Working exactly as intended
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California’s unfinished wildlife ‘bridge to nowhere’ tops $100M.
In 2022, California Gov. Gavin Newsom broke ground on the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing (WAWC), a project featuring an overpass for animals atop ten lanes of the 101 Freeway in Southern California.
At the ceremony, Newsom boasted that the state had committed $54 million. He promised to “complete the job within another $10 million,” before seeming to hedge on whether that final sum would do the trick.
Officials projected a 2025 completion date for the overpass, and estimated that the entire project — which includes the bridge and other ancillary developments — would cost $92 million, some of it coming from private philanthropists.
Nearly four years after the ceremony, the bridge is past due and the project some $21 million over budget. What was supposed to be the world’s largest wildlife crossing has become a jobs program for environmentalists, with taxpayers on the hook for what WAWC leader Beth Pratt told us is an overpass “for everything from monarch butterflies to mountain lions.”
Pratt, a cougar-sweater-wearing environmental activist who serves on WAWC’s Partner Leadership Team, is the program’s public face. She is also a regional executive director of the national Wildlife Federation. In 2021, the group received a $25 million grant from “Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation” for the bridge that bears the late philanthropist’s name.
I found more on this, which just demonstrates, yet again, why these projects are so beloved.
Why has a project primarily consisting of a bridge for animals cost over $100 million? One reason is that Newsom and WAWC’s philanthropic supporters apparently don’t mind it becoming a patronage program. As the WAWC-endorsing Wildlife Crossing Fund notes, citing the California Department of Transportation’s estimate, “for every $1 billion spent” on wildlife crossings, “13,000 jobs are created.”
Some of these jobs are absurd. The National Wildlife Federation’s WAWC website claims that “[o]ur Native Plant Nursery”—apparently funded by the nonprofit SAMO Fund and other “partners”—“has prioritized hiring Indigenous team members to help steward the plants that will vegetate the bridge.” The nursery’s co-manager said she makes an “offering” after collecting seeds, sometimes including pieces of her hair.
Or consider the ways one of the nursery workers and her associates have spent their time. The nursery’s founding manager worked with “helpers and volunteers” to “seed scout[]” across the Santa Monica Mountains. Her associates on the “design team” received “feedback from all the various project partners”—including state and federal bureaucrats—for their plant list.
A group of experts apparently adds to the operation’s expense. A fungi whiz, Pratt says, worked as a WAWC habitat designer, periodically scrutinizing root samples under a microscope. A contracted soil scientist said his process involves assessing local dirt to “rebuild it . . . as close to nature as possible.”
One reason California supposedly needs this overpass is to ensure the safety and genetic diversity of mountain lions in the Santa Monica Mountains, where only about a dozen non-kitten cougars live at any given time. While bridge proponents claim that the local mountain lion population could otherwise face extinction, researchers suggest the bridge is not the only solution to ensure their survival.
$100,000,000 is chump change for California’s socialists, who have, the the state accounting office, spent $37 billion dollars on “solving” the homeless situation — $160,000 per bum — since 2019, and accomplished nothing.
In New York City, the Second Avenue subway extension project is years behind schedule, already $2 billion over budget. and costing $2.6 billion per mile “which is 8 to 12 times higher than similar projects in Europe.” (This past Tuesday the city filed suit against the federal government for its withholding $60 million of the promised loot.)
The public makes a lot of noise about government waste, but love the individual pork barrel projects that come its way, so politicians; federal, state and local, keep getting reelected. I’ve mentioned before that I served on the RTM Cost Containment Committee back in the late 80s, a temporary committee created to examine the town’s spendimg and find things to cut: a mini-DOGE, if you will. We found dozens of wasteful programs and services, but each one had a small group of partisans who benefitted from it, and their voices were far louder than those taxpayers who might see a one or two dollar reduction in their taxes for each service that was terminated. We brought the final report back to the RTM, and not a single cut was made.
That’s government spending: everyone hates it in general, and fights tooth and claw to keep their share.