Karen Bass painted a beautiful picture of LA’s future in her “State of the City” address.
But he was short on details, leaving little idea of how LA will reach that bright horizon.
The mayor welcomed upcoming sporting events – not just the NBA All-Star game later this month, the FIFA World Cup later this year, and the Summer Olympics in 2028, but also the US Women’s Golf Championship in June.
That tournament will be held at the Riviera Club in Pacific Palisades – surrounded by vacant lots that still haunt that community, a year after the devastating fire.
Hopefully, the prospect of hosting an international sporting event in the heart of the scorched earth will spur LA’s efforts to pick up the pace of recovery and rebuilding.
Bass praised the neighbors who helped each other in the disaster, the bravery of the firefighters who rushed to the scene, and the generosity of Angelenos to those who lost everything.
In a nod to critics, he thanked displaced residents for their “loyalty” — perhaps, for telling him how angry they were about the city’s failure to save their homes.
But he offered few new plans to help them rebuild, aside from going to Sacramento to lobby for more money — after being turned down last year.
The mayor also praised progress in the fight against housing shortages. Here, he can apply for credit for a small reduction in the number of people living on the streets.
Yet the problem remains huge, and the city has spent billions of dollars on homelessness to get a more modest result.
He cited “affordability,” saying the city has “accelerated” the construction of affordable housing.
But he said nothing about the collapse in housing construction, in part because of Measure ULA, the failed so-called “housing tax” — which he promised to end last year, but never did.
The mayor devoted much of his address to attacking law enforcement, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
He called on locals to protest “peacefully” against ICE’s presence in the city, saying our democracy is “fragile.”
But the mayor did not condemn the violent mobs that rose up against ICE, destroyed government property, targeted innocent people, and attacked journalists.
The Mayor cited the controversial case of Keith Porter, whom he called a “43-year-old father of two” who was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE officer.
He left out the fact that Porter had been firing a gun late into the night, and – according to some reports – had pointed it at or fired it at an ICE agent.
Although all the facts have not yet emerged, it is irresponsible to paint that incident as the result of law enforcement against criminal immigrants.
He complained that the Border Patrol sent men on horseback to MacArthur Park. At least the mayor showed interest in that community, plagued by drugs, homelessness, and neglect.
Notably, violence has only occurred when mayors and governors have refused to cooperate with ICE in deporting the most hardened criminals.
When ICE must go into communities on its own, tensions arise — and law-abiding immigrants whose crime may be to enter without a visa are sometimes caught in the enforcement net.
Bass is clearly hoping that anti-ICE sentiment will be his ticket to re-election after his mishandling of the Palisades Fire, which he himself admitted “failed.”
If there was one lesson from Bass’s trip to Ghana during the fire, it’s that his focus must be here at home – not on divisive national issues or the glamor of the international arena.
