LOS ANGELES — Furious Los Angeles residents say they’re desperate for leadership as the city continues to burn. They say Gov. Gavin Newsom appears more focused on putting out the fire on his own political career, while Mayor Karen Bass seems to have faded into the woodwork.
Retired accountant Eddie De Ferrari, 52, was forced to flee the Eaton Fire in LA County. He returned to find his floors and furniture were covered in a fine layer of ash, but the house was still standing.
De Ferrari said when the fires put Newsom’s leadership to the test, he faltered.
“At the very least you would expect him to be donning a fire coat, being there, on the scene. Instead, we see him on video approached by someone asking him questions, and he pretended to be on the phone,” he said.
Bass has also been less-than-confidence-inspiring.
“The fires showed that she was not ready to hold this position when it’s not glorious, when everything is not going great,” he complained.
“The minute something goes wrong, then you have excuses and cop-outs and really no direct response.”
Elysabeth Cherniak, 60, a psychic who lives in the Pacific Palisades, didn’t need her crystal ball to see the void in leadership.
She held out in her Pacific Palisades condo until the flames were feet from the windows before finally evacuating to a recreation center shelter, where she has managed to find food and a cot with around 300 other refugees.
Cherniak said on-the-ground emergency workers and volunteers have stepped up where Karen Bass has failed.
“I’m not happy about Karen right now. She doesn’t like her job. She isn’t interested in the public,” she said.
Bass and Newsom — both of whom now face recall efforts for their handling of the crisis — have become the faces of the wildfire response.
Critics say they failed to prepare the city for a disaster of this scale — a $250 billion catastrophe — including by cutting and divert funding to lefty pet causes
“LA cannot go forward with the status quo,” former California first lady Maria Shriver posted on X on Sunday. “LA is no longer what it was. It has to be different. It has to prioritize the safety of its citizens, police, fire, schools. LA residents deserve better.”
Bass, who was longtime member of Congress who took office in 2022 and reportedly on President Biden’s shortlist for veep in 2020, immediately came in for criticism for being thousands of miles away from LA when the wildfires broke out, attending the presidential inauguration in Ghana. But her leadership faltered well before that ill-timed trip.
Last week it was revealed she cut the city’s fire department budget by $17.6 million for fiscal year 2024-2025, prioritizing the funds for its the LAPD and the massive homeless population.
In February 2023, she also appointed longtime public servant Brian Williams to serve as her deputy mayor, giving him significant public safety responsibility in his role, including overseeing the fire department.
But Williams was placed on administrative leave last month when the FBI raided his home after he allegedly made a bomb threat against city hall less than three weeks before the wildfires broke out.
Her appearances at near-daily press press conferences held by fire officials have done little to instill confidence, whether standing stone-faced like a statue as reporters pepper her with questions to growing combative and defaulting to canned responses as if someone had pulled a string on her back.
She’s been so inert during the press briefings that she has been speaking seventh or eighth, often no more than a few minutes at a time — and sticking to softball topics like where people can donate to fire victims.
Newsom, meanwhile, has seemed more interested in preening for a possible 2028 presidential run than doing anything of substance, starting with a widely mocked social media post of himself surveying the wildfires with his hands casually placed in his back pockets in what some called a “photo op.”
He’s also caught heat for misleading the public about a 2019 pledge to clear flammable underbrush from the hills surrounding Pacific Palisades, which later became a massive fuel source for the wildfires.
The embattled governor’s new budget slashed the state’s firefighting efforts by $101 million just seven months before the devastating wildfires began wreaking deadly havoc in Los Angeles.
Tens of millions of those dollars instead went to bankroll his “Don Quixote” Green New Deal handouts, critics — including some environmentalists — charge.
The governor also put his foot squarely in his mouth during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper when he appeared to blame “local folks” for fire hydrants running out of water during the Pacific Palisades fire.
He recently launched a website allegedly aimed at fighting “misinformation” on the fires and soliciting charitable donations — which are then funneled through liberal super PAC ActBlue, which also gets a cut of the proceeds.
“This is the longest disaster I’ve been involved with and there is no end in sight right now. It’s been more than a few tough days and a lot of unrest,” said Clint Carlton, 43, a director at the Dream Center, a nonprofit organization in central LA.
“People are looking for answers; they are looking for leaders. But so far there’s been no Mayor Giuliani type who’s taken command of the situation the way Giuliani did during 911.”
In the leadership vacuum that formed as the wildfires began burning out of control, Rick Caruso, a California billionaire and real estate developer who ran against Bass in 2022, has stepped into the spotlight
“Some really tough questions need to be answered about how this happened — the void of leadership, he said on CNBC Wednesday.
“Not just in the last couple of days but in the last couple of years.”
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