I think this may be the most California story of all time.
In 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom celebrated the groundbreaking of a giant wildlife bridge across the 101 Freeway in Southern California. He noted that while the project came with a $54 million price tag, it could be completed with another $10 million.
For those who’ve followed the California bullet train to nowhere fiasco, you know where this is going.
On Wednesday, City Journal published a report by Chris Rufo and Kenneth Schrupp highlighting how Newsom’s bridge project was still not done despite being scheduled for completion in 2025.
And shock of shocks, the bridge to nowhere is $21 million over budget with a projected price tag of $114 million and an indefinite timeline for completion. A chunk of that money, $25 million, came from “Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation,” but the rest is being covered by California taxpayers.
Oof.
Now, you may still be wondering what kind of “wildlife” this bridge is intended to protect for such a hefty sum.
Brooklyn Robinson, the assistant to the vice president for Strategic Communications at The Heritage Foundation, told me that she visited the bridge on a class field trip and asked some questions.
“While on the class trip to the infamous bridge, I asked the guide what animals the bridge will benefit most, assuming she would say the mountain lions,” Robinson said. “Because, of course, one mountain lion dying on the 101 is what sparked this multimillion-dollar project. But I was wrong, she told me the main species that would benefit was a butterfly. This confused me because I thought butterflies could fly … and therefore would not need a bridge to cross a highway. I guess I was uninformed!”
Now I could make a few snide comments here. A bridge for butterflies, seriously? Aren’t there already plenty of accessible “cougar” dens in Santa Monica?
But to give California the benefit of the doubt, there are plenty of similar overpasses built in other states that haven’t been driven crazy by Left Coast environmentalist whacko-ism.
The difference is, those projects were completed within reasonable budget parameters and in relatively short order.
I don’t think it’s wrong to question the leadership of this now hundred-million-dollar endeavor. Below is a video of Beth Pratt, the left-wing environmentalist activist who has been put in charge of the project.
Brace yourself.
Ah, there we go. The lady in the pink vest holding a stuffed animal says that the state with what the governor calls the “4th largest economy in the world” can’t finish this project because of President Donald Trump and tariffs or something.
Funny, I don’t recall Trump being president back in 2022.
I don’t want to be mean, but I can’t say that this X post doesn’t reflect exactly what I was thinking when I saw the video.
We should reasonably ask if this is just another gargantuan California boondoggle in a state that long ago forgot how to efficiently build infrastructure or practically anything at all.
“There’s no boondoggle, there’s no people stealing money,” Pratt said when questioned about the bridge in January.
Rufo and Schrupp weren’t convinced. And given how much this story falls in line with the modern blue state patronage model, I’m not either.
The bridge supporting Wildlife Crossing Fund, cited by the City Journal, used government data to say that “’for every $1 billion spent’ on wildlife crossings, ‘13,000 jobs are created.’”
And as Rufo and Schrupp found, many of those “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,’” they wrote. “The nursery’s co-manager said she makes an ‘offering’ after collecting seeds, sometimes including pieces of her hair.”
Here’s another job created.
“The nursery’s founding manager worked with ‘helpers and volunteers’ to ‘seed scout[]’ across the Santa Monica Mountains,” Rufo and Schrupp wrote. “Her associates on the ‘design team’ received ‘feedback from all the various project partners’—including state and federal bureaucrats—for their plant list.”
Even if everything here is being done legally, it’s still an absolute insult to state taxpayers. It would almost be a relief to think that the money was simply being stolen under the noses of state authorities. But that’s not what this looks like to me.
As you can imagine, Newsom responded to the allegations that his glorious butterfly bridge is a boondoggle with his typical grace and concern for government propriety.
Newsom—or really one of his Zoomer interns—went with an online “gotcha,” posting a picture of two assumedly disastrous bridge projects in Texas and Florida, two states he seems particularly concerned about for some reason.
The problem is that the pictures—clearly meant to show incomplete bridges—were of old, decommissioned bridges in the process of being taken down. In one of the pictures, you can actually see the new bridge completed on the other side if you click on it. Oops.
Newsom can say whatever he wants, but the butterfly bridge is just another example of the kind of dysfunction that’s become endemic in the Golden State. This is all worthwhile if you are politically connected or are otherwise on the public dole, I suppose. It’s not so great for everyone else.
And California, as wealthy as it is, can’t keep doing this forever. The tech money will eventually dry up. The budget deficit is already alarmingly high, and the proposed “wealth tax” won’t fix things. If anything, it will make the problem much worse.
The good news for Newsom is that the whole thing may only truly blow up when he’s out of office at the end of the year. I’m sure a man with such noted humility will settle into a fine, modest retirement away from the public spotlight.
