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IN MY VIEW -
The city is in “a very difficult position,” – City Controller Kenneth Mejia.
You can feel it coming; it’s in the air. Los Angeles is approaching an event horizon, driven by ideological governance and a retreat from statutory responsibility. Leaders entrusted with preserving a world-class city have instead normalized dysfunction, excused and celebrated failure, and treated decline as a moral victory. Whether through incompetence, indifference, or purposeful actions, it no longer matters. The outcome is the same: a city on the verge of collapse, with too little time left to pretend this is just a rough patch.
Los Angeles is at a point of systemic failure. For instance, city leadership appears unwilling to acknowledge that streets are deteriorating faster than they are repaired. Voter-mandated transportation reforms are being ignored. Budgets are hollowed out even as operating costs surge. And looming gasoline prices of $8 to $10 per gallon threaten to detonate the fragile economic model that keeps the city barely functioning.
This is not a collection of unrelated problems. Los Angeles is experiencing a cascading system of failures, in which transportation, infrastructure, public safety, homelessness services, and municipal finance are all breaking down simultaneously. The city was built on the assumption of affordable, reliable mobility. Years of policy choices hostile to automobiles, dismissive of parking requirements, and indifferent to the realities of how people live and work will shatter their assumption that cars are a burdensome, polluting inconvenience. As driving becomes more expensive and less viable, the foundation of daily life and commerce in Southern California will diminish into a shadow of its former self. The City Council will now have to confront a reality it long refused to acknowledge: the automobile is not a cultural preference but the circulatory system of the city’s economy, workforce, and commerce.
Measure HLA is not the problem; it is the symptom, the tip of the iceberg, revealing a city that can no longer execute even modest, voter-approved mandates. In March 2024, voters narrowly approved a legally binding requirement to add basic safety improvements during routine street repaving—work that was already funded and scheduled. More than a year later, the city has completed only a single 400-foot compliant segment, even as it continues repaving streets while ignoring the law.
This failure reflects a much deeper insolvency. Los Angeles has spent itself into paralysis after years of prioritizing expensive and ineffective homelessness programs, a sprawling and politically protected nonprofit bureaucracy, and unfunded service obligations tied to illegal immigration, including housing, healthcare, legal services, and public-safety costs. Billions have been allocated with little to no measurable improvement in outcomes, while core municipal functions have been systematically starved of resources. The result is a government that continues to tax, promise, and mandate but cannot deliver.
The proposed 2025–26 budget confirms this collapse rather than correcting it. Instead of restoring capacity, it eliminates staff responsible for capital delivery and grant execution, placing hundreds of millions of dollars at risk and guaranteeing continued nonperformance. This is not a budget retrenchment; it is a failure.
For more than two decades and accelerating sharply over the last twelve years, Los Angeles has been governed not as a functional city but as a political project. Successive City Councils and Mayors prioritized ideological signaling and patronage networks over competence, redirecting public resources toward favored nonprofits, politically connected contractors, bloated administrative (DEI) payrolls, and programs untethered from measurable results. Los Angeles taxes excessively because those revenues can be directed to supporters. This is old-fashioned fraud and corruption on a multi-billion-dollar industrial scale.
The city’s tax base should have been sufficient to modernize infrastructure, build reserves, and prepare Los Angeles for the demands of the 21st century, and at least the Olympics. Instead, that abundance was drained away. However noble the stated intentions, the outcome was predictable: capacity collapsed, accountability dissolved, and fiscal resilience was quietly exhausted. Los Angeles did not run out of money by accident. It chose to spend itself into fragility.
Los Angeles maintains approximately 28,000 lane miles of streets. Roughly 25 percent are already in poor condition. At least $4 billion over 30 years is required just to restore the network to acceptable standards. The city’s Pavement Condition Index sits in the low “fair” range—the most dangerous and expensive place to be.
Preventive maintenance on a healthy road may cost $10,000 per lane mile. Allow that same road to deteriorate, and reconstruction costs explode to $100,000–$300,000 per lane mile. Every year of delay compounds future liabilities.
The city fills between 250,000 and 350,000 potholes annually, a costly exercise in futility. Despite hundreds of millions allocated, streets are not being resurfaced fast enough to stop the decline. Residents see it daily. They ask where the money went. City Hall offers no credible answer.
This crisis is not accidental; it is a self-inflicted festering wound. Los Angeles deliberately chose to demonize fossil fuels, indulge in environmental catastrophizing, and suffocate energy supply under layers of regulation while ignoring the basic preconditions of a functioning city: affordable power, reliable mobility, affordable housing, and broad-based economic growth. Energy was treated as a mortal sin rather than the foundational input it is embedded in every mile driven, every good delivered, every emergency response, every job held, and every computer keystroke.
The outcome was inevitable. Over-regulation constricted supply, punitive taxation drove up costs, and policymakers responded to the damage by imposing still more taxes and mandates. Each new levy further shrank the productive economy, eroded the tax base, and accelerated the exodus. Los Angeles is now learning, the hard way, that prosperity cannot be taxed into existence, and that when government makes ordinary life unaffordable, people do not adapt. They exit, leaving the city poorer, weaker, and closer to collapse, one family and one business at a time.
If Los Angeles’s infrastructure situation is precarious today, $8 to $10 gasoline could push it into outright collapse.
Refinery closures and regulatory constraints make such prices plausible. For a city where car ownership is effectively mandatory for employment, these prices are not merely painful; they are destabilizing. As fuel prices rise, driving declines. As driving declines, gas-tax revenue collapses. The result is a brutal paradox: the city most dependent on driving loses the very revenue it relies on to maintain its roads.
A 30–50 percent reduction in gasoline consumption would cost Los Angeles roughly $66 million annually in gas-tax revenue—translating into thousands of lane miles that will no longer receive preventive maintenance and hundreds that will not be resurfaced at all. Revenue from LA’s exorbitant sales tax would fall because fuel purchases are necessary while other goods are sacrificed on the altar of a tight budget.
This is a classic death spiral. Deferred maintenance accelerates deterioration. Deterioration raises costs. Rising costs collide with falling revenue. The city falls further behind every year. Under this scenario, the already unrealistic 30-year rehabilitation timeline stretches to 45 or 50 years. Within a decade, pavement conditions are likely to fall from “fair” to “poor.” Without functional infrastructure, the city literally comes apart.
Los Angeles’s $12.9 billion budget was never designed to withstand an energy shock of this magnitude. Fuel costs for the city’s massive vehicle fleets—police, fire, sanitation, and public works—would surge. LADOT alone could see fuel costs rise by $20–$30 million annually.
Revenues would fall across the board. Sales taxes decline as households divert income to fuel. Business taxes diminish as margins evaporate. Parking and citation revenue drops as driving becomes unaffordable. Contractors demand price escalations or walk away. Street paving costs rise 20–40 percent. Projects are delayed, scaled back, or canceled. The math does not work. Something breaks.
For working Angelenos, $8 to $10 gasoline is not an inconvenience; it is an existential threat. Low-income workers already spend a disproportionate share of their income on transportation. At extreme prices, a single tank of gas can consume nearly a full day’s wages.
Some are forced back onto transit, adding hours to commutes. Others are priced out of employment altogether. Jobs that require physical presence, healthcare, logistics, construction, and hospitality become unreachable. This is how Los Angeles loses its workforce.
In Los Angeles, economic shocks do not primarily cause homelessness among working families. Once housed, tenants are difficult to evict, and relocation payments can be substantial. Faced with unsustainable costs, most working households leave, moving to cheaper regions and red states.
Instead, the pressure manifests as soaring demand for publicly funded services: welfare, healthcare, transit subsidies, emergency response, and city-supported housing. These costs are compounded by the unfunded fiscal burden associated with the legions of mentally ill, drug abusers, and illegal immigrants, which has shifted housing, medical, legal, incarceration, and public-safety costs onto local taxpayers without federal reimbursement. At the same time, the tax base erodes. With state, county, and city budgets already in structural deficit, there is no remaining capacity to absorb these failures.
Police and fire departments operate vast fleets and already consume most of the General Fund. As fuel costs rise and revenues fall, the choices are unavoidable: response times worsen, staffing shrinks, or budgets crack. The margin of public safety—already thin—collapses further. Fewer officers patrol. Emergency response slows. Deterrence erodes; crime explodes. There is no painless adjustment.
Los Angeles has promised the world a “car-free” Olympics in 2028, built on seamless transportation and modern infrastructure. At the moment, those promises must be fulfilled; the city is cutting the very staff responsible for making them possible. The Olympics will not conceal failure; they will expose it. A global audience will witness the consequences of denial and neglect.
The failure is not one program or one mandate. It is a governing culture that allocates billions to initiatives with no measurable outcomes (large-scale fraud) while starving core city functions of capacity. They have only one plan: to extract as much money from us as possible to keep this carousel of grift and failure going a little longer. Do not be surprised when they raise taxes and fees again in 26.
Corrective action must be structural. Operational staffing cuts must stop. Spending must be tied to results, enforced through independent audits, and backed by real consequences. Core infrastructure, transportation, and public safety funding must be protected from diversions into suicidal empathy and failed left-wing policies that are destroying Los Angeles.
Mayor Karen Bass and all her deputy mayors should resign. Los Angeles cannot survive leadership this destructive and incompetent. The failure is no longer abstract; it is visible to anyone who lives or visits here. Mass resignation is not radical when stupendous failure after failure has occurred. It is the minimum action required to prevent irreversible decline.
(Eliot Cohen has served on the Neighborhood Council for 12 years, 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.)
