The Fall of California

While California is the fifth-largest economy in the world, its days of being a business haven have long passed. More and more, companies big and small are forced to either shut down or move to a more business-friendly state. Take, for instance, the departure of Fortune 1000 companies like Tesla, Oracle, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, or a recent survey of CEOs ranking California as the worst state in which to do business. Things have gotten so bad that even providers of critical municipal services have been forced to stop doing business in the state. And in Los Angeles, the city may soon become a giant Skid Row, a dumping ground in every way.

The company that operates the Chiquita Canyon landfill, the second-largest landfill in Los Angeles County, says the current regulatory environment caused it to cease operations. Admittedly, there has been an ongoing rare Elevated Temperature Landfill (ETLF) event impacting the communities surrounding Chiquita Canyon with noxious odors that may have given regulators pause in moving forward with the necessary approvals. Studies to date have shown “no anticipated short- or long-term health impacts” due to the ETLF. Nonetheless, the operators of the landfill have put aside nearly $25 million to address this issue.

Unfortunately, California regulators do not seem open to finding reasonable solutions that would maintain active waste disposal operations. And now that the landfill has been forced to close, funding for the community assistance program has dried up. This decline is mirrored by the state’s water system, which was once considered an engineering marvel but is now plagued by chronic water shortages. Political resistance to new reservoir construction and desalination plants has left the state increasingly vulnerable to drought, while tone-deaf environmental requirements and miscalculations by the Department of Water Resources and the State Water Resources Control Board have caused the state to lose hundreds of billions of gallons of water.

Compounding this bureaucratic dysfunction is California’s deeply entrenched plaintiffs bar, which has weaponized environmental challenges into lucrative predatory litigation. Rather than stemming from genuine community action, legal assaults against critical infrastructure are frequently manufactured by outside trial lawyers.