California Wastes Big on Bridge to Nowhere

The homelessness grift and the bullet train to nowhere are hardly the only means California Democrats have had of flushing taxpayer money into oblivion. The New York Post reports on a bridge to nowhere:

In 2022, California Gov. Gavin Newsom broke ground on the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing (WAWC), a project featuring an overpass for animals atop ten lanes of the 101 Freeway in Southern California.

At the ceremony, Newsom boasted that the state had committed $54 million. He promised to “complete the job within another $10 million,” before seeming to hedge on whether that final sum would do the trick.

By now we know what this means: $64 million was only the beginning. The project, which was supposed to be finished last year, is currently $21 million over budget.

WAWC leader Beth Pratt tells taxpayers to keep bending over:

“There’s no boondoggle,” she said. “Given the times we’re living in,” a potential $21 million overage is “not that bad.”

The times we are living in are characterized by arrogant looting inflicted by pathologically greedy liberals.

Within days of Pratt’s announcement, the California Transportation Commission funneled another $18.8 million to the project, well exceeding the governor’s $10 million cap. The project’s total price tag now reaches about $114 million, reportedly including some $77 million in state funds.

Helping animals across the road is only a pretext. The bridge is a jobs program for useless enviromoonbats.

As the WAWC-endorsing Wildlife Crossing Fund notes, citing the California Department of Transportation’s estimate, “for every $1 billion spent” on wildlife crossings, “13,000 jobs are created.”

Presumably at least a few of those 13,000 would be engaged in some productive activity if Democrats did not pay them to drag out boondoggles — of which there will be many more if Dems remain in power:

At the groundbreaking ceremony, Newsom envisioned WAWC as a catalyst for the construction of wildlife crossings across the state. California, he boasted, set aside $105 million “to replicate projects like this all up and down the state.” Pratt reportedly thinks “hundreds more crossings are needed.”

You can see why Newsom has presidential ambitions. California’s deficit has been estimated to reach as high as $35 billion in coming years. As Margaret Thatcher famously observed, moonbats eventually run out of other people’s money. But if he achieves power at the federal level, he can just print more.

On a tip from R F.

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