By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2025-01-11 15:02:23 | Updated at 2025-01-11 17:52:59
2 hours ago
As the community of Pacific Palisades in the city of Los Angeles burned to the ground Tuesday night, LA Mayor Karen Bass was in Ghana to attend the inauguration of that country’s new president, while the man she defeated in the 2022 mayor’s race was on the air talking to a local television station about Bass’ “absolute mismanagement of the city.”
Real estate developer Rick Caruso also savaged city and county officials for their failure to clear brush in the hills “for probably 30 or 40 years,” increasing the risk of raging wildfires.
“What is most concerning to me is, our first responders and our firefighters who are trying to battle this, there’s no water in the Palisades,” Caruso told Fox 11 News. “There’s no water coming out of the fire hydrants.” Caruso slammed Bass for being out of the country while the city was burning.
Bass chose to attend a Jan. 7 event in Africa even though the National Weather Service in Los Angeles had warned as early as Jan. 2 of the risk of “extreme fire growth” and power outages due to high winds forecast for Jan. 7-9.
Before she traveled, the mayor signed off on a news release to announce “preparedness measures” that the city had taken ahead of the dangerous conditions.
But shockingly, she failed to order any action to find and clear homeless encampments, a known fire hazard, from fire-prone areas.
Instead, Bass reported that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority would continue to conduct “outreach” to individuals living on the streets in “high fire severity zones.”
The US Supreme Court ruled last summer that cities may enforce an anti-camping ordinance, but Los Angeles officials have refused to do so.
Homeless encampments in Pacific Palisades have long been a concern. In 2014, a group of community volunteers formed the Pacific Palisades Task Force on Homelessness and began “organizing cleanups of abandoned encampments in our fire-prone hillsides.”
The group says it cleaned up 535 last year alone.
What caused the dry fire hydrants? The new CEO of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Janisse Quiñones, told reporters on Wednesday that there was just too much demand on the system.
Quiñones was hired by Bass in April to run the city-owned LADWP at the eye-popping salary of $750,000 plus a housing allowance. She “has the skill set and leadership experience to advance the department into 100% clean energy by 2035,” the mayor said at the time.
“It’s important to me that everything we do, it’s with an equity lens and social justice,” Quiñones told a radio host in July, “and making sure we right the wrongs that we’ve done in the past from an infrastructure perspective.”
Doesn’t anybody in the city government just want to get water to fire hydrants?
Hydrants also went dry during the 2018 Woolsey Fire that burned nearly 97,000 acres in Malibu and Ventura County, destroyed 1,643 structures, and killed three people. Electricity was shut off, disabling the pumps that moved water to the hydrants.
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West hired private firefighters to save their home in Hidden Hills from the approaching flames.
More LA residents may want to look into private fire protection after the mayor signed a $12.8 billion city budget in June that cut $17.5 million from the LA Fire Department’s budget.
In December, Fire Chief Kristin M. Crowley warned the Board of Fire Commissioners that the cuts, especially the $7 million reduction in “overtime variable staffing hours,” had “severely limited” the LAFD’s capacity to respond to wildfires and other large-scale emergencies.
In the same budget, Bass enthusiastically supported salary increases for the city’s civilian employee unions projected to cost $316 million in the first year and $1 billion per year in 2028.
Why cut the fire department’s budget? The answer may be that the California constitution requires voter approval for local tax increases. Starving the fire department of resources leads to scary scenarios that can be used to persuade voters to say yes to higher taxes.
In fact, that just happened in the November election. The union that represents LA County firefighters collected signatures for an initiative that slaps a new annual tax of $60 per 1,000 square feet on properties served by the Los Angeles County (not city) Fire Department.
Voters were told the tax hike would raise $152 million annually to ensure “local firefighter/paramedic emergency response, involving wildfires, house fires, heart attacks, strokes, and car accidents; to hire/train firefighters/paramedics, upgrade/replace aging firefighter safety equipment, fire engines, helicopters, facilities, life-saving rescue tools, and 911 communications technology.”
That description on the ballot made it hard to vote no, but 45% of voters did, probably because they recognized the same old trick. LA County has a $45 billion annual budget, and if county leaders can’t find $152 million to fight fires and save lives, the FBI should take a look at the books.
Don’t blame climate change. The terrible fires in Los Angeles County were caused by egotistical politicians who indulge in virtue signaling instead of delivering basic government services.
California residents are paying a high price for electing them.
Susan Shelley is an editorial writer with the Southern California News Group, and VP of communications for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. On X: @Susan_Shelley.
