When two hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center towers in New York City on the morning of September 11, 2001, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani became the face of a city struggling with violence, a place there is agreement, security and control. The reputation he forged that day will be tarnished with time, but he became a model for the mayor facing problems throughout the country.
As Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles faces a city dealing with wildfires, her performance has raised questions, even among her supporters, about whether she can pass to lead the city from the crisis that New Yorkers saw more than 23 years ago.
Some of these concerns reflect his relative lack of experience in governance – he is a former member of Congress and the California legislature, where he served in a powerful role as the to speak And some of this concern has to do with the loss of his absence from the city during the fire.
But the question of who is in charge – of who plays the role in Los Angeles that Mr. Giuliani did in New York, using an example – also a testimony to the spread and, in some cases, the dysfunction that causes the DNA base. of the administration of the greater Los Angeles area. This muddled policy is a smart one, and by design is deliberate, compared with New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and other cities with great power, big leaders.
The city of Los Angeles, with a population of 3.8 million, is one of the 88 different cities that make up the city of Los Angeles. That city, with a population of 9.6 million spread across 4,751 square miles of land by the Pacific Ocean, is governed by five governors, each representing 1.9 million people. Each of these conservatives challenge the mayor of Los Angeles in power as they guard their own fiefdoms in the nation’s most populous country, even if they are unknown to the voters.
Within these larger boundaries, there are the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, as well as an additional 45 law enforcement agencies, to name two three, Santa Monica, Long Beach, Inglewood and Pasadena. There is twelve fire stations in the cityIncluding one that works in the city and another that works for the city.
One of the two major fires that devastated this area – the Eaton fire – was not in the city of Los Angeles; it is in an incorporated part of Los Angeles County. The response to the Eaton fire was led by the city fire department; The city’s fire department is on the front lines fighting the Palisades fire.
All of this is a recipe, analysts say, for competition among elected officials and confusion among voters, and a challenge for even the people elected officials have succeeded in trying to take the mantle of leadership when Gray Davis, former governor of California, called “the dispersed and discombobulated nature of our government.”
“As a leader most of my life – governor, president, governor – there are times when you need clear accountability, someone who will give orders and accept responsibility whether everything works or not,” said Mr. Davis, who was governor from 1999 to 2003. “People here don’t seem to want that for a day. But in an emergency, we need that. And we don’t have a system. “
When New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, causing widespread destruction and hundreds of deaths, the mayor, C. Ray Nagin, stepped in to lead his city through the crisis. , and raised its national profile. (Mr. Nagin’s reputation, like Mr. Giuliani’s, too lost with time). Mrs. Bass was just one part of the system, referring to the Palisades fire, but so was Kathryn Barger, a member of the county board whose county includes the Eaton fire.
“What you have in a city like New York is a presidential headquarters,” said Raphael J. Sonenshein, a Los Angeles political and government expert and executive director. the work that, even in quiet moments, everything flows to the mayor,” of the Haynes Foundation, a research organization in Los Angeles. “Here it is a bit more of an art to be the mayor. The mayor may have good intentions, but to solve the problems, you have to know how to do it. getting these governing bodies to work together is very difficult to achieve.”
None of this is a mistake.
The web of overlapping governments is the product of a change in governance that has evolved over the years, designed to limit the authority of cities, towns and the people who lead them. Many people who lived here in the last century came from the Midwest, and they have a distrust of the powerful leaders and political machines found in cities like Philadelphia, New York and Chicago.
The mayor of Los Angeles does not control the school, as in some large cities. Public health often falls under the jurisdiction of Los Angeles County, forcing the mayor and commissioners to work together on issues such as homelessness. In the city, there is a group of police officers who make the final decision on hiring and firing the police chief; Mrs. Bass needed the job to agree on his choice of who should be the leader.
The stakes here are high. The fire has subsided, but rebuilding can be difficult such as fighting the fire, testing resources and speeding up the list of victims election.
Eric M. Garcetti, the former mayor, said that all of these government agencies – however historically competitive – appeared to work together during the fire. “But for the reconstruction, it will be very important for us to act like we are in one city and not a group of 88 villages,” he said in an interview from India answer, where he is now the US ambassador.
These structural issues have long been a source of frustration for Los Angeles mayors. In the interview, both of them – Mr. Garcetti and Antonio Villaraigosa – said they will support the creation of a central government representing the region, to replace the network of local governments. Mr. Villaraigosa said he supports, for example, rebuilding Los Angeles along the lines of San Francisco, which is both a city and a city. They both argued that the problem has become more urgent with the natural disasters that have come with climate change.
Mr. “I don’t think that’s going to happen in my lifetime, but it’s going to increase the relationship,” Mr. Garcetti said. For now, he said, the mayor must retreat to the power of persuasion. “Illegal power is very important,” he said. “It is very important to provide unity.”
Mr. Villaraigosa said that, being concerned about the problems of the structure in Los Angeles, he did not criticize Ms. Bass. “I don’t want to be involved in that,” he said. “But when you have a whole organization involved – 25 speakers – it expands the leadership structure. You have two different bureaucracies trying to work together. Sometimes they do, sometimes they do. they don’t.”
By contrast, without restrictions from the regulations, Gov. Gavin Newsom has been an important part of the present nearly two weeks ago, walking through the smoke as he talked with firefighters and people who lost their homes. He introduced specific legislation to address the Los Angeles wildfires and signed executive orders for response and recovery efforts.
Ms. Bass has been criticized for being out of the country when the fire broke out – he was in Ghana in West Africa to attend a meeting of his new president. When he returned, in a widely circulated clipMrs. Bass stood quietly when a reporter pressed him on why he left the fire warning.
Since his return, he has announced his own administration to rebuild quickly, and he has called a longtime community leader, Steve Soboroff, to work on the restoration. But he also defended his performance, saying he and leaders across the region were working “in lock step” to solve the problem.
“We are actively fighting this fire,” he said in a press conference on the second day of the crisis, adding: “So what we see is the result of eight months of rain and wind haven’t seen in LA in at least 14 years. And we have to fight one – one – effort to pull us apart.”
The mayor’s office did not immediately return a request for comment Saturday.
Even before the fire, there was a movement to restore the system. In November, city voters approved the biggest change in government in a century – including the creation of a new person to lead the city of Los Angeles, a city manager who elected to vote in the 2028 election.
“They will be the most powerful voters in the United States,” said Fernando Guerra, you. Head of the Center for Learning Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. “They will represent 10 million people. They will be very strong. Most importantly, they are going to steal the voice and voice of the mayor of Los Angeles. It will be as important a center as New York is now. “
It is difficult to say what the responsibility of the city manager will be to manage the government’s response to the fire, a responsibility that is often overseen by the fire departments themselves. But officials said what the region needs, in addition to the fire and police who led the response, is a political leader showing morals and values. do, with a platform to speak across the city whose population is larger than from. most states.
“People want to see their elected officials — who they want to see,” said Zev Yaroslavky, who spent 20 years as a member of the Los Angeles City Council and 20 years as a member of the Los Angeles County Commission. is in charge,” . “In this particular case, the reality is you have two different fires: one in the city of Los Angeles and one in an unincorporated area of the city. Who’s in charge?”
Shawn Hubler help guide.