Gavin Newsom’s $114M ‘Butterfly Bridge’ insults taxpayers

I’m a small business owner. I live with real budget accountability every day. Sacramento doesn’t.

There is a job title on the payroll of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s $114 million pedestrian bridge project — the so-called “Butterfly Bridge,” or “wildlife bridge to nowhere” — that I cannot get out of my head: fungi habitat designer.

I have owned a small business in California for 10 years. Every month I make payroll, pay rent, negotiate with vendors, and file taxes. I know what it means to justify every dollar.

So when I learned that the state hired someone to cultivate fungus — on a bridge, over the 101 freeway — while California is staring down a $2.9 billion budget deficit, I did not laugh. I filed a petition.

This is the Butterfly Bridge in Agoura Hills. Initially sold to Californians as a project that would be funded by private donors with some state funding, taxpayers have once again been baited-and-switched into funding the majority of the project. Worse, the $54 million cost has ballooned to $114 million — more than double — and it is still not finished.

When project leaders were asked to explain the runaway costs, they blamed tariffs and inflation.

Then the line items came out.

A fungi habitat designer. Indigenous seed scouts. A soil scientist paid to make dirt feel more natural. 

All on the bet that some wildlife may figure out how to use a 165-foot-wide bridge to cross over 2.7 million feet of Los Angeles freeway. 

I wish I were making this up.

Seventy-seven million dollars in state funds have already been released. For a dirt path over a highway. In a state that cannot finish a high-speed rail project after burning through almost $20 billion; cannot reduce homelessness despite pouring money into it year after year; and still cannot account for billions lost to unemployment fraud during COVID (the state just raised taxes on me and other small business owners to pay for its carelessness).

The Butterfly Bridge is not a quirky line item. It is a pattern. It is what happens when no one is watching the money — and no one is held responsible when it disappears.

I started a petition on Change.org demanding a full, independent, public audit — every dollar, every contract, every vendor — before the state releases another cent. I am also calling for an immediate halt to additional funding and the creation of a Taxpayer Protection Task Force to review high-risk state spending statewide.

Government officials should have their pay tied to outcomes. That is how it works in the private sector. It should work that way in Sacramento too.

Newsom wants to be president. He tries to take credit for a state that was really built by its great innovators and taxpayers by claiming his government is a national model for success. 

Fine. Show us what that model looks like when it is held accountable.

Open the books on the Butterfly Bridge. Explain the fungi designer. Tell us who signed off on $114 million for a project that started at $54 million and is still not done. Explain the many other out-of-control projects on which the state has recklessly blown taxpayer money.

I have lived here my whole life. I chose to build a business here. I stayed when it got harder. But there is a limit to what citizens can absorb when their government treats accountability as optional.

We are not ATMs. We are taxpayers. And we deserve to know where our money is going.

Aaron Bergh is a lifelong Californian and small business owner. His petition, “Audit Newsom’s Out-of-Control $114 Million Butterfly Bridge Now,” is live at change.org.