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ELIOT'S POV -
"What's predictable is preventable." – Rick Caruso
The perfect Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DEI) storm has been foisted upon the people of Los Angeles. Damage from the firestorm is estimated to be $275 billion and might still climb higher. It is the biggest and most expensive disaster in American History, even after adjusting for inflation.
Critics say that this is not the time to criticize our dear leaders. After all, they are struggling with the consequences of their failed policies. If you can't blame the city, county, and state's culpable and criminally negligent leadership now, when can you? I guess we are all supposed to wait for the event to burn itself out. We need to condemn the blameworthy now. We must rebuke those who mightily contributed to the conflagration that is now. Los Angeles can no longer afford the inevitable spinning and prevaricating of the circumstances of their incompetent decisions and hires based on skin color and sexual preferences to be conveniently swept under the rug.
What is the price for Didn't Earn It (DEI) Incompetence? Is a $750,000 salary too much or too little? Janisse Quiñones, who heads the Department of Water and Power (DWP), makes that much, almost twice as much as her predecessor. This DEI hire was not attracted to the position because she cared about improving the water delivery system, or minor things like water quality, or having emergency water supplies ready, so perhaps the Pacific Palisades fire could have been stopped efficiently.
Our newly appointed DWP CEO, who you might have thought would have a safety first policy regarding delivering safe, reliable electricity and water to LA based on her experience of working at PG&E, but you would be mistaken. Mayor Bass would never hire someone with the necessary knowledge, skill, and foresight when she can hire a candidate who checks a diversity box. Janisse said her first and most important mission is to view everything through a social equity lens.
In an interview on KBLA, Janisse said that regarding her job responsibilities, "It's important for me that everything we do is within an equity lens and social justice and righting the wrongs that we've done in the past." Is letting Pacific Palisades burn down righting any of the wrongs from the past? Now, many affluent white people, wealthy black people, and Hollywood A-listers can experience homelessness and lose almost everything. Is that the equity she was looking for?
Before this lucrative assignment, Ms. Quinones worked in the C-Suite of Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), a company thoroughly despised in certain circles of Northern California for its sub-standard electrical power lines, which caused fires all over the state and constantly cuts off power to homeowners in rural areas. The California Public Utility Commission has imposed frequent fines on PG&E, including the largest penalty ever, a $1.9 billion fine for the causation of fires in Northern California.
I am sure everybody is surprised that the Santa Ynez Reservoir, which holds 117 million gallons of water, has been dry for almost a year due to a cover problem. Since the weather forecast days before the Santa Ana Devil Winds arrived was well known to all far and wide, wouldn't it have been prudent to store water in that reservoir ahead of a potential fire event? There are rumors that this was discussed, but the DWP didn't want to spend the money on the water, so they say. The reservoir could still have been crucial in saving Pacific Palisades by providing considerable water to the fire hydrants and the million-gallon reserve tanks.
The National Weather Service issued warnings about high winds in Los Angeles starting on January 6, 2025, with warnings continuing through at least January 9, 2025. These warnings warned of a highly significant Santa Ana wind event, expected to bring potentially "life-threatening and destructive" conditions to the area. Did the Los Angeles brain trust do any advance preparations, like filling the reservoir at least temporarily? Deploying fire engines and crews in fire-prone areas? Did they think of moving homeless drug encampments out of high-fire zones? Even the LA Times said fire officials could have pre-deployed more than 40 available fire engines to fire zones before the Santa Anas winds started.
Despite these warnings, Mayor Bass, another DEI voters hired Ghana go on a vanity trip to participate in the inauguration of a new president of Ghana. Even CNN anchors repeatedly pressed City Council President Marquis Harris Dawson if it was wise for his longtime political ally to be out of town during a time ripe for a disaster. Other reporters wanted to know if Karen Bass owed Angelinos an apology for being absent while their homes were destroyed.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass claimed her $17.5 million cut to the LA Fire Department budget did not impact the Department's ability to prevent or fight fires. But the LA Fire Chief Kristin Crowley (another controversial hire) told CNN that "the $17 million budget cut… did absolutely negatively impact" the Department's ability to respond to the fires. Other firefighters-whistleblowers have come forward, saying there is insufficient funding for pre-deployment. The fire prevention parts of the LA have taken huge cuts, too, and their resources are extremely limited. The whistleblowers specifically mention that there are not enough mechanics to work on the equipment or enough fire stations to be close to a fire to have reasonable response times in fire-prone areas.
The LAFD budget of $820 million is not nearly enough. The number of calls firefighters make has tripled over the last 20 years. It's been known that Los Angeles is at least 80 fire stations short for the amount of work the LAFD has to do. The enormous increase in the number of fires is in large part because our record of getting homeless people, drug addicts, and the mentally ill out of high-fire-risk areas is pathetically low.
It is outrageous that since 2019, California has invested $27 billion in mitigating the homeless problem. We spent $40 billion on providing too few affordable housing options. We spend 30 billion a year to provide services to illegals, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, but yet we have no programs that will aid and help human flourishing in the legal population of California. We are just expected to pay the highest taxes in the country for all manner of things that don’t work.
I do not think one can express enough outrage that 1.6 to 2.3 trillion gallons of water that could be used for farms in the Central Valley and making Southern California green again flow into the Sacramento Delta to support a fish the delta smelt, which was last seen in the wild in 2015. While the cost of water can vary, a reasonable estimate is that $3,000,000,000 of water is lost on a fish that doesn't exist. How can even the most radical green eco-warriors justify that?
Till we can talk about all aspects of DEI and the radical green movement, forest ecology, and brush clearance, there will be no curing the conditions that have led to these catastrophic losses. We are so bottled up and censored as a society that questioning any DEI criteria makes you a homophobe and a racist. To challenge green orthodox ideology makes you a climate change denier. As long as these topics are forbidden and we can't look at all the proximate causes of this disaster, we can't make the diagnosis. Without a diagnosis, we can't have a prescription that will mitigate these problems. And these problems will continue to fester, mutate, and possibly even worsen soon. It's time to have these difficult conversations now.
How does any of this ideologically driven drivel, which has proven deadly, help anybody here in California? How does this suicidal empathy and deadly altruism benefit anybody in LA? These are questions that the victims of these horrible fires in LA especially should be asking, as well as everybody else. The politicians serving LA should have hired better people, and the voters should have voted for competent people. No less a personage than Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the LA Times, has said he made a mistake endorsing Karen Bass. LA should do an immediate 180 and, at the very least, recall every politician whose hands are identifiably dirty from creating the policy initiatives that allowed this to happen or resoundingly defeating them in the next election.
(Eliot Cohen has been on the Neighborhood Council, serves on the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, and is on the Board of Homeowners of Encino and was the president of HOME for over seven years. Eliot retired after a 35-year career on Wall Street. Eliot is a critic of the stinking thinking of the bureaucrats and politicians that run the County, the State, and the City. Eliot and his wife divide their time between L.A. and Baja Norte, Mexico.)
