Rick Cole on Local Governance in the Aftermath of the Fires

Rick, please share with our readers your perspective, as somebody who's long been in public life and led NGOs focused on the built environment, what’s the role and capacity of local government to respond at scale to the destruction by fire of Altadena and LA’s Palisades?

When I was growing up, it was axiomatic that if it was a big job, you turned to government to get it done – whether it was enforcing civil rights, putting a person on the moon or winning a War on Poverty. Yet over my lifetime, we’ve lost faith in government’s capacity to do even small things. The public sector has fallen behind, failing to adapt to radical demographic, economic, and technological change.

A crisis offers both danger and opportunity. Los Angeles is, frankly, near the brink. The City faces the worst budget crisis since the Great Recession and the clock is ticking on the Olympics. Two vibrant communities were essentially wiped off the map with 15,000 households burned out. This follows four decades of chronic underinvestment in public infrastructure, technology, training, and organizational development. It’s a "perfect storm.”

Consciously or not, we long for a hero to save us. Like Churchill during the Battle of Britain, Guiliani after 9/11 or Riordan in response to the Northridge quake. But we’re the people we are waiting for. We must rise to the occasion, because one is going to ride in on a white horse to save us.

What should post-fire press conference audiences legitimately expect from their leadership beyond informing them of immediate dangers and where essential resources are located?

Let me tell you my approach. I’m not a mayor; I’m a councilmember representing a district that, escaped the damage to the north, east and west.

I’ve been making short videos focused on practical and timely information and going door to door to hear what’s on people’s minds as they grapple with the enormity of what’s happened. So our videos have addressed air quality, small business recovery, debris removal, water supply— the practical necessities. I’ve tried to avoid photo ops and the ritual rhetoric of "thoughts and prayers." We all have a job to do, and photo ops and thoughts and prayers aren’t going to get that job done.

Well, since President Reagan proclaimed, "Government is the problem," the capacity and expectations of government to deliver have significally deminished. If you were sitting in the audience listening to public officials respond to questions of those who have lost everything, what would you expect and want to hear from officials?

We should under-promise and over-deliver. Focus on what we can do, get it done, and get it done well. We can’t pretend that we can solve every problem with the capacity of the institutions we have today. That’s my biggest frustration.

Everyone is pitching their ideas for the recovery. Great! But for every laudable notion, I start with: what’s our capacity to implement them? We have policies and laws on the books now that we lack the capacity to implement and enforce. We did an audit in the LA Controller’s Office -- we found thousands of complaints of illegal tenant harassment—yet not a single prosecution. People aren’t looking for glittering generalities. We need to deal with the hard truths about what government must do, can do, and will do. The rest is just empty rhetoric.

Let’s address Altadena’s many challenges. It’s mostly homeowners, quite diverse, with families who have lived there for generations. While news coverage of the Palisades has been extensive, elaborate on Altadena’s needs.

The first principle is that Altadena will determine Altadena’s future. The rest of us can support their efforts, but the future of Altadena will be determined by the people of Altadena.

That said, having grown up next door and lived in Altadena for part of my life, I think the biggest danger is clinging to the past. A catastrophic loss inevitably evokes our nostagic memories. Altadena was indeed a very special place, but it was also a real place, with real problems. It’s impossible to recreate the ideal that exists in people’s minds. So Altadenans will need to be hard-headed about the most critical features they seek to preserve. That should guide the rebuilding. Obviously, some things will need to change if they want to retain the essence of the community they cherish.

Altadenans deeply care about their shared sense of community. The best way to achieve that would be to embrace a greater mix of housing types and concentration of commercial uses to promote income diversity and walkability.

When you suggest they’ll be able to rebuild, you skip how. With all of the environmental, building and financing issues that must be addressed & aligned to rebuild what existed before the fires, Rick, is local government today able to address at scale what needs to be done to rapidly rebuild?

The existing County structure serves 10 million people. It can’t target the unique needs of a community of 40,000 that has lost half its landscape. Some credible entity must be set up that’s deeply sensitive to community concerns but also has the financial clout and organizational authority to get things done. Anything short of that will condemn Altadenans to endless frustration.

People won’t be back in their homes next year. We’re talking about a five-to-15-year rebuild, requiring patience and tenacity. The county will inevitably lose interest—because it has the needs of 9.95 million other people to worry about.

There has to be an entity—like the base closure authorities that transitioned former military bases to civilian use. It can’t be authoritarian, but it does have to have authority. Where will it derive that authority? The county has to give it authority, rooted in legitimacy with the Altadena community.

Does the County have the authority to create such an entity—like a base closure authority?

Well, if they don’t, they can go to Sacramento and get it in short order. The County elected representative for Altadena, Kathryn Barger, has a big say in all of this. But she can’t simultaneously be Chair of the Board of Supervisors during a time of organizational transition, represent a district of two million people, and be the Altadena recovery czar. No one can. Whether the entity reports to her, the Board of Supervisors, or some joint state-county authority—there’s no magic answer. But there must be an entity. Otherwise, Altadena will be at the mercy of real estate investment forces that will dictate a future that doesn’t look at all like what Altadenans want.

LA County voters recently approved an expansion of the Board of Supervisors and creation of an elected Executive—but with no ballot details spelling out the powers of the latter.

Is the scale of the needed rebuilding a reason to expedite the civic engagement essential to implementing reform? If so, what should those conversations address and include?

This crisis demands new ways of doing business. Yet major change needs to be stepped out carefully so it doesn’t crash and burn. Reforming a $50 billion-a-year County operation, with 100,000 staff members serving 10 million very diverse constituents, is not something you can do quickly—or you invite the chaos of the dissolution and reconstitution of the ex-Soviet republics.

Unlike the County – despite the scandals -- no major reforms have yet been enacted by the City of LA. Because institutional change takes time, now is the time to begin.

I once made waves by noting that “Los Angeles is not designed to work.” It sounds harsh, but it’s factually true. The leaders who designed LA City government 100 years ago took effective and efficient government for granted. What really animated them was avoiding big city corruption – so they incorporated so many checks and balances that accountability is lost.

The 1999 Charter change aimed at giving the Mayor more authority, but failed to live up to its initial promise. The power of the Mayor remains weaker than what Riordan and voters envisioned. The City Administrative Officer fills the vacuum in the absence of clear lines of authority. The neighborhood councils are less effective than people anticipated. The new Charter Study Commission has the opportunity to enact the clarity and accountability LA needs to meet the titanic challenges ahead.

Rick, you’ve spent a lot of time over the last decades grappling with both regulatory and local government procurement reform. When officials these past two weeks at the podium say they want to expedite the approval process for 8,000 homes—on top of the existing priorities for homelessness and affordability—do you smile at the thought of that happening without reform?

Pope Francis says, “Never be optimistic, but always be hopeful.” The local government workforce is just as talented as those in the private or non-profit sectors. But they’re hamstrung by bureaucracy. It wouldn’t take decades to give them the training and empowerment they lack to live up to their potential to produce excellent results. We need to unleash their common sense – which currently gets lost in layers upon layers of overlapping controls.

My experience in my third time at LA City Hall is that there’s a rule against everything you need to do. There’s also always a workaround, but the problem is that only the insiders know those workarounds. The average citizen is trapped in a maze of red tape, while those with inside access know the short cuts. We rely on those workarounds to get things done. But too often those shortcuts lead to Jose Huizar.

You’ve long pursued procurement reform. Many are skeptical of giving any level of government the authority to oversee rebuilding at scale, worrying that having local government empowered will result not in expedited reviews or permiting, but rather in the reliance on the same old bureacacy and procurement rules that now impede development. Is there a workaround?

No, there’s not a workaround. There’s only one solution: rebuilding the system, just like we have to rebuild the landscape. The challenge in the 21st century is that our global economy is changing faster than at any time in human history. The one thing we know for certain is that the pace of change is accelerating—whether it’s climate change, global instability, or artificial intelligence.

We must be disciplined and focus on what matters. Politics is just Kabuki theater if it’s disconnected from the reality of what it takes to actually get things done. If we want a city government that can modernize its payroll system in less than seven years—and come even close to being on budget—we need clear lines of authority that empower people to focus on results.

As a Democrat, it’s infuriating that Democrats control every statewide office as well as the Legislature and big city governments – and do a lousy job actually delivering results, especially for working people and the most vulnerable. We have to fix that. And we can fix that. But it requires leaving the comfortable shore of “the way we’ve always done it.”

For context, when in LA City there was debate about the future of its building and planning departments, the key question was: Who should be the steward of the built environment? Today’s question: for rebuilding both Altadena and the Palisades, who should be the steward of the built environment to ensure livability?

Visionaries often emerge when you least expect them—but when you need them most. It makes sense to empower the visionary leaders among us who understand the unique diversity of Southern California. Of course, we’d have to support them through the discomfort of departing from business as usual.

Which puts the onus on civic society, especially those connected to the built environment. That includes architects, land use and transportation planners, builders, engineers -- and especially engaged citizens. People who, on a national level, have rallied around movements like new urbanism and Strong Towns.

Start with groups like Streets for All, LA-Mas, Livable Communities Initiative, Destination Crensaw. Professional organizations like ULI, AIA, Westside Urban Forum. University programs and grass roots community coalitions. When I knocked on over 5,000 doors during my recent campaign, I found that people are deeply caring, extraordinarily thoughtful… and woefully uninformed and disengaged. It’s past time for Los Angeles, Pasadena and the other 86 cities in our County to ditch the self-fulfillng delusion that we love our cars and don’t care about our communities. We have to transcend this tendency to be isolated in our private lives until our houses burn down.

That echoes a recent Atlantic magazine article by Eric Thompson, The Anti-Social Century, asserts that Americans now spend more time alone than ever and that this is now changing our personalities, our politics, and our relationship with reality. Do you agree?

Thompson offers both a sobering portrait of what I saw firsthand while campaignng for City Council. Knocking on doors, the people who invited me in or came out onto their porches care deeply about their community. Yet, so often they don’t know their neighbors or their representatives in local government. They have little concept of what goes on in local government. If they follow local news, they hear about car chases and crime stories.

I’m trying to rebuild civic stewardship at the micro-scale, within a district of 20,000 people—while also plugging citizens into a broader, citywide vision. That’s why, before I took office, I hosted six issue forums. Since the election, I’ve knocked on over 800 doors. My goal is to inform, engage, and activate residents as citizens.

Americans love to assert our rights. Even when we disagree on what those rights are, we vehemently agree that our rights are sacred! We’ve forgotten the vital importance of our shared responsibilities to each other and the common good.

We see generosity in moments of disaster. People donate money and supplies. But we need more than just writing checks and dropping off bottled water in response to a crisis. We need long-term engagement in this experiment we call self-government, starting at the local level. LA has neglected that capacity for too long. We see the result. Isn’t it obvious now that we need to change?