Trump cuts Rancho Palos Verdes' landslide recovery

Over the past 18 months, the city of Rancho Palos Verdes has been working to address a deteriorating local emergency – a sharp expansion of an ancient landslide area that has torn up houses, bent over roads and stopped utilities.

The ongoing land movement has upended residents' lives and has plunged the city into financial uncertainty as a series of heavy rains in 2023 and 2024. Without substantial external aid, officials said they expect to spend about $37 million on emergency landslide mitigation this fiscal year, a figure that is almost the same as the city's annual operating budget.

Now, to make matters worse, the Trump administration announced it would stop funding the federal emergency management agency’s building resilience infrastructure and community grants, the main money the city hopes to fund long-term prevention and stability programs.

“The BRICS Program is another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program,” the government announcement read. “This is more concerned about the political agenda than helping Americans affected by natural disasters.”

For the city of Rancho Palos Verdes, the operation could have lost $16 million in stable work. It also marks a surprising reversal of federal support for local slide mitigation efforts.

In September 2024, a Trump campaign visited Trump National Golf Club near him, saying the administration needs to do more to help residents in slide areas. “This mountain is moving and can stop, but they need help from the government. So, I hope they get help,” Trump said.

Last week, municipal officials once again expanded their local emergency declarations as the crisis continued to put unprecedented pressure on city finance.

“We ran out of money very quickly,” Rancho Palos Wilders Mayor Dave Bradley said at a recent city council meeting. “We are ending the huge ropes so that we can (continue to work to alleviate the landslides). … We are spending a lot of budget on this issue.”

Most of these allocated funds are used to collect new underground “dehydrated” wells that pump out groundwater and lubricate mountain slide planes, a strategy that geologists believe is a strategy that has helped mitigate movements in recent months.

Millions of dollars are also heading towards repeated repairs to and from the south (continued to break and transfer), as well as efforts to fill cracks, improve drainage and maintain important infrastructure such as sewers and power lines.

Although the city has not yet faced a significant budget shortage, its reserves have dropped rapidly over the past two years. The next fiscal year starting in July, according to city data – the city is expected to have $3.5 million in unallocated capital improvement reserves, down from $35 million three years ago, according to city data. While landslides have been the most pressing focus lately, city officials say they are now facing about $80 million in other capital projects.

The line chart shows that the city's reserves peaked at $35.1 million in January 2022 before falling to $3.5 million today.

“We need external help without a doubt,” said Ramzi Awwad, the city’s director of public works, who said the city is working to find and apply for other federal and state funding sources, but has encountered obstacles as they are not usually included in most disaster or emergency response frameworks.

“This is a disaster…severe weather and severe climate change will intensify,” Bradley testified recently in the California Emergency Management Parliamentary Committee. He said prices are growing to achieve the necessary response “unsustainable.”

Many areas of the Rancho Palos Verdes landslide complex, which covers 700 acres, including about 400 homes, are still moving up to 1.5 feet per month, destroying property and infrastructure, according to the city. Other parts of a few inches per week slow down or stop completely when moving peaks in August 2024. City officials attribute the improvements to ongoing mitigation projects and a drier winter season — but they say more work is needed to ensure the area is safe and accessible.

Officials believe the loss of FEMA funds could hinder long-term slide prevention efforts for years before land movements sharply accelerated last year.

Awwad said the Portuguese elbow landslide remediation project called for the installation of a series of water pumps called Hydraugers, among other measures to prevent water from entering the ground, and received $23 million in 2023. The grant was later reduced to $16 million.

Awwad said the project is separate from the city’s ongoing emergency response, but is key to long-term stability in the region.

Rancho Palos verdes officials questioned the government's claim that the BRICS Grants Program is “wasteful and ineffective”. Instead, they say this represents a lifeline for a small city that has long been with landslides.

For decades, the city’s most dramatic landslide (Portuguese curved slide) has moved up to 8.5 feet a year, about an inch or two a week. Last summer, it moved about a foot a week. Other nearby landslides, including Abalone Bay and Klondike Canyon, also accelerated significantly last year, but these areas are not part of a long-term stability plan.

“Losing the BRICS funding will jeopardize the city's ability to implement long-term efforts to slow down the bending landslide in Portugal and prevent the emergencies we are facing now again,” City spokesman Megan Barnes said.

Since the BRICS grants are specifically used for preventive measures, the city cannot use the money for emergency response. But in recent weeks, the city has completed the first phase of a long-term project – planning, engineering and final design – and FEMA approved $2.3 million in initial work.

Officials say the city has not received this portion of the funding and it is not yet clear whether it will.

“We are still seeking to clarify the next steps to understand what might be part of it,” Barnes said. “We continue to strongly urge our federal, state and county partners to recognize the urgency of this situation and continue to support the city in protecting our residents and vital infrastructure.”

It's not just local residents who benefit from this stable job, Awwad said. It can also help thousands of motorists traveling south using Palos Verdes, and thousands of residents rely on sewer lines operated by counties running beside the road.

“It’s a regional issue,” Awwad said.

Barnes said the city is considering a FEMA hazard mitigation grant program that applies to the program, but ensuring state or federal funding to stabilize the program is a challenge.

After the Biden administration announced a federal disaster hit in the winter of 2023-2024, the city applied for more than $60 million in disaster reimbursement from FEMA, linking its depressed mitigation efforts to heavy rainfall. But FEMA officials rejected almost all requests from the city.

The city appealed the decision, but federal officials seem unlikely to reverse the route. The California Governor’s Emergency Services Office recommended not to appeal in a recent letter to FEMA about appeals, because landslides “are unstable before disasters” and therefore not “a direct result of a declared disaster.”

“Cal Oes agrees with (city) that winter storms… may significantly accelerate the sliding,” the letter said. “But…the pre-existing instability dates back to 2018, which makes it unqualified under FEMA policies.”

The most important external funding the city received comes from Los Angeles County. Supervisor Janice Hahn received a $5 million landslide response, with more than $2 million of which has been distributed to homeowners via a $10,000 payment for seeking direct assistance. The county's flood control area also allocated $2 million to help pay for the preparation for the rainy season.

In 2023, the city also received $2 million from Congress after U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) helped get funding for landslide restoration.

The city’s most compelling financial support (if you get it) would be a $42 million acquisition program awarded by FEMA. With the money, city officials are expected to acquire 23 homes in the landslide area, 15 of which are red-labeled or considered inseparable. Barnes said FEMA has not allocated these funds yet, but even so, there is no money for mitigation or prevention.

Faced with this difficulty, city officials provided support behind the bill, which could change the way the state categorizes emergencies.

Al Muratsuchi (D-Rolling Hills Estates) raised by the Congress introduced AB 986, which would add landslides as a condition that could constitute a state of emergency – a change that could free up the national funding pool of Rancho Palos Verdes.

After seeing what the Rancho Palos Verdes Landslide area is working on, he called the bill a “common sense advice” but similar bills in the past failed.

“The Palos Verdes Peninsula…has been witnessing what I call the slow moving train wreckage,” Muratsuchi testified at an emergency board hearing last month. “The house was torn apart. …The road was torn apart, the utilities were cut off. From any common sense definition: natural disasters.”