Posted by California-Is-Broken, a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood, on Jan 27, 2012 at 12:07 pm

It’s hard to tell if Jerry Hill is just grandstanding, or if he actually has some idea about the things he is going on about. Remember, all of California is built with steel and concrete, and it all is decaying at some finite rate. While the PG&E catastrophe in San Mateo County offers a hand target for his ire—what about the rest of the state?

The web-site of the State Auditor is full of observations of government failures, lack of sufficient oversight, and often fraud. An audit worthy of note is the recent review of the Office of the State Architect:

Web Link

which is responsible for overseeing seismic safety of schools. Additionally, there have been claims by the Legislature that most hospitals in California are subject to significant damage in a sufficiently powerful earthquake.

And then there are hundreds of overpasses around the state that are also likely to fall, given the right conditions.

So .. what is Jerry Hill going to do about all of these potential failures of government-designed, and operated, buildings and structures.

And even though PG&E may have some problems—there have been very few incidents of systemic failure in the system. Certainly the San Bruno explosion will not cause people to trust everything that PG&E says for a while—but what about the CPUC? What has it been doing all these years?

One can only look at the crazy things the California Legislature has spent its time on in the past, and asked: “Mr. Hill, what have you and your peers done to insure the safety of all Californians?”

The problems of managing this state are much larger than Jerry Hill can solve, even if he is not really grandstanding for his own political purposes.