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When two hijacked airplanes hit the World Trade Center towers in New York City on the morning of September 11, 2001, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani became the face of the city’s fight against disaster, an omnipresent presence that emanates authority. , guarantee and control. The reputation he defended that day will be tarnished by time, but he has become a model for mayors facing crises across the country.
As Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass faces a city grappling with devastating fires, her performance has raised questions, even among her supporters, about her ability to become a dominant executive. managing a city in crisis that New Yorkers saw more than 23 years ago.
Some of these concerns reflect his lack of executive experience – he is a former member of Congress and the California state assembly, where he served in powerful roles as speaker. And some of these concerns have to do with the fallout of his absence from the city when the fire broke out.
But the question of who is in charge — who plays the role in Los Angeles that Mr. Giuliani did in New York, to use an example — is also a testimony to the sprawl and, at times, dysfunction that make up the basic DNA. the administration of the greater Los Angeles area. This chaotic power is sharp, and deliberate, in contrast to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and other cities dominated by strong and powerful mayors.
The city of Los Angeles, with a population of 3.8 million, is one of the 88 different cities that make up Los Angeles County. The district, with a population of 9.6 million spread over 4,751 square miles of land that stretches inland from the Pacific Ocean, is governed by a five-member board of trustees, representing 1 ,9 million each. Each of these supervisors is competing against the mayor of Los Angeles as they control their districts in the most populous county in the country, even if voters don’t know. don’t even them.
Within these broad boundaries are the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, as well as 45 additional police departments protecting, to name but a few, Santa Monica, Long Beach , Inglewood and Pasadena. There are dozens of municipal fire departments, including one that serves the city and one that serves the county.
One of the two major fires that devastated this area—the Eaton fire—isn’t even in the city of Los Angeles; it is located in an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County. The response to the Eaton fire was led by the county fire department; The city’s fire department was at the forefront of the Palisades fire.
It’s all a recipe, analysts say, for animosity between elected officials and voter confusion, and a challenge for even the best elected officials trying to take the mantle of a leader in what former California governor Gray Davis calls “the fragmented and chaotic nature of our government.”
“Being an executive most of my life – governor, lieutenant governor, governor – there are times when you need clear accountability, someone who will give orders and accept responsibility whether it works or not,” said Mr. Davis, who is the governor of 1999 to 2003. “People seem to dislike it every day. But when there is an emergency, we need it. And we don’t have that system.
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, causing hundreds of deaths and damage, Mayor C. Ray stepped in to lead his city through the crisis. Nagin, and raised his national identity. (Mr. Nagin’s popularity, like Mr. Giuliani’s, has also declined over time). At a recent press briefing on the Los Angeles fire, eight city and county officials lined up to speak. Ms. Bass was just one in the lineup, talking about the Palisades fire, but so was Kathryn Barger, the top member of the county board of supervisors who oversees the Eaton fire in the county.
“What you have in a city like New York is a core mayor-based system where, even in quiet moments, things flow to the mayor- everything,” said Raphael J. Sonenshein, a longtime Los Angeles political and government expert and executive director. of the Haynes Foundation, a civic research organization in Los Angeles. “This is a more elegant application of the mayor’s leadership. The mayor may have strong ideas, but to solve the problem, you need to consider how these administrative departments work together. It’s very difficult to do something.”
All this is no accident.
The web of conflicting governments is the result of a reformist system of government that has evolved over the years, designed to constrain the power of cities and municipalities and the people who lead them. Many of the people who have settled here over the past century are from the Midwest, bringing with them a strong distrust of the powerful mayors and political machines found in cities like Philadelphia, New York. and Chicago.
The mayor of Los Angeles does not control the school system, as in some large cities. Public health is under the jurisdiction of Los Angeles County, forcing mayors and supervisors to work together on challenges such as homelessness. In the city there is a police commission that makes the final decision on hiring and firing police chiefs; Ms. Bass wants the commission to confirm its choice of who should lead the department.
The stakes here are high. The fire is abating, but the rebuilding can turn out to be as difficult as fighting fire, testing the resources and ingenuity of this catalog of chosen ones.
Eric M. Garcetti, the former mayor, said all those government agencies — despite a history of rivalry — seemed to work together during the blaze. “But for reconstruction, it is very important for us to act like a city and not a collection of 88 villages,” he said in an interview in India, where he is now the US ambassador.
These structural tensions have long been a source of frustration for Los Angeles mayors. In an interview, two of them — Mr. Garcetti and Antonio Villaraigosa — said they would support the creation of a regionally representative sovereign government, replacing a network of conflicting municipal governments. Mr. Villaraigosa said he supported, for example, the reorganization of Los Angeles following San Francisco, which is a county and a city. They both argued that the problem of natural disasters is becoming more urgent with climate change.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen in my lifetime, but it’s certainly going to make things more harmonious,” Mr. Garcetti said. At this point, he said, the mayor must fall back on the power of persuasion. “Irregular power is critical,” he said. “It is very important to build a coalition.”
Mr. Villaraigosa said that, in expressing his concerns about the structural challenges facing Los Angeles, he was not criticizing Ms. Bass. “I don’t want to get involved,” he said. “But when you have all agencies — 25 people speaking — it spreads the leadership model. You have two different offices trying to work together. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.”
By contrast, out of court, Gov. Gavin Newsom has been an increasingly popular figure over the past two weeks, walking through the smoking ruins as he spoke to firefighters and those he is a person who lost his home. He extended a special legislative session to deal with the Los Angeles wildfires and signed executive orders related to response and recovery efforts.
Ms. Bass was criticized for being out of the country when the fire broke out — she was in Ghana in West Africa to attend the inauguration of its new president. When she returned, in a clip that went viral, Ms Bass stood quietly as a reporter pressed her on why she had left amid warnings of dangerous fire weather.
Since his return, he has issued special executive orders to speed up reconstruction, and he has appointed longtime civilian leader Steve Soboroff to lead the recovery effort. But he has also repeatedly defended his performance, saying he and leaders across the region are working “in closed-loop” to resolve the crisis.
“We are actively fighting this fire,” he said during a press conference on the second day of the crisis, adding: “So what we are seeing is the result of rain and less wind. there’s a sense for eight months that haven’t been seen in LA for at least 14 years.
The mayor’s office did not immediately return a request for comment on Saturday.
Even before the fire there was a movement to repair the structure. In November, county voters approved the biggest change in their government in a century — including putting a new person in charge of Los Angeles County, the executive of electoral district that will be elected in the 2028 election.
“They will be the most powerful electorate in the United States,” said Fernando Guerra, head of the Los Angeles Center for the Study of Loyola Marymount University. “They will represent 10 million people. They will have a lot of power. Most importantly, they will steal the thunder and the pulpit from the mayor of Los Angeles. It will be as central as New York is today. “
It’s hard to say what role the county executive might play in directing the government’s response to the fires, a duty that is often overseen by the fire department. But officials say what the region needs, in addition to the fire and police officials leading the response, are political leaders who show moral authority and leadership, with a platform to speak out. across the area of a territory that has more people than the country. most of the states.
“People want to see their elected officials — they want to see who is responsible,” 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 Board of Supervisors. . “In this particular case, the reality is that you had two different fires: one in the city of Los Angeles and one in an unincorporated area of the county. Who is responsible?”
Shawn Hubler contributed to the report.
