L.A. ignored planning and governing responsibilities for 50 years. Will the fires change that?
The Democracy Column is co-published with Zócalo Public Square. Photo by Joe Mathews
In October, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed a document called Executive Directive #9, which launched a process for establishing a citywide capital infrastructure plan.
The directive was both a historic breakthrough and a demonstration of L.A.’s poor governance, for the very same reason: Such capital plans—which outline priorities and multi-year strategies for building infrastructure—are commonplace in cities around this country and planet. But Los Angeles, a peculiar island in our world of governance, did not have one.
I mention this lack of plans not to exonerate Bass from her current political crisis, nor to take a side in the bitter battle over responsibility for the devastating fires, still burning as I write.
Instead, I wish to emphasize that the big controversy over the causes of the fires’ devastation—faulty hydrants, dry reservoirs, pre-positioning of fire engines, or lack of personnel—is way too small. And the need to recover and rebuild from these fires, while massive, is hardly the most serious problem that Los Angeles faces.
Rather, the biggest challenge posed by these disasters is whether the city of Los Angeles, after a half-century of reckless and irresponsible shirking of basic responsibilities, is ready to do the fundamental tasks of governance.
If the city decides to get serious about self-governance, it will be starting near the bottom. The city of L.A., which includes Pacific Palisades, doesn’t have a comprehensive catalogue of all its infrastructure, much less a plan for maintaining it. It’s a city that tolerates three water main breaks a day. It’s a city of disintegrating streets and failing street lights, and little organized effort to fix them. It’s a city with a list of requests for sidewalk repairs that would take years, if not decades, to process.
Even worse, it’s a city that has all but given up on planning. Modern cities typically have updated, official plans for all the elements of a city, from conservation to public safety. In California, such plans are required by state law. But most of L.A.’s official planning documents are out of date. Despite some recent updating work, many of L.A.’s community plans—plans for 35 different communities, which are part of the city’s land use element—date to the 1980s and 1990s. Key city plans—for public facilities and for infrastructure—are older than this 51-year-old columnist.
Planning is about imagining a future. A city that doesn’t plan is a city that doesn’t tap the imagination of its people. And that’s the bitter irony behind these fires, and the real cause of this tragedy.
Los Angeles, a city whose most famous industry runs on imagination, experienced a massive failure of imagination.
I mean, how could a city that produced films of itself destroyed by so many unusual disasters—tidal waves, ice storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, zombies, infections, sharknados, and a 50-foot-tall woman—not have been ready for an epic fire?
There is an explanation for the lack of readiness hiding beneath the lame excuses Mayor Bass and L.A. fire officials have made. They keep saying that the inferno that destroyed Pacific Palisades and Malibu was too much—too hot, too fast, and too dangerous to be stopped. “There’s nothing you can do to suppress the fire” once it’s that big, said County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone.
There’s an acknowledgment in that excuse—that they simply had no plan in place, and no firefighting tool, to prevent, much less stop, a powerful fire. Maybe they couldn’t imagine it. But they should have imagined it—fires that powerful had recently destroyed communities in other parts of California. City Fire Chief Kristin Cowley said as much to a TV interviewer. Larger fires and emergencies “demand an expansion of our life-safety service capabilities,” she explained.
Why didn’t L.A. make plans equal to its challenges?
The answer, in a word, is corruption. The real estate developers and public employee unions that dominate city governments don’t want to be constrained by plans; they prefer to use their power to negotiate special deals with city officials.
The absence of plans gives elected officials, in particular, the power to make ad hoc decisions about development and changes in their own districts. This sort of decision-making often runs on a pay-to-play system. Those who have power or money get what they want. And the council members get political donations, or, worse, illegal favors. Which is why federal prosecutors have spent the last decade bringing charges against councilmembers and city staffers.
Mayor Bass had her chances to change this system when she took office in 2022. She could have revamped the city council. She could have cleaned out the 1980’s-style city bureaucracy and built a 21st century technocracy. And last year, she had an opportunity to ask voters to rewrite the city charter, LA’s constitution. Instead, she offered up only minor changes to the charter, and balked at bigger moves, preferring to emphasize collaboration within the existing system.
These fires offer a second chance to remake L.A. city government. So far, Bass is flailing. And she has put a veteran insider of the broken system—the developer Steve Soboroff—in charge of the fire recovery, when what’s needed is a whole new plan, and new structure, for L.A. governance.
Perhaps Bass, once the smoke has cleared, will build on last October’s announcement of a capital investment plan and do something bolder. But she has yet to show that kind of vision.
L.A. may be a world-class place, but it does not have a world-class city government. And it has no plan to create one. Indeed, the city’s commitment to host the 2028 Olympics now looks like a distraction from the work of imagining a new future for a more resilient city.
If the city won’t fix itself, state agencies might intervene—by taking over some emergency responsibilities, as they have done recently with failed law enforcement in Oakland and Bakersfield. The state could also convene L.A. residents—I’d suggest using citizens assemblies—to create the plans that their officials have so long neglected.
The state would be fully justified in such a takeover. Los Angeles—unable to match state gains in employment and education—has been a drag on California and its economy since the early 1990s recession. Poverty rates and homelessness have soared here as they’ve flattened or declined elsewhere.
California will never turn itself around until it puts out the fire that is Los Angeles.
