown to override regulations that prevented the perfectly sensible and longstanding practice of controlled burns to limit wildfire risk. “The California Air Resources Board and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection shall work together and with federal land managers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to expand the practice of prescribed burns, which reduce fire risk and avoid significant pollution from major wildfires, and increase the number of allowable days on a temporary basis to burn tree waste that has been removed in high hazard areas,” Brown wrote.
The then-governor also directed the California Public Utilities Commission to “take expedited action” to speed up approvals of bioenergy facilities that would receive feedstock from the high hazard zones, demanding that these contracts be executed “within six months.” He also called for “expedited mediation” to complete the “interconnection agreements” needed to get those “forest bioenergy facilities in high hazard zones” connected to the grid.
It may or may not be a good idea to speed up approvals of electricity transmission lines through high hazard forest zones, but in California there are only two choices available: snarl everything forever in tangled regulations and lawsuits, or declare an emergency and barrel ahead without adequate review of safety or financial controls.
The Tree Mortality emergency is California’s longest ongoing emergency, but it’s far from the only one. According to the California Department of Emergency Services, there are 54 open emergency declarations in this state for fires, storms and more. A May 2021 drought emergency in Klamath River, Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and Tulare Lake Watershed Counties is still in effect, and a statewide “heat/energy” emergency declared on Aug. 31, 2022, has never ended.
This doesn’t even count the “budget emergency” Newsom declared after the tax-filing delay implemented during the storm emergencies led the legislature to spend money based on rosy revenue projections that “didn’t pan out,” as the gold miners used to say. The budget emergency declaration allows the state to dip into budget reserves, money set aside in case of a recession, to pay the bills for their overspending.
In declaring an emergency for bird flu, Newsom said he was being “proactive.” That suggests it’s not an emergency yet. There is a state law, the California Emergency Services Act, that specifically defines when an emergency may be declared and when it must be ended. While it is in effect, the governor is authorized to temporarily suspend “any statute, ordinance, regulation, or rule.”
States that haven’t put themselves into a regulatory chokehold don’t need a declaration of emergency to cut dead trees or test cattle for bird flu.
California could use a “DOGE” of its own to go through the codes and clean out the barn.
Write Susan@susanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley