The Exchanges

Q Yeah, one of the, I guess one of the other key threads of your life has really been public service, and I believe that you've served under three different mayors in LA over time. You were the runner-up in the twenty-twenty-two LA mayoral race. You were former president of LA's police commission. You've had a variety of roles. Could you tell us a little bit about your public service engagements?

A Yeah, I appreciate it. I'm a big believer in public service. I enjoy it, and I just think it's an important thing to do. So at a very young age of 26, uh, Tom Bradley tapped me to be on the board of the Department of Water and Power, and I then became president. Um, after that, Dick Reardon asked me to go back on the board, so I was at DWP for about 13 years. And then after that, Jim Hahn, uh, the mayor at the time, asked me to head up the police commission because L.A., Back then was having really rising crime. We were losing a lot of police officers, very similar to what's happening today, and to come in and turn LAPD around, and, uh, I did. I brought in Bill Bratton as the chief of police at the time, and we were able to get crime down to levels not seen since 1950. So, I, I'd been very fortunate to have been involved in government service, and reason I decided to eventually run for mayor was because I saw what could be done Especially if you're not beholding to worry about getting reelected, if you're just focused on doing the right thing and becomes a very powerful, powerful mindset to have.

AI assessment note: “Tom Bradley tapped me to be on the board of the Department of Water and Power”

Q severity and frequency of fires across the city and state have been escalating, with this one really becoming, uh, one of the costliest in history on multiple levels, a human level, as well as the financial level. Uh, what is behind this trend? Are wildfires getting worse due to climate change? Is it other factors like Policy, deterring infrastructure, negligence, like what, what do you think are the causes here?

A All the above. I mean, listen, I don't, I don't think you can doubt that there's an impact to climate change, so let's just say that's a given. But, uh, the Palisades fire was fueled by 40 years of brush that was never managed, and so you have an enormous amount of brush in those hills behind the Palisades, and when you had the winds coming up, uh, the city was not prepared adequately to deal with it. The fire department was not properly deployed to deal with it. To be in the second largest city in the United States and to run out of water and have fire hydrants empty is, Completely insane. So there was a series of things, but it really starts with, frankly, incompetent leadership that wasn't prepared for something like this, like clearing brush, like making sure the reservoirs were full. There's a whole reservoir that was empty. That was drained because they wanted to have repairs on it. Well, we had a fire in Malibu, 10 minutes from the Palisades fire, three weeks before. That's probably a pretty good sign that we needed to be prepared, and we knew the winds were coming. So unfortunately, I think it's border negligence. Um, there's no doubt in my mind, but it's clearly bad planning, bad leadership, and maybe you couldn't have prevented the fire. I'm completely convinced you could have substantially mitigated the fire. We've lost the equivalent of two Manhattans in terms of la…

AI assessment note: “All the above. I mean, listen, I don't, I don't think you can doubt”

Q bass, and, um, you know, you talked a little bit about water availability in the reservoir. Uh, can you tell us a little bit more about what happened there? Because I've heard arguments that, you know, the house is burned down, and therefore there was, uh, open pipes, and water was just leaking out, and that was a reason that there wasn't enough water. Do you think that's just... No.

A You know, I just got off the phone with an elected official in Congress that was finding every excuse in the world Uh, why it wasn't anybody's fault, which I think elected officials are really good at. I think they have a PhD in that. But no, listen, I was on the phone with my team. A senior member of the rapid response team that we have was up there and embedded in the command staff. And at about, I think it was a little bit after 10 o'clock or 10 30, I get the call. The, the hydrants are empty. We're not getting water. It had nothing to do with broken pipes. It had everything to do with the reservoirs not being filled. Everything up there is gravity flow. So those reservoirs draining are coming into the hydrants, and there's protocols should be in place that's keeping those reservoirs full, but the largest reservoir was empty. And that's, that was a huge problem.

AI assessment note: “It had nothing to do with broken pipes. It had everything to do with the reservoirs”

Q right around there, California ran a massive surplus of almost a hundred billion dollars. And, um, that was just three, four years ago. And it's really unclear to me what actually happened to all that money. And now we're running a big deficit. Um, where do you think California more broadly should be investing in its own future? And what are the big things that should go fix right now?

A It, a lot of it goes back to infrastructure. I was on the governor's committee, the COVID committee and whatnot. I was amazed to learn how many kids did not have access to the internet. This is the fifth largest economy in the world, and we had kids that had to go home for school, but couldn't connect on the internet. How could that be? Um, we've got demands on our power grid that are exceeding what we can supply. We need to go fix that. We certainly have a vegetation overgrowth problem with forest fires. We need to go fix that. The water delivery problem. We need to go fix that. We need to upgrade our schools, our school system. Just, I think we get back to basic things of saying, what would make residents of Los Angeles lives better and more livable and safer and give them an opportunity to prosper? And let's organize our budget dollars around that, and we have to start prioritizing, but to your point, how did we blow so much money? I, I really don't know. I've never heard a good explanation. I don't know if you've got one.

AI assessment note: “a lot of it goes back to infrastructure... power grid... vegetation overgrowth... water delivery”

Q If we do the things that you say a year?

A Shouldn't be past a year. Maybe the hazardous cleanup is three, four months. The infrastructure is going in right after that. People will end up spending maybe a year to redraw a house, blah, blah, blah. Permits should all be very easy to get. All the costs should be suspended. Um, and then we start mobilizing. Is there going to be supply chain constraints? Yes. All of those things are going to be, have to be dealt with, but there's a great opportunity here to have these communities literally come out of the ashes. In a year. That would be my demand, if I was king for a day, put together a program that allows people to start building in a year.

AI assessment note: “Shouldn't be past a year. Maybe the hazardous cleanup is three, four months.”

Q Where does a lot of the budget go instead, or where do you think the budget should be reallocated from?

A Well, we're spending billions of dollars to deal with the homeless situation we have in LA to no avail. Uh, we still have the same amount of people on the streets. That number is growing even after spending billions of dollars. So we're not spending money wisely. And, um, we have to start fighting drugs on the streets. We have open sale of drugs on the streets. We'll put it this way. The most active Fire station in the United States is in an area around MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. It's the most active because of the amount of people dying on the streets from overdoses. That's, that tells you everything, and that is a disaster, and it's sad at every human level. We've got to get the drugs off the street. We've got to start enforcing it. We've got to start going after the gangs that are selling drugs and being tough on them. And again, hopefully with a new district attorney, and we also have a new chief of police, Jimmy McDonald, we're going to start making progress in that regard.

AI assessment note: “we're spending billions of dollars to deal with the homeless situation we have in LA”