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OP|ED - It’s time to stop managing decline and start rebuilding.” Asaad Alnajjar
Los Angeles resembles a city abandoned by its own government. Streetlights remain broken for years. Sidewalks crumble into rubble and are covered with trash and human waste. Trees go unpruned, and brush piles up uncleared—turning neighborhoods into tinderboxes waiting to ignite. Graffiti covers freeway walls for months on end. And every time residents demand answers from City Hall, they receive the same empty excuse: "budget cuts." It's a lie of omission. The city isn't broke—it's broken, paralyzed by mismanagement and misplaced priorities while basic services decay and residents are left to fend for themselves.
Yet the budget hasn’t shrunk—it’s grown. The problem isn’t money—it’s management.
For nearly four decades, Assad Alnajjar, a professional engineer and longtime city employee, has watched this dysfunction from the inside. He’s seen how bureaucracy, consultants, and short-term stinking political thinking have hollowed out Los Angeles' civic machinery. Now, at 61, he’s decided to do something about it.
“I never planned to be a politician,” he says. “I just planned to fix things. But if no one in City Hall is willing to do that, then maybe it’s time an engineer took charge.”
Alnajjar’s connection to Los Angeles started in 1989 when he applied for an engineering job with the city. During his interview, he was asked where he saw himself in retirement; he replied, "Mayor of Los Angeles." He was hired on the spot.
Over the next 36 years, he worked across nearly every corner of city government—engineering, budgeting, 3-1-1 operations, sustainability programs, neighborhood councils, and significant infrastructure projects. He also volunteered for 22 years with the Los Angeles Fire Department and a decade with the LAPD. Today, he serves on the Porter Ranch Neighborhood Council.
He’s seen both the idealism and the dysfunction up close. “Politicians wake up and deal with whatever chaos is happening that day,” he says. “There’s no vision, no planning, no systems thinking. However, there is plenty of dependence on political consultants. Consultants don’t care about fixing problems; they are about spinning the problem to their client's greatest advantage. Engineers plan 25 years ahead. Politicians can’t think past the next press release.”
Ask Alnajjar what separates him from Los Angeles’ current leadership, and his answer is blunt: “They’re managing decline instead of building progress.”
He argues that City Hall’s leadership operates reactively, not strategically, relying on consultants and deputies rather than developing in-house expertise. They only care about winning the next election and keeping their job, not making the city better, more affordable, or safer. “The mayor has nearly a hundred administrative staff,” he says. “They cost millions, but they don’t produce value. Meanwhile, we lose about $500 million a year in lawsuit settlements and spend another $200 million defending ourselves. That’s $700 million gone before a single pothole gets fixed.”
For Alnajjar, this isn’t an abstract budget problem; it’s evidence of a city that’s stopped working for its residents. To Alnajjar, one of Los Angeles’ most serious but least discussed issues is the quiet expansion of political staffing inside City Hall. “Every administration adds more deputies, advisors, and consultants,” he says. “None of them fix streetlights or fill potholes, but they all draw six-figure salaries.”
Under the current mayor, the number of deputy mayors alone has swelled to nearly a dozen, with roughly ninety-four administrative and policy staffers attached to the mayor’s office. Most, he argues, are political appointments—campaign loyalists, communications specialists, and external consultants—rather than people with technical or operational experience. “They issue press releases about solutions,” he says, “but they’re not the ones implementing them.”
The irony, he adds, is that the city already employs thousands of professionals in Public Works, Planning, Transportation, and Engineering who could handle those same assignments at a fraction of the cost. “Instead of using our own talent, we outsource everything to people learning on the job,” he says. “For an extra ten thousand dollars a year, an experienced public works engineer could do what these consultants do for a hundred thousand.”
The result, Alnajjar argues, is a government top-heavy with talkers and painfully short on doers. “We don’t have a lack of workers,” he says. “We have a surplus of managers.”
When he joined Public Works in the early 1990s, streetlights were repaired within 72 hours.
“Now the average is three and a half years,” he says. “That’s not a typo.”
He attributes the decline to a combination of early retirements, unfilled positions, and a freeze on rehiring. “You walk through entire floors of empty cubicles,” he says. “They offer overtime, but you can’t give overtime to an empty chair.”
Minor regulatory missteps, he adds, have compounded the damage. A well-intentioned cap on Airbnb properties reduced listings from 50,000 to about 7,000, cutting roughly $300 million in city revenue. Combined with disruptions in hotel permitting and other regulatory confusion, he estimates the city has lost another $300 million.
“These are not policy debates,” he says. “They’re operational failures.”
Few places, Alnajjar says, show the city’s failure to plan more clearly than Van Nuys Airport. The airfield—surrounded by densely populated neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley—has become one of the busiest general aviation airports in the country. Residents have long complained about noise, pollution, and the risk of accidents as corporate jets and training aircraft crowd its runways.
“It’s a ticking bomb,” Alnajjar says. “You have flight schools, private jets, and repair operations packed into a landlocked space. One mistake, and it could be catastrophic.”
He believes Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) oversees Van Nuys and has ignored public input and local safety concerns. “They keep expanding operations instead of relocating them,” he says. His solution: move maintenance and training activities to Palmdale Airport, also owned by LAWA, where there’s room to grow. “If a hotel can move you to another room when it’s full, why can’t the city do the same with airports?” he asks. “You relieve pressure, reduce risk, and give Valley residents their neighborhoods back.”
To Alnajjar, the issue reflects a deeper pattern: decisions made for revenue, not for residents. “Good planning means anticipating consequences,” he says. “Right now, Los Angeles just reacts.”
Drive through Los Angeles, and it’s hard to ignore the physical decay, faded lane markings, untrimmed medians, and potholes deep enough to bend rims. “Tijuana looks better,” one interviewer remarked. Alnajjar doesn’t disagree.
“It’s not just money,” he says. “It’s competence. We have managers who’ve never fixed a thing in their lives running public works. They bring in outside contractors who don’t understand our infrastructure. Then they wonder why it all collapses.”
He points to one example that still frustrates him: the empty Pacific Palisades reservoir, left offline during fire season because of a leak. “It would take three or four days to patch,” he says. “But instead, it sat dry because the only contractor authorized to do it was backlogged. That’s not budget—it’s bad management.”
On public safety, Alnajjar pushes back against what he calls “the false choice between policing and compassion.” “We’re not over-policed,” he says. “We’re under-staffed and mismanaged.”
The LAPD’s sworn force has hovered around 9,000 officers for decades, even as the city’s population has grown from three million to nearly five. His proposal is to expand capacity to roughly 20,000 personnel, including civilians and cadets, so sworn officers can focus on law enforcement instead of paperwork. “It’s not about more policing,” he says. “It’s about restoring peace and order.”
He argues the same logic applies to the Los Angeles Fire Department, which has remained near 3,000 personnel for 20 years. “If a major earthquake hits today,” he says, “we’re not ready. We need at least 10,000 firefighters.”
Few issues expose L.A.’s dysfunction more starkly than homelessness. Billions have been spent, but tent encampments still line sidewalks and underpasses. Proposition HHH, meant to provide affordable housing, has produced units costing up to $800,000, but many are still sitting empty.
“It’s incompetence, plain and simple,” Alnajjar says. “We can’t build our way out of this.”
He divides the crisis into three categories—families, addicts, and displaced workers—and argues that each requires a different solution. Families, he says, need stabilization programs; addicts need rehabilitation and clinical care; displaced workers need retraining and transitional jobs.
“There are empty federal buildings with full clinics that could be reopened for veterans and recovery programs,” he says. “That’s where we should start—not with luxury apartments.”
His view is pragmatic, rooted in process rather than ideology: “You don’t fix every kind of leak with the same wrench.”
Perhaps the most overlooked casualty of Los Angeles’ political culture, Alnajjar says, is the erosion of public voice. The city’s 99 Neighborhood Councils—created in the early 2000s to connect citizens with City Hall—have been stripped of meaningful influence. “City attorneys have put gag orders on councils,” he says. “We can’t criticize the mayor or even comment on state policies. People are quitting because they can’t speak freely.”
Alnajjar advocates for a significant power shift: restoring independence to neighborhood councils and granting them real authority at City Hall. Each council would elect a president, and one of these presidents would take turns holding a seat in the City Council chambers each year, possessing a voice, voting, and veto powers over projects in their districts. "They follow the same ethics rules as city employees, but they have no voice and no pay," he says. "That's not civic engagement. That's tokenism designed to manufacture consent."
Neighborhood councils were meant to be the city's immune system—the people who know which corner floods, which lot can handle density, where a shelter will work, and where it will fail. They are the only ones capable of distinguishing between smart development and developer-driven disasters.
Instead, City Hall has systematically neutralized them, creating the illusion of community input. At the same time, District Council members and their staff steamroll local expertise and push decisions that benefit political donors more than residents. The result? Poor policies piling on top of each other, with no one left to oppose them.
Alnajjar’s critique of the city’s hiring culture is equally direct. “Competence has to come before politics,” he says. He prefers a blind hiring process when reviewing résumés, without names or personal identifiers to reduce bias and highlight qualifications. “You can’t fix a bridge with optics,” he says. “You fix it with engineering.” He argues this approach would also boost diversity by rewarding skill over tokenism. “When you build based on merit, you end up with people who actually know what they’re doing,” he says.
Beyond bureaucratic inefficiency, Alnajjar describes a workplace culture dominated by fear. “People are scared to speak up,” he says. “We’ve had managers who got physically ill before meetings with the mayor. That’s not leadership. That’s intimidation.” He recalls instances where dissenting voices were marginalized or reassigned rather than heard. “It’s not that people don’t care,” he says. “It’s that the system punishes initiative.”
If elected, Alnajjar says he would start by re-engineering the city from the ground up:
– Consolidate redundant consultant contracts.
– Redirect legal settlements toward infrastructure.
– Reopen critical job positions frozen under budget holds.
– Restore accountability and planning in every department.
– Rebuild trust between City Hall and the neighborhoods.
His philosophy is straightforward: replace political improvisation with engineering discipline. "Leadership isn’t about issuing press releases,” he says. “It’s about making decisions that last. I’ve spent 36 years watching this city decay. I know how to fix it. We just need the courage to do it.”
Assad Alnajjar’s campaign may seem unconventional, and it definitely is a long shot in a city used to celebrity mayors and slick talking points. But his message taps into something deeper — a growing feeling that Los Angeles no longer functions as a real city, and it’s only being kept together by inertia and the smart decision of those who came before.
“Engineers work with facts,” he says. “One plus one equals two. Politics keeps pretending it doesn’t. Ideology does not pave roads or balance a budget. That’s why nothing works.”
Whether voters agree or not, his diagnosis of Los Angeles' problems is impossible to ignore. The city that once symbolized innovation, ambition, and progress now struggles to keep streetlights on or maintain cleared streets, basic tasks that directly put lives at risk. Alnajjar may be a dark horse candidate, but he's prompting the conversation this city desperately needs.
Los Angeles is failing because essential skills are no longer valued. Running a major city isn't about politics, press conferences, progressive credentials, or how many mosques you've visited. It’s about picking up the trash, fixing the roads, and preventing residents from burning to death. If the establishment candidates can't promise that bare minimum, then Los Angeles doesn't need another politician. It requires someone who can actually do the job. The choice is clear: demand competence now or continue watching the city fall apart in real time.
(Eliot Cohen has been on the Neighborhood Council, served on the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, is on the Board of Homeowners of Encino, and was the president of HOME for over seven years. Eliot retired after a 35-year career on Wall Street. Eliot is a critic of the stinking thinking of the bureaucrats and politicians that run the County, the State, and the City. Eliot and his wife divide their time between L.A. and Baja Norte, Mexico. Eliot is a featured writer for CityWatchLA.com.)
