Lots cleared by the Army Corps of Engineers and other contractors had little or no greenery left. Trees that people hoped might survive were kept, but then later they had to be cut down, too.
By HANK WRIGHT
I read “Residents Need Biologists to Rebuild” click here in the February 27 issue of Circling the News.
A Highlands resident needs a biologist’s approval before they can get a final plan check.
The city requires it.
Here is the timeline.
January 12, 2025. Governor Newsom suspends CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) — the law that requires biological surveys, habitat analyses, and monarch butterfly studies before you can build anything in this state. CEQA is suspended forPalisades fire rebuild projects. Gone. Done. The governor said so.
January 13, 2025. Mayor Bass issues Emergency Executive Order 1. She calls it a sweeping order clearing the way for residents to rebuild. She promises to cut red tape. The press conference is confident. The language is urgent.
April 24, 2025. The City of Los Angeles Department of City Planning creates Form CP-3613: Biologist’s Statement of Biological Resources. It is a new form. No earlier version exists. The form cites CEQA as its authority. But governor suspended CEQA one hundred and two days earlier.
July 23, 2025. Bass issues Emergency Executive Order 8, expanding streamlined permitting for Coastal Zone rebuilds. Inside EO8, a quiet instruction: the Director of Planning shall prepare and adopt environmental protection measures to protectbiological resources from any project approved under EO8. Bass writes the mandate herself. It is in her order. Her name is on it.
August 2025. The EO8 Implementation Guidelines are published specifying properties flagged “Medium” or “High” biological potential in ZIMAS must have a qualified biologist prepare Form CP-3613. The biologist must be city-approved. There are twenty-two firms on the list. Each has a contract with the City Planning Department. The applicant pays them directly.
February 2026. A Highlands resident trying to get a final plan check is told they need a biologist to inspect water/plants/trees on the property.
Here is the problem. The fire burned everything. The trees are ash. The habitat is gone. ZIMAS didn’t update. The flag stayed. Parcels carrying medium or high ratings before January 7 — most of the hillside and coastal Palisades — are still flagged.
An approved biologist, for a fee, must survey land permitted, built upon, and taxed for thirty years.
They will find ash. They will find whatever the Army Corps of Engineers left behind.
The governor suspended the law. The mayor created the requirement under the suspended law. The Planning Department built the form requiring an approved biologist. The city-contracted biologists wait for the work to roll in.
Karen Bass did not miss the memo. She wrote it.
The form is dated April 24, 2025,. This is not a revised form dug out of a filing cabinet. It is a new form, created four months into a rebuild period, grounded in a law the governor suspended.
The house was permitted. The biology known. City approved it, zone, and taxed for 30 years. The city’s fire department left the hillside before the fire was out. The houseburned. Now the city wants a biologist to survey the ash.
That someone in the Planning Department has a name. The authorization chain for CP-3613 is a public record.
The Palisades is burning twice: once in January, and once in the permit office.
Absolutely absurd!