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DEEGAN ON LA—As the fires scorched, the tables turned. Dagger-like fingers pointed to deficiencies in readiness and management and cast a long shadow over civic Los Angeles.
A burning question, viewed through the lens of today, has emerged: does City Hall have the executive management capacity to deal with a tragedy of such enormous size? Is a former legislator, used to wrangling with lawmaking but with little executive experience, adept at handling crisis management for the city? Or is the task of running LA better left to an experienced business executive.
The voters had that choice—someone qualified to be dealing with in-chamber votes in the state and national capitals or a successful business executive with decades of management experience who knows how to get things done? In November 2022, voters chose Karen Bass to be Mayor, not Rick Caruso.
Voter remorse may be entering the fray. Within days, and still raw from the searing experience of watching two huge communities (Palisades and Altadena) turned into ash, the first post-fire political poll was released showing Rick Caruso ahead of Mayor Bass by 7% if the mayoral election were held today. In the 2022 general election, the winning margin for Bass was a comfortable 9 points over Caruso. This 16-point swing is hard not to notice.
Bass is a serial politico with twenty-one years as a legislator while Caruso has some political experience (Police Commission and DWP Commission), and a strong record as a business executive. It’s too late to make a city leadership change right now, but not too early to have an eye on the mayoral race next spring and track the perceived electability of the mayor and her past and future opponents.
The mayor is trying to fill the management void with a “recovery czar” who has decades of experience as a City Hall insider. Former Police Commission member and real estate developer Steve Soboroff has the daunting task of leading the resurgence of Pacific Palisades. He’s a public service and private sector hybrid that will be assisted, the mayor recently announced, by the hiring of outside consultants— “major firms” as she called them— possibly telegraphing that she may not have faith that LA has qualified business executives and residents to do the job. So far, the community has no announced role in the rebuilding of Palisades, as the permitting and letting of contracts feeding frenzy is about to start.
Soberoff tried to assuage any concerns that locals were being left out of the process by telling the LA Times “We ain’t going to do this without a whole bunch of friends.”
The roster of Soboroff’s “friends” and the mayor’s “consultants” has not yet been made public.
A counterpoint to the mayor’s teaming of Soberoff and consultants has come from Governor Newsome who has gone local, announcing the creation of a high powered LA businessman-centric group called LA Rises a private- sector initiative led by Dodgers owner Mark Walter, the legendary Los Angeles icon Earvin “Magic” Johnson, and sports agent executive and Olympics 28 chairman Casey Wasserman “to support swift and unified rebuilding of Los Angeles”. This troika has already received a pledge of 100 million dollars toward their mission.
Altadena, not part of the city, has the leadership of a very strong County Supervisor Kathryn Barger. What we will witness in the coming months is a tale of two communities; the race is on.
Soberoff must deal with a collection of pressure points starting with POTUS at the federal level, Governor Newsom at the state level, and Mayor Bass at the city level. Each of these silos is loaded with constituent parts.
The most important constituents for Soberoff and Mayor Bass are the residents of Palisades for whom “recovery” may be front of mind when the municipal election cycle begins next spring. In 2022 Bass ran on a platform of housing the thousands of homeless; next time she may also be promising to house thousands of newly homeless, but a cohort of a different brand.
As part of Los Angeles was actively burning to the ground, the Fire Chief was attacking the Mayor, her political opponent who almost became mayor was needling her, during an onsite visit POTUS gave her short shrift and the governor is so front and center that he leaves the mayor little oxygen.
At the start of the Rodney King riots, Governor Pete Wilson arrived, stepping onto the LAX tarmac in time to appear live on the 11pm news with the statement I have arrived to take charge, and I brought the National Guard with me. The Guard troops exited the plane with Wilson.
Mayor Bass stepped off a plane at LAX coming home from Ghana, after the fires had started, and stared into the cameras with a frozen expression. No Pete Wilson moment for her. It took days to find her footing and even then it was by press release political speak, not inspired leadership.
Applied logic would say that we are at an inflection point where we need someone to lead us in the recovery strategy and also into the future of Los Angeles. Soberoff has part one of that, the mayoral primary election next spring will provide clarity on part two.
Across the continent, the New York political observer and crisis management specialist Jim McCarthy captures the moment when he says that "it’s fascinating to watch Caruso mounting this shadow campaign of sorts”.
New York also provides a warning: Mayor Lindsey got publicly clobbered when he was unprepared to deal with a historic blizzard and was blamed for not getting streets plowed quickly enough. It almost cost him re-election. LA or New York, fire or ice, a mayor is the first and last stop in leading their city through crisis.
(Tim Deegan is a civic activist whose Deegan on LA weekly column about city planning, new urbanism, the environment, and the homeless appear in CityWatch. Tim can be reached at [email protected].)
