The three mobile home parks below the El Medio bluffs were destroyed in the fire.
By HANK WRIGHT
In February, the City of Los Angeles published three reports from AECOM, the engineering firm it paid $5 million to assess what Pacific Palisades needs to recover and rebuild safely. The reports arrived three months late. They were released through a Mailchimp newsletter. There was no press conference. There is still no public implementation dashboard. There is no named official accountable for executing the findings.
That tells you most of what you need to know.
The reports themselves are serious work. They document nearly $1 billion in infrastructure needs through 2033: $664 million in electrical hardening and undergrounding, $150 million in water system repairs, hundreds of millions more in roads, drainage, and slope stabilization.
They confirm almost all residential streets in the Alphabet Streets fail current fire code standards. They find most of our long dead-end streets lack turnaround space for fire apparatus. They document water pressure failed during the fire, hydrants ran dry at elevation, and the single trunk line serving the entire Palisades is a single point of failure.
None of this was a secret. Now it’s on paper. That’s something. But it changes nothing if the City cannot act on it—and it cannot. The Mayor Had the Wheel. She Crashed.
In Los Angeles, the mayor does not control the budget. That power rests with the City Council. What the mayor controls is operations—the departments, the agencies, the daily execution of city government. Karen Bass was elected to do that job. Before the fire, she did not ensure LAFD pre-positioned resources before a forecast red flag event. She did not enforce brush clearance on City-owned properties. She did not fix the hillside water pressure problems that had known deficiencies for years. The department’s after-action report, before it was quietly edited for public release, admitted LAFD chose to be “fiscally responsible” rather than pre-deploy resources ahead of a high-risk wind event.
After the fire, the AECOM report sat in the City Attorney’s office for three months. The lead AECOM project manager departed before reports were released. Neither fact has been explained. When the reports finally arrived, they came by newsletter. This is not leadership. It is incompetence masquerading as leadership.
Follow the Money
This giant pine tree was cut by DWP workers in the 800 block of Radcliffe Avenue after the Fire.
The City has no capital improvement funds for Pacific Palisades. To understand why, follow the money backward. In 2016, Los Angeles voters approved Proposition HHH—a $1.2 billion bond to build supportive housing for the homeless. The pitch was $350,000 per unit. The reality: costs ballooned to $600,000 on average, and as high as $837,000 per apartment. The city has now spent over $1 billion of that bond. By its own admission, the result is still inadequate to meet the need. Meanwhile, the County runs Measure H, a half-cent sales tax also dedicated to homelessness. The city added Measure ULA, a transfer tax on high-value home sales. The spending continues. The problem persists. And the City Controller’s office has flagged weakening liquidity and aging assets across the city’s balance sheet.
The proof of what this has cost is visible in a single fact: the proposal to fund the Los Angeles Fire Department through a new sales tax increase. The City is asking residents to pay again for fire protection they already paid for and did not receive. When $664 million in electrical hardening and $150 million in water repairs sit unfunded while the city builds $837,000 homeless apartments, that is a choice. Someone made it.
What the City Can Do, It Won’t.
All that was left of the Bruce Gallery on Via de la Paz after the fire were three sculptures by Jon Krawczyk.
Not everything in the AECOM reports costs money the City doesn’t have. Some of it requires only will, which the City proved it lacks. Fire egress. For years, homeowners across the Palisades have encroached on mapped fire access points—roads, paths, and rights-of-way designed to provide evacuation redundancy. The City permitted it. Code enforcement looked away. The result is a neighborhood with fewer escape routes than it had fifty years ago.
The residents who will fight street widening on the Alphabet Streets are not wrong. The problem on January 7 was not that fire engines couldn’t reach us. The problem was that fire engines were not sent. Widening roads providing access to firefighting ghosts solves nothing. Restoring the egress routes quietly lost over decades—that is a different conversation, and a necessary one. It requires no bond measure. It requires enforcement authority the City already has.
The City is capable of doing this. It has not been willing. The City Does Not Plan. It Reacts.
There is a deeper problem the AECOM reports illuminate without naming. Los Angeles does not do urban planning. Planning has been outsourced to developers. City services—water, power, roads—respond to permit requests. They do not model future demand or sequence investment ahead of need in any meaningful way.
Rebuilding five thousand homes is not like normal infill development, where permits arrive one at a time and agencies respond sequentially. It is a simultaneous demand surge hitting water, power, roads, and waste systems at once, in a neighborhood whose infrastructure was already beyond designed capacity before the fire. LADWP does not get ahead of this. It never has. The bureaus do not coordinate across agencies. They protect their lanes. And the City certainly can not corral the private players: Telecom companies and the gas company.
The AECOM Logistics report proposes a Special Implementation Group inside City Hall to manage all of this. The recommendations are sound. The institution intended to carry them out cannot do so.
We should not plan our recovery based on hope that City Hall becomes something it has never been.
The Answer Is Already Here.
Swimming pool water could have been used to save homes in Pacific Palisades.
Pacific Palisades has a trusted, community-rooted, and independent from City Hall: PPCC. The Pacific Palisades Community Council exists to represent residents in precisely this situation. It is the right host for what needs to happen next.
What the PPCC should do is engage an independent recovery project manager—funded outside the City’s structure, accountable to this community, not to the mayor’s newsletter. The job is the job the City cannot do: coordinating the sequencing of private rebuilds against public infrastructure work, so that a homeowner doesn’t complete construction on a block the City tears up every six months later for electrical conduit, water upgrades, telecommunications. Tracking LADWP undergrounding schedules against individual permit timelines. Identifying encroached egress points and supporting their restoration. Serving as the single credible information source not filtered through an administration that has already demonstrated what its filter does.
This is not a small undertaking. It is a concrete one. And the community has more reason to do it well than City Hall ever will, because we are the ones living with the consequences.
The AECOM reports gave the City a roadmap it paid $5 million for. The City has already shown it cannot follow one. The question is not whether City Hall will lead this recovery?
It will not.
The question is whether Pacific Palisades builds the capacity to lead it ourselves—before we spend five more years waiting for a government that has already failed us once.
PPCC: the call is to you. Engage a PM. Build the structure. I think we will fund it. The alternative is trusting a City who sent us a newsletter outlining what we already knew: The City of LA is not concerned with keeping us safe or lead such a critical task.