Santa Monica Mountains
The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy announced on May 13 that it has awarded $3.2 million in State funds to Los Angeles County and Ventura County Fire Departments to implement wildfire prevention programs.
The grants, unanimously approved by the Conservancy and its Advisory Committee at its May 12 meeting, include $2.2 million to Los Angeles County Fire Department and $1 million to Ventura County Fire Department.
The Conservancy was allocated $31 million from Proposition 4, which passed in November 2024 for watershed improvement, wildfire resilience, chaparral and forest restoration, and workforce development.
The proposition authorized $10 billion in debt to spend on environmental and climate projects, with the biggest chunk, $1.9 billion, for drinking water improvements. The bond prioritizes lower-income communities, and those most vulnerable to climate change, and requires annual audits. Repaying the money could cost $400 million a year over 40 years, a legislative analysis said.
The State Legislature enacted an early action measure and signed into law by Governor Newsom in mid-April that allows the Conservancy to use Prop 4 bond funds for urgent wildfire prevention and resilience efforts.
Senator Ben Allen and Assemblymember Jaqui Irwin, who are legislative participants on the Conservancy and whose Districts were highly impacted by the January 2025 Palisades fire championed early action funding.
“My community has seen firsthand the devastating effects of wildfires,” said Senator Ben Allen, author of Proposition 4. “We have been working with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy with a sense of urgency to get these Prop 4 dollars to work as soon as possible.”
Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin. “Wildfire experts from both the Los Angeles and Ventura County Fire Departments continue to work hard to ensure the safety of residents living in these areas however, their safety will be greatly enhanced through additional wildfire mitigation and the much-needed fuel reduction plans funded by these grants.”
In January 2025, the devastating Palisades, Eaton, and Kenneth wildfires underscored an urgent need for wildfire and climate resilience efforts to address the growing severity of fire seasons in Southern California.
The Conservancy is an active member of the Santa Monica Mountains Fire Safe Alliance, an umbrella group of government agencies groups convened by Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsay Horvath to address environmental and community safety problems related to wildfire in the Santa Monica Mountains.
(Note: The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy is a State Agency established by the Legislature in 1980. Since that time, it has helped preserve more than85,000 acres of parkland in both wilderness and urban settings. Its mission is to strategically buy back, preserve, protect, and restore pieces of Southern California to form and interlinking system of urban, rural, and river parks, open space, trails, and wildlife habitat that are easily accessible to the general public.)
Here’s your Fire Department pay-off for the stand-down.
Wait a second—taxpayers voted to spend $10 billion on “environmental and climate projects” and the legislature gave $31 million of that to the already flush SMMC for “watershed improvement, wildfire resilience, chaparral and forest restoration, and workforce development”? And now we’re supposed to be impressed that SMMC gave 10% of that to two fire departments whose efforts to save the Palisades were made futile by the huge amounts of decade-old uncleared brush on property owned by these agencies?
Is everyone aware that the SMMC and its baby sister, MRCA, are the private fiefdom of Palisadian Joe Edmiston? (Yes, we know he too lost his home in the fire and that is tragic. But did you know that his Temescal Gateway Park staff took the time and had the resources to save the park structures while their neighbors’ homes burned, and this after they failed to comply with brush clearance requirements?)
For years the MRCA’s neighbors on either side of Temescal Gateway Park have tried to forge a working relationship with the MRCA with regard to brush clearance and Park usage and stewardship, but MRCA staff have consistently ducked and dodged. And why not? There is no oversight over the MRCA, so they just ignore us. A little research has revealed that some Palisadians have finally added the SMMC and the MRCA to lawsuits resulting from the Palisades Fire—and rightly so. A 2024 FOIA request returned documents proving MRCA’s failure to comply with brush clearance requirements. Requests for action following that discovery resulted in still more stalling. On January 7th many of us watched the fire race over the ridge and through the Temescal Gateway Park brush that we have been begging to be cleared for years, as it headed mercilessly toward our homes. Now we’re supposed to applaud Edmiston’s generosity with OUR tax dollars—giving token amounts to the fire departments that were shafted by Mayor Bass? No way. Rumor has it these $3.2M “awards” are little more than bribes to connected people and token efforts to rehabilitate the SMMC’s and MRCA’s reputations in the face of the pending lawsuits. Someone needs to require some real governance over the SMMC and MRCA. Enough is enough.
The LAST thing we need is for our over-extended tax funds to go these failed organizations. Rather than waste more money on the LAFD–which is solely responsible for our $250 billion dollar loss in the last fire—let’s privatize them. Chinese-type water drones and Palentir-type AI are the future of fire fighting, not the unionized overpaid cowards who believe that the best way to fight fire is to sip coffee on the beach in the $1.2 million rigs we bought them.