LA Mayor Karen Bass faces critical leadership test as questions emerge about wildfire response

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Earlier this week, as hurricane-strength winds blew through bone-dry hillside subdivisions, Los Angeles saw its worst nightmare realized as long-predicted firestorms engulfed wide swaths of the nation’s second-largest city.

For Mayor Karen Bass, the horror show was compounded by every chief executive’s worst nightmare. She was halfway around the globe, on a trip to Ghana as part of a presidential delegation.

As her city faced its greatest crisis in decades, the first-term mayor confronted a critical test of her leadership two years after taking office. After rushing home to help manage the city’s response, she pushed back against a loud chorus of critics from near and far.

“LA has to be strong, united,” Bass said at a press conference Thursday evening. “We will reject those who seek to divide us and seek to misinform.”

Bass eventually made it back to Los Angeles by military transport, but only after a more than 24-hour absence, during which critics assailed her for not being better prepared. More than 5,000 homes burned as fire hydrants ran dry because water demand was so high it drained the city’s reserve tanks.

An online petition demanding Bass’ resignation garnered 33,000 signatures.

“We have got a mayor that is out of the country, and we have got a city that is burning,” said Rick Caruso, a developer who ran against Bass in the 2022 mayoral race, on local television Tuesday night, adding that two of his children’s houses were destroyed. “It looks like we’re in a third-world country here.”

Elon Musk called the mayor “utterly incompetent” in a post on his social media site X, leading a charge of conservatives slamming Bass for a cut to the city fire department’s budget in July — even though it was later boosted with additional money and officials say it now has more funding than last year. Some conservatives also claimed shortcomings of the response were connected to a focus on diversity at the agency.

A low-key, longtime legislator and coalition-builder, Bass, a 71-year-old Democrat in her first term as mayor, is now caught between the fires threatening her city and the white-hot spotlight trained on an executive struggling to get a spiraling natural disaster under control.

“She will be defined by this crisis,” said Fernando Guerra, founder of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola-Marymount University. “She needs to be very proactive, not for the sake of her political career but for the sake of the city.”

The fires are not just due to Los Angeles’ policies or flaws in its response. One of the worst blazes has raced through communities entirely outside city limits, showing how dry brush, steep hillsides, high winds and dense neighborhoods can be a lethal combination regardless of the local response. Experts for decades have warned about the risks of building and living in hillside neighborhoods like Pacific Palisades, the wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood that was largely incinerated in one of the blazes.

Bass seemed more forceful after a series of initial stumbles after returning from Ghana, where she was part of an official White House delegation to the inauguration of that country’s president. Bass was silent while intercepted on camera by a reporter at the airport, asking why she’d been gone and if she had regrets. At an earlier press conference, she read haltingly from prepared remarks, directing people to “url” to find information online.

She later said that it was too soon to respond to the critics.

“When the fires are out, we will do a deep dive,” she said. “We will look at what worked, we will look at what didn’t work, and we will let you know. Until then, my focus is on the TV screens behind you that are showing devastation that has continued. Thank you. Answered it in the morning, answered it now, won’t answer it again.”

Christian Grose, a political scientist at the University of Southern California, noted that Bass’ specialty has long been building legislative consensus behind closed doors rather than the sort of take-charge public posture required of big city mayors in times of crisis.

“Her skills are building coalitions and working with people,” Grose said of the new mayor. “This moment demands a true executive who will stand up and say, ‘this is what we’re going to do.’”

Guerra said that makes Bass a good fit in a city where the mayor has limited direct power, which is instead diffused among the city council, a web of boards and quasi-independent agencies, the broader county and neighboring city governments.

Bass is also a better fit for Los Angeles voters who prefer her style to that of incoming President Donald Trump and other critics, Guerra said.

“For those who see leadership as a white male making statements not based on fact, she’ll never convince them,” Guerra said. “But for Angelenos who see leadership as a collaborative, multicultural effort, she can.”

National Democrats, including President Joe Biden, began to rally around Bass on Friday.

“I know you’re getting a bad rap,” the president said to the mayor during an Oval Office meeting with Bass appearing virtually. “This is complicated stuff, and you’re going to have a lot of demagogues out there trying to take advantage of it.”

Michael Trujillo, a Los Angeles Democratic strategist, dismissed the immediate criticism of Bass as meaningless. “The test isn’t whether she was here for the fire or not,” he said. “The test is going to be rebuilding.”

The pressure will be immense. Pacific Palisades and the adjoining community of Malibu, which is outside city limits but also suffered severe damage, is home to some of the wealthiest people on the planet, Trujillo noted. They will have no patience for a slow reconstruction, he said.

The explosion of wildfires forced Bass to immediately pivot from what had been the all-consuming priority of her brief time in office — getting control of the city’s long-running homeless crisis. The vast demands of rebuilding will shuffle those priorities and stretch limited construction resources.

“This is basically her entire mayoral legacy,” Trujillo said of Bass and the rebuild, dismissing arguments over changes to the fire department budget that he characterized as minor. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley wrote the city last month a memo pleading for more funds and complaining a separate $7 million reduction in overtime funds could hamper response to fires, but since the blazes erupted she’s stressed that the catastrophic nature of the event would lead to significant damage regardless of the budget.

Trujillo said: “I don’t care if the fire department had an extra $500 million, I don’t think it would have changed what happened.”

For decades, scientists have warned that the Los Angeles area is due for catastrophic devastation from wildfires. Blazes are part of life in Southern California, but few have ever ripped into the heart of the city as this week’s.

Guerra, who has been active in Los Angeles civic life since the 1980s, said the city is actually lucky.

“Given what happened, I think that local government has been incredibly responsive,” Guerra said. “LA from 20 years ago would not have been able to manage this.”

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Riccardi reported from Denver, Colorado. Associated Press Staff Writer Zeke Miller contributed from Washington, D.C.

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