Somewhere above ten lanes of the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills, California, birds have started landing on a bridge that was built for mountain lions. The bridge isn’t finished. Nobody invited the birds. They just showed up.
The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing was supposed to open last year. It didn’t. It was supposed to cost $92 million. It costs $114 million. It was supposed to be a feel-good story about cougars and conservation. Instead, it became the centerpiece of a week that also featured 89 hospice agencies in one building, a YouTuber confronting hospice workers in parking lots, and a governor whose press office decided to pick a fight with all of them.
This is the week Gavin Newsom’s California had. The bridge is just where it starts.
The Man Who Called It a Boondoggle
Christopher Rufo is a conservative activist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow. On Wednesday, he and co-author Kenneth Schrupp published an investigation in City Journal calling the wildlife crossing a “$114 million butterfly bridge” and a jobs program for environmentalists. The numbers are real. Newsom committed $54 million at the 2022 groundbreaking and projected a $92 million total. Four years later, the project is past due and $21 million over budget.
Rufo didn’t stop at the article. He posted a thread of tweets that collectively reached hundreds of thousands of views — video of Newsom at the groundbreaking, footage of an Indigenous nursery worker discussing cultural offerings to native plants, and a clip of Pratt, which he captioned with a line about putting “crazy in charge.” Libs of TikTok picked it up. The Daily Wire ran it. By Thursday morning, the bridge had its own news cycle.
The Woman Who Wrote Back
Image credit: @bethpratt/Facebook
Pratt is the California regional executive director of the National Wildlife Federation. She has spent 14 years on this project. She did not respond with a tweet.
She responded with what amounted to a sourced engineering report on Facebook. Multiple pages. Construction timelines. Cost breakdowns. An explanation of how record flooding in 2022 and 2023 filled open excavations and forced crews to redo soil compaction multiple times. A breakdown of four separate projects folded into one: the freeway bridge, a secondary road structure, a utility relocation spanning high-voltage lines, a water main, and five telecom vendors, plus a 13-acre habitat restoration.
She noted the Stage 1 contractor came in below state projections. The overruns came from Stage 2. About $37 million — 32% of construction costs — comes from private donors, not taxpayers.
Rufo called the post “rambling.” He did not address a single specific point it raised.
The Week Was Already on Fire
The bridge would have been enough. But the bridge wasn’t alone.
Image credit: @nickshirleyy/X
A day earlier, 23-year-old YouTuber Nick Shirley released a 40-minute video alleging more than $170 million in hospice and daycare fraud across Los Angeles and San Diego. He followed workers leaving a supposed hospice center and filmed them climbing into new BMWs and a Cybertruck. He visited daycares that appeared to have no children. The video has been viewed millions of times across platforms.
Newsom’s press office responded by posting a mocking image. Shirley’s reply — about trying to help eliminate fraud — got over 190,000 likes and 1 million plus views. The governor’s office had turned a YouTuber into an underdog.
Then CBS News published its own investigation. More than 700 of the roughly 1,800 hospices in Los Angeles County trigger multiple red flags for possible fraud. Reporters visited a Van Nuys building with 89 registered hospice agencies and found empty offices, piled-up mail, and dead phone lines. The state auditor had flagged a 1,500% increase in LA County hospice companies since 2010.
Three investigations. One governor. Five days.
Back to the Bridge
Here is what got lost in the noise.
Wildlife crossings work. Arizona’s 20-plus corridors have cut wildlife-vehicle collisions by 90%. Crossings with fencing reduce large-mammal crashes by up to 97%. Americans hit more than a million animals on the road every year — 200 deaths, $8 billion in damage.
The cost comparison is real, too. Utah built one for $5 million. Colorado did it in a year for $15 million. Neither crossed ten lanes of urban freeway while relocating a water main and five telecom networks. Pratt says the scope isn’t comparable. Critics say the scope is the problem.
The bridge still needs $6 million more in fundraising. California is projecting a $2.9 billion budget deficit.
Still on the Bridge
If it opens later this year as planned, the crossing will be the largest wildlife crossing in the United States. The Los Angeles Times reported in January that the structure, still unfinished, has already attracted birds, lizards, and insects. It rises 30 feet above the freeway. There is no ribbon to cut. The animals came anyway.