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The men and women of the LA Fire Department (LAFD) are so desperate for the equipment they need to do their jobs that they’re reaching into their own pockets to fund a sales tax measure they say is the only way to protect the communities they love.
They were underfunded and understaffed on the eve of the Pacific Palisades fire last year, with trucks out of commission due to maintenance and firefighters told to stand down because the city did not want to pay overtime.
Now, Freddy Escobar, the president of the firefighters’ union, has filed a defamation lawsuit against Mayor Karen Bass claiming her office conducted a smear campaign to stifle critics of the city’s response to the fire.
Escobar has publicly contradicted the city’s official narrative of who’s at fault for the disaster, and his lawsuit alleges the mayor retaliated by directing her staff to leak damaging but discredited stories about him to the press.
Escobar’s allegations certainly match the broader behavior of the Bass administration, which has relentlessly prioritized minimizing the city’s legal liability and salvaging the mayor’s re-election bid over meeting basic obligations for transparency and accountability.
Their beef started shortly after the fire, when Bass sacked LA Fire Department Chief Kirstin Crowley. Escobar denounced the move as a flashy public sacrifice intended to obscure Crowley’s complaints about systemic under-investment in her department.
Crowley had a point. Since the 1960s, the population of Los Angeles has jumped from 2.5 million residents to nearly four million. Meanwhile, the city’s firefighting core has expanded by a total of eight positions. Yes, just eight: from 3,379 in 1965 to 3,387 today.
And the total number of firefighter stations has actually decreased, falling from 112 to just 106.
Then the Mayor made some gentle “refinements” to the city’s official “after action” report that just so happened to scrub away mentions of chronic underfunding and funnel all the failures down to frontline firefighters. Escobar went on record disputing the edits and pointing out that the union member who originally authored the report, Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook, had actually removed his name from the final version.
Bass does not appear to have met these criticisms with a “growth” mindset. In a heated closed-door confrontation she allegedly asked Escobar: “When are you going to stop?” And when he didn’t, she allegedly responded by launching a campaign to destroy his reputation.
My mom lost her home in the fires. And this is exactly the PR playbook she and the rest of the Pali victims have suffered through since: obscure, discredit, and stonewall.
Or, simply flee. Just look at the fate of Janisse Quiñones, who was running the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) the day of the fire.
LADWP is now facing a lawsuit claiming it failed to de-energize the Palisades power lines, a standard industry practice to prevent new sparks and keep firefighters safe.
A specific set of lines in an area called the Highlands appears to have collapsed late on the first day of the inferno and allegedly caused a new fire that burned down several blocks of homes that might have otherwise survived.
It’s still not clear what actually happened, and there has been no transparency, or accountability.
Quiñones also oversaw the Santa Ynez reservoir, the now-infamous monument to catastrophic municipal mismanagement specifically built to “increase fire protection” that was empty the day of the fire.
Quiñones — backed by Bass — has met the public outrage with blithe dismal. She did eventually direct her engineers to fill the reservoir, though they quickly stopped after noticing rips in its cover — the exact same problem that caused them to drain it the first time — and Santa Ynez still sits empty.
Quiñones’ response to this mounting public pressure has been to leave: she recently resigned to take a cushy job in Puerto Rico. Mayor Bass’s official press release praised her “steady leadership and engineering expertise.”
This track record is why many residents are treating Spencer Pratt’s mayoral candidacy as more than a celebrity sideshow. They’re operating on the exact same logic that powered another reality TV star to a historic electoral upset: the status quo is so bad, the political establishment so sclerotic, the costs of incompetence so severe, that it might be worth taking a chance on a disruptive outsider.
It’s hard to say they’re wrong.
Rob Montz is CEO of Good Kid Productions and the director of “The Untold Story of the Palisades Fire.”
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