These are difficult days for Congressman Brad Sherman. Parts of his Southern California district have been ravaged by the wildfires.
“It's obviously devastating. Every burned out home is a family,” Sherman (D-CA) said quietly, his head bowed, in an interview with Spectrum News. “People are anxious to know when they can get back in.”
Sherman has been shuttling back and forth each weekend between Washington and California, touring the devastation in the Los Angeles community of Pacific Palisades, which is in his district, and in the community of Altadena, which is in an adjacent district, represented by Rep. Judy Chu.
Sherman said it is difficult to comprehend how his Republican colleagues could call for tying conditions to federal disaster aid for the region, something that has not been done for federal assistance provided to Republican states.
“The California delegation has almost uniformly voted for disaster relief for all the hurricanes, whether it be [Hurricane] Sandy or the Louisiana hurricanes in the home state of the speaker, or all those that take place in Florida,” said Sherman. “We've been there for the other states that have had disasters.”
It’s believed that many of the incinerated homes in Sherman’s district were underinsured or uninsured, an issue the congressman said has been happening far too often as private insurers stop providing coverage in fire-prone areas, driving up rates.
“Most of the oversight of insurance companies is done at the state level, and that's been a good system for our country over the last few decades. But we do have to look at so many people being non renewed in California, we do have to see what we can do to help everyone by reducing the risk, and we may need a federal role in the reinsurance process,” said Sherman, who alongside Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. is sponsoring a bill that directs the Government Accountability Office to “conduct a study assessing how the market for homeowners' insurance is responding to wildfires as well as federal action to support homeowners.”
Sherman said unless Congress passes a large enough relief package, “a lot of people in the Palisades [who] couldn't get insurance, they're going to get $43,000, which is a nice government benefit, but not enough to rebuild a home.”
“The government is not going to cover all your uninsured loss, but it needs to be more than $43,000 if you lost everything,” he said.
In the last several weeks, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has threatened to withhold disaster relief from California unless the state changes its immigration policies. Johnson has also said the idea has been floated to tie the aid to raising the federal debt limit — a controversial issue within his own party — but a move that he’s hoping could bring Democrats to the table to help push the debt limit raise through.
Democrats have been swift to reject any sort of strings attached to disaster aid, period.
“We will not support conditions to disaster assistance,” Democratic Caucus Chair Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., said in response to a question last week from Spectrum News at his weekly press conference. “We did not put partisan conditions on Florida or Louisiana or the Carolinas when we offered aid. Partisan conditions are not helpful and will distract from the help, and more importantly, delay the help that's necessary for the American public.”
Sherman is in a tough position. His community needs help — but he also has principles.
“It's reasonable for the rest of the country to say, ‘be resilient to the future.’ It's not reasonable to say we're going to tie this to the abortion issue, we're going to tie this to the gun issue, we're going to tie this to whatever hot button issue works for our constituency,” said Sherman. “People have to be given the resources to rebuild, and they do have to rebuild better.”
Sherman said one thing he wanted Americans to know as the discussions of federal aid for California continues is that to rebuild in the Palisades, homeowners will have to meet the Chapter 7 materials and construction methods for exterior wildfire exposure code. "You can't just rebuild what you had before," said Sherman. "The Paradise fires up in Northern California, that was also a whole town going up. 58% of the homes that met the new code survived. 18% that of those who didn't meet the code survived. So we know this new fire code is helpful even under some of the worst conditions, and we are going to build back better."
While Johnson will ultimately be the person to have to push some sort of legislation through to provide the aid to California, President Donald Trump could prove to be the biggest hurdle.
On the campaign trail last year, Trump threatened to withhold federal wildfire aid from California unless Gov. Gavin Newsom made changes to his water policy. Trump continued to falsely claim that the state's fish conservation efforts in the northern part of the state are responsible for fire hydrants running dry in urban areas in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday.
“I don’t think we should give California anything until they let the water run down,” said Trump, who signed an executive order this week “putting people over fish.”
Sherman said Trump “is completely wrong if he thinks that this has anything to do with that.”
“This was not a water shortage. This was a water pressure delivery system problem,” Sherman explained, noting that there were no water restrictions placed on the community before the fires as there would have been if there was a drought. “There was no shortage of water. They were scooping water out of a full Encino reservoir near my home with the scooper aircraft and dropping it – plenty of water to fight the fire, plenty of water for 13, 14 million people to live their lives.”
“The difficulty is, you give a system designed so that a community of tens of thousands of people can live their lives, and you could fight five house fires at the same time. And then you get 500 house fires at the same time. The system wasn't designed for that.”
Newsom has called for an investigation into the loss of water pressure to hydrants in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood and why the Santa Ynez reservoir was offline during the fires. Last February, a cover at the Santa Ynez was reportedly damaged, leading to the draining of the reservoir for repairs. “The number one reason to have the reservoirs there is to provide healthy water to people who live there. And if the cover was broken, they had to fix it,” said Sherman, not placing blame on the dry reservoir for the struggle to get water to firefighters, but rather the unprecedented nature of all the circumstances combined.
“We had a system where water pressure up there is provided by three tanks, and that plenty of water for the Palisades do everything anyone has ever done in the Palisades in the last 100 years, and the Palisade goes back over 100 years, but we never had 500 houses go up in flames at the same time. They didn't engineer it for that.”
On Friday, Trump is scheduled to visit Southern California in addition to western North Carolina, which is recovering after Hurricane Helene, a busy trip that Sherman pointed out leaves little time for him to spend with those impacted by these natural disasters. Despite representing essentially ground zero, Sherman said his office had heard barely anything about the forthcoming trip.
“We did everything possible to contact them, they've acknowledged that they know we're there, but this is so different than [how] every other president has handled disasters. I mean, it's famous to have presidents of one party meeting Governors of the other party and both being concerned about the victims of the disaster and hugging and working together. And I hope that we see that from Donald Trump,” said Sherman, who plans to be in the district Friday and says he would be available to the president if the White House reaches out.
Spectrum News reached out to the White House to ask whether they had been in touch with Sherman’s office or if Trump planned to tour the damage with the congressman, but our request for comment went unanswered.
Rep. Sherman’s office is advising constituents in the Pacific Palisades community to be aware of potential insurance scams. For more information, click here.
EDITOR'S NOTE: After this piece was published, the White House reached out to Sherman late Thursday and invited him to attend a roundtable with the president being held in Santa Monica. A spokesperson for Sherman tells Spectrum News that the congressman "is pleased to attend and looks forward to discussing with the President, his California colleagues, and key officials the urgent need to secure critical disaster relief funding necessary to recover and rebuild."