In October, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed Executive Directive #9 to establish a citywide capital infrastructure plan.
The directive was at once a breakthrough for L.A. and a demonstration of poor governance. Such capital plans — outlining priorities and multi-strategy strategies for building — are commonplace in local governments. But Los Angeles, a peculiar island in the governed world, did not have one.
I mention Bass’s directive not to exonerate her from her current political crisis, nor to take a side in the bitter battle over responsibility for this month’s fires.
Instead, I wish to emphasize that the big controversy over the fires’ causes — faulty hydrants, dry reservoirs, pre-positioning of fire engines, or lack of personnel — is way too small.
Los Angeles, buffeted by disaster, needs to have a bigger argument about its biggest challenge: how and whether the city government, after a half-century of shirking basic responsibilities, might start doing fundamental tasks again.
L.A. is deep in a hole. The city, which includes Pacific Palisades, doesn’t have a comprehensive catalogue of its infrastructure, or a plan for maintaining it. It’s a city that tolerates three water main breaks a day and disintegrating streets and a years-long backlog of sidewalk repairs.
Even worse, it’s a city that has all but given up on planning. Modern cities are supposed to make and update general plans, covering elements from conservation to public safety. But L.A.’s official planning documents are mostly out of date. Despite some recent updating work, L.A.’s community plans — which are part of the city’s land use plan — mostly date to the 1990s. A few city plans — for facilities and infrastructure — are a half-century old.
Planning is about imagining a future. A city that doesn’t plan isn’t tapping its collective imagination. That’s the bitter irony behind these fires. Los Angeles, a city world-famous for 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?
The lame excuses by Mayor Bass and L.A. fire officials — that the fire which destroyed Pacific Palisades was faster and stronger than any they could fight — are confessions of this failure. And they should have imagined this — even more powerful fires had recently destroyed other parts of California. City Fire Chief Kristin Cowley has admitted that larger fires emergencies “demand an expansion of our life-safety service capabilities.”
Why didn’t L.A. make plans equal to its challenges?
One answer 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 elected officials. 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 donations, or, worse, illegal favors. Which is why federal prosecutors have brought charges against so many city officials.
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Mayor Bass could have changed this system after she took office in 2022. She could have revamped the city council, cleaned out the 1980s-style city bureaucracy, or asked voters to rewrite the city charter, LA’s constitution. Instead, she emphasized collaboration within the existing system.
L.A. is a world-class place, but without a world-class city government. And it has no plan to create one. If the city won’t fix itself, state agencies might intervene by assuming some emergency responsibilities, as the state has done in Oakland and Bakersfield. The state could also convene L.A. residents, perhaps with citizens assemblies, to devise new city plans
The state would be justified in such a takeover. Los Angeles — unable to match state gains in employment, anti-poverty, and education — has been a drag on California since the early 1990s recession.
California will never turn itself around until it puts out the fire that is Los Angeles.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.
