Austin Beutner: Los Angeles is a city in crisis

January 7th marks the one year anniversary of the tragic fires in Pacific Palisades. 12 people died, thousands of families lost their homes and another 10,000 people lost their jobs. Damages will exceed $50 billion.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass says the buck stops with her. It’s time she starts acting like it.

It’s become increasingly clear, this wasn’t a “natural disaster.” The fire was started by an individual and much of the destruction could have been prevented. Federal officials say the cause was a holdover, meaning it was due to a small fire days prior that was not extinguished completely. Press accounts, and my conversations with many Palisades residents, reveal chaotic evacuations, broken hydrants and fire trucks and a reservoir out of commission along with too few firefighters at the outset to prevent or battle the blaze.

Mayor Bass recently issued a report prepared by the Fire Department about the fires. The findings were changed to cover up mistakes made by city leadership.

She hired a civic leader to serve as Chief Recovery Officer, but sidelined him immediately. When he left after only 90 days she promised a replacement. Millions were spent on a consulting firm to develop a comprehensive restructuring plan. A year later, there’s still no leader and still no plan.

Mayor Bass keeps announcing recovery strategies, only for them to get bogged down in details or abandoned altogether.

She claimed they would underground powerlines, but it hasn’t happened.

She promised to waive hundreds of millions of city fees for people rebuilding homes and businesses, but residents are still waiting.

She has not worked to tackle the lack of insurance that’s going to prevent many families from rebuilding. And despite reports about homes that need to be gutted due to toxic levels of heavy metals, there is no comprehensive plan for environmental testing of buildings to better understand the problem.

The situation in the Palisades remains a crisis. Here’s how we can move forward.

1. The Mayor Has To Own The Problem.

The headlines may be just a memory for some, but the lives of tens of thousands of people have been changed forever. Sound bites on TV sets, doctored After Action reports, scapegoating others, and announcements made with false claims about progress are an insult to the community. Mayor Bass should hold regular, in-person public forums in the Palisades where she can discuss the issues, explain what progress is being made and answer questions directly from her constituents.

2. Establish An Independent Commission To Find Out The Facts.

We need to know the truth, so nothing like this happens again. A group of respected, local leaders should be appointed and provided with the resources to hold public hearings. They should ask questions of the Fire Department, Police Department and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, along with the mayor, the president of City Council (who was Acting Mayor while Bass was out of the country during the crisis), and any relevant city officials or staff. What happened, how were decisions made before, during and after the fires and what should be done differently?

My campaign has shared a report of the missteps, “Timeline of a Tragedy.” This document would be a good place to start.

3. Tackle the Big, Unsolved Issues.

The city will fail its residents and other stakeholders if it doesn’t help develop solutions to deal with insurance problems as well as environmental and health risks. While there’s no precedent for how to handle these issues, the mayor can’t blame the lack of progress on the bureaucracy or look for someone else to solve them. These problems won’t solve themselves.

4. We Need A Plan.

All of the work that lies ahead needs a set of goals along with a roadmap to get there. Call it Palisades 2030 and tell us what needs to happen for it to be completed.

The truest test of leadership happens during a crisis. Leaders have to stand in front. They need to quickly understand issues, develop solutions, build teams and empower them to get things done. That hasn’t happened in the Palisades and the consequences are far reaching.

Los Angeles is adrift, every day it’s becoming less affordable, less safe and a more difficult place to live. There’s a crisis of confidence across our city that progress can be made on any of these issues. It’s being made worse by the repeated failures in the Palisades.

Austin Beutner, founder of Vision To Learn, author of Proposition 28 and former superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, is a candidate for mayor of Los Angeles in 2026.