LA Officials Previous Comments Under Scrutiny

Oh, Los Angeles—where the incompetence never takes a day off, even in the face of disaster. As if the raging wildfires weren’t catastrophic enough, the revelations about the failures in leadership and infrastructure management are downright infuriating.

Mayor Karen Bass and her handpicked Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) CEO, Janisse Quiñones, have managed to turn a natural disaster into an avoidable catastrophe, with dry fire hydrants, drained reservoirs, and crumbling systems leaving firefighters helpless as homes and lives were consumed by flames.

Let’s start with the Santa Ynez Reservoir fiasco. This massive water source, capable of holding 117 million gallons, was inexplicably drained and taken offline for repairs during wildfire season. Yes, while California’s infamous brush fire season was in full swing, someone thought it was a good idea to remove a critical piece of the city’s firefighting infrastructure.

When three one-million-gallon tanks in Pacific Palisades ran dry Tuesday night, firefighters had no choice but to abandon efforts to save thousands of homes. It’s hard to imagine a more reckless decision.

But wait, it gets worse. The person overseeing this debacle, LADWP CEO Janisse Quiñones, was hired by Bass in 2024 at an eye-popping $750,000 salary—plus a housing allowance. For context, that’s double what the President of the United States earns, and for what? Quiñones came into this role with a focus on making LADWP a leader in “100% clean energy” by 2035 and with a heavy emphasis on “equity” and “social justice.”

Admirable goals, perhaps, but when the city’s hydrants run dry and lives are on the line, it’s fair to question whether these priorities are misplaced.

Quiñones herself admitted the hydrants failed due to “too much demand on the system.” But this problem didn’t appear out of nowhere. Infrastructure failures like this have been flagged since at least 2021.

Yet instead of addressing these glaring issues, Bass and her appointees seem more focused on ideological pursuits than ensuring basic services work. Pipes and reservoirs don’t care about “social justice”—they just need to function.

This is the predictable result of Democrat governance gone awry. Leaders tasked with straightforward responsibilities—like keeping water flowing and the power on—are transformed into activists more concerned with buzzwords than results. The cost of their negligence is borne by ordinary citizens who lose their homes, their loved ones, and their faith in a system that seems more interested in political posturing than public service.