NYT: Los Angeles Needs a Strongman

no no no no no no no no no no no, and also no

Wrong, wrong, wrong. And psychologically interesting, as an examination of ideological priors. But mostly wrong.

The New York Times has an answer to the question raised by the fires in Los Angeles, and, uh. So here’s how they frame the problem:

The city of Los Angeles, with a population of 3.8 million, is one of 88 different cities that make up the county of Los Angeles. That county, with a population of 9.6 million spread across 4,751 square miles stretching inland from the Pacific Ocean, is controlled by a five-person board of supervisors, each one representing 1.9 million people. Each of those supervisors rivals the mayor of Los Angeles in clout as they oversee their own fiefdoms in the nation’s most populous county, even if they are relatively unknown by constituents.

Within those vast borders, there is a Los Angeles Police Department and a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, as well as an additional 45 police departments protecting, to name a few, Santa Monica, Long Beach, Inglewood and Pasadena. There are dozens of municipal fire departments, including one that serves the city and another that serves the county.

So when bad stuff happens, see, everything gets all confused. Nobody knows who’s even in charge!

And here’s the indescribably horrible answer, with emphasis added, highlighting the sentence that gave me dry heaves:

These structural tensions have long been a source of frustration for Los Angeles mayors. In interviews, two of them — Mr. Garcetti and Antonio Villaraigosa — said they would support creating a dominant government representing the region, to replace the network of overlapping municipal governments. Mr. Villaraigosa said he supported, for example, remaking Los Angeles along the lines of San Francisco, which is both a county and a city. They both argued the issue had become more urgent with the kind of natural disasters that have come with climate change.

They compare the poor health of Los Angeles, with diffused leadership, to the good health of cities with unified systems of authority, like San Francisco, New Orleans, and Philadelphia. Please try to guess my current facial expression. Imagine a place being as healthy as Philadelphia, if you dare to dream of such things.

So the path to health is the centralization of power and the elimination of separate jurisdictions. You could make Manhattan Beach and the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Glendora much healthier by just having all of those places entirely governed right out of downtown Los Angeles, eliminating their local city councils and school boards and just having one bold Karen Bass figure at the top.

This isn’t merely wrong — it’s actively insane. Los Angeles is geographically diffused and slow to transit; friends complain about meeting eight miles away, because it’s so far. Before MLB screwed up the minor leagues, we used to spend a good part of every summer at High-A baseball games in Lancaster (still in Los Angeles County) and Rancho Cucamonga (a few miles into a neighboring county). I would invite other families to join us. They would squint and say, “Out there?” Thou embarkest upon a journey to yon Outer Lands? Like it was a quest to drive over the mountains to see the Lancaster Jethawks. Unifying all of this into one streamlined jurisdiction is disenfranchisement. It’s an assault on representation. “Great news, we’ve moved your city hall to the middle of the 4,751 square-mile county.”

But beyond that, the strawman is that the fragmentation into separate jurisdictions is a failure and an impediment to practical effort.

Case in point: You know about the two disastrous fires that started in dry brush and high winds in the hills of Los Angeles County on the night of January 7, but you haven’t heard of the third, because it wasn’t a disaster. That third fire happened in my tiny suburban town, South Pasadena, a city that doesn’t work at all but somehow has solid police and fire departments that operate in their own cultural bubble, outside the local malaise. Our fire was a big problem, or would have been, as it grew explosively in the first moments after it started burning:

There are hundreds of homes in the Monterey Hills in South Pasadena, many of them on narrow streets that fire departments struggle to access quickly. And a major fire starting in the Monterey Hills in South Pasadena could quickly spread into the Monterey Hills in Los Angeles; a runaway fire here has a long way to run, through a lot of dry brush and narrow streets.

Now: South Pasadena has a one-station fire department, with one engine company and one paramedic ambulance. So a big fire, spreading fast, in dry brush, in the hills, among densely packed houses on narrow streets, on a windy night, in a town with one fire engine.

But South Pasadena is a Verdugo city, one of the cities in the fourteen-agency Verdugo system. All fourteen fire departments are dispatched from one call center, on automatic mutual aid, as if they were one fire department. Four fire departments immediately responded to the first call of a fire in South Pasadena, before the South Pasadena fire chief called for a second alarm and five more engines from other fire departments. And then, as this local news story reported:

The department got control of the fire within about 30 minutes. Lloyd breathed a sigh of relief when the captain of engine 39 reported to him, “Forward progress stopped.” He cancelled the second alarm he issued for the other five units before they’ve even arrived and, knowing conditions elsewhere were worsening, he released those that had responded.

Engine 39 is a Pasadena engine, from a different city. The captain on Engine 39 reported to the South Pasadena fire chief, a chief officer from a different department, that the forward progress of the fire had been stopped. They had no problem at all coordinating across agencies, a task they perform all the time. So here’s the headline and subhed at the New York Times, describing the problem:

True? Or not true?

Now, screenshot below, but MY GOD click this link to watch this video from the Free Press:

See, if we could eliminate all the separate jurisdictions and just have everything run by the same people who run the Los Angeles Fire Department, the problem would be solved, and everything would work well.

The Palisades fire started in the City of Los Angeles, and initially burned within the jurisdiction of a single government, until it exploded out of control and grew into an enormous and multijurisdictional wildfire. The Eaton fire started in the unincorporated County of Los Angeles jurisdiction of Altadena, and initially burned within the jurisdiction of a single government, until it exploded out of control and grew into an enormous and multijurisdictional wildfire. The Teresa fire started in one small suburban city, South Pasadena, and was quickly stopped by four different fire departments without crossing city boundaries.

But if only Karen Bass and Kristin Crowley had also been in charge in South Pasadena, I guess. Centralization and strongmen, clearly the real solution. How interesting to see those as healthy things.