The new year in Sacramento didn’t start with a bang, but it definitely produced more than a whimper of change.

California Governor-elect Gavin Newsom (D) will have to deal with a financial mess left behind by outgoing Governor Jerry Brown (D). It’s not just the trillion dollar unfunded pension liability that has metastasized during the Brown administration. Another one of the major challenges that Newsom will confront as chief executive of the world’s fifth largest economy is what to do with the high-speed rail project that Governor Brown has kept on life support and which has been described as “one of the biggest public policy failures in the state’s history.”

What does a California governor-elect do in the time between Election Day and the inauguration?

While Gov. Jerry Brown blames the horrific death toll from California’s late-season wildfires, he and the state’s lawmakers have done little to discourage people from building homes in high-risk wildfire zones known as the wildland-urban interface (WUI). By shifting the cost of wildfire prevention and protection to general taxpayers, they send the wrong signals about risk to WUI homeowners.