Los Angeles Fires Reveal a Network of Governments Weak by Design

When two hijacked airliners struck the World Trade Center towers in New York on the morning of September 11, 2001, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani became the face of a city grappling with tragedy, an omnipresent presence projecting authority, confidence and control. The reputation he built that day will be tarnished with time, but it will become a model for mayors facing crises across the country.

As Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass confronts a city grappling with devastating wildfires, her performance has raised questions even among her supporters about her ability to become the dominant executive leading a city through a crisis that New Yorkers experienced more than 23 years ago.

Some of these concerns reflect her relative lack of experience as a leader: She is a former member of Congress and the California Assembly, where she served in the powerful role of speaker. And some of those concerns relate to the consequences of his absence from the city when the fires broke out.

But the question of who is in charge — who plays in Los Angeles the role that Mr. Giuliani played in New York, to cite just one example — also speaks to the diffusion and, sometimes, dysfunction that constitutes the Basic DNA. of governance of the greater Los Angeles region. This muddled authority constitutes a stark, and deliberately deliberate, contrast to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other cities dominated by powerful, high-profile mayors.

The city of Los Angeles, with a population of 3.8 million, is one of 88 different cities that make up Los Angeles County. This county, with a population of 9.6 million spread across 4,751 square miles extending inland from the Pacific Ocean, is controlled by a five-person Board of Supervisors, each representing 1, 9 million people. Each of these supervisors vies for influence with the mayor of Los Angeles as they oversee their own fiefdoms in the nation’s most populous county, even though they are relatively unknown to voters.

Within these vast borders, there is a Los Angeles Police Department and a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, as well as 45 additional police departments protecting, to name a few, Santa Monica , Long Beach, Inglewood and Pasadena. There are dozens of municipal fire departments, including one that serves the city and another that serves the county.