From start to now, Los Angeles’s handling of the fires that tore through the city a year ago has been a masterclass in how not to run a city, and all of the Democratic leaders involved are happy to point the finger elsewhere instead of finding real solutions.
The latest response disaster has been fines levied against residents in the Pacific Palisades for brush-clearance penalties. Residents say that the fire department has not come to inspect their properties (which are currently under construction) and that they cannot reach anyone or even leave a message at the phone number provided on the citations they have received. According to one resident, “We have no house, and we have no brush,” and yet the citation arrived all the same.
The buck stops anywhere but with Mayor Karen Bass, it seems, as Bass is outraged that the city she runs is punishing the residents it has failed to help so far. Bass has put the blame for this at the feet of the Los Angeles Fire Department, calling it “unacceptable” and saying that “No resident who lost their homes in the Palisades fire should receive this charge.”
Were you to look at Bass’s tenure since the fires, you would think that all of these things just kept happening to her as an innocent bystander, rather than being a product of her failed leadership as the mayor of the city. Bass was the one who weakened the LAFD and who fled the city to Ghana when the fires broke out, breaking her own travel promises. Bass’s team was warned about the risks of a large fire before her vacation, but she left anyway, and Los Angeles was unprepared for the scope of the fires.
LA COUNTY CUTS NEARLY $200 MILLION IN HOMELESS SERVICES TO NARROW BUDGET DEFICIT
Then, in the aftermath of the fires, the left-wing Los Angeles Times accused Bass of altering a report about the fires to take heat off the city. That is the same Los Angeles Times that endorsed Bass for mayor. Through it all, the rebuilding efforts have been a failure as well. According to the Los Angeles County dashboard, the city has rebuilt 13 homes in the 13 months since the fires started. Now, people whose homes have still not yet been rebuilt are being hit with fines by the city.
Los Angeles has done nothing correctly before, during, or after the fires. Bass and the other Democrats who run the city want to point fingers everywhere but at themselves, refusing to acknowledge that their incompetence and their love of bureaucracy destroyed whole neighborhoods and have strangled the rebuilding efforts for over a year.
