Comments
iAUDIT! - Many columnists and reporters, including me, have called Los Angeles a failed city. There is good reason to define LA as failed. A recent Westside Current article describes the sorry state of garbage control in the city; it is so bad LA is among the dirtiest cities in the nation. Political corruption seems rampant; two former Councilmembers and the former head of the DWP are in jail for accepting bribes, and a sitting member is under indictment. Small businesses struggle under the weight of inefficient city processes and overbearing regulations. Whistleblowers claim City and LAHSA leaders have been cooking homelessness numbers to make programs look more effective than they are. Non-emergency calls to the Police Department go unanswered or strand callers on hold for an hour or more. Even the app meant to make reporting common problems easier doesn’t work as it should. As high and middle-class wage earners leave, they are being replaced by workers with lower incomes who are more dependent on public services. When you’re stuck in endless traffic or waiting out another power failure, it certainly feels like LA is a failed city.
I think a better definition is a fractured city. Fractured means an organization split or broken and unable to function or exist. The City of Los Angeles’ government may physically exist as an organization, but it is barely functioning. Los Angeles is fractured philosophically and organizationally. The city has a weak Mayor/strong Council structure; the mayor can propose and approve legislation, but she cannot act unilaterally and needs Council approval to spend money. For example, she has to return to Council periodically to renew approval for her Executive Directive One (ED-1) housing program, and ED-2, her signature Inside Safe Program. She is nominally in charge of the city’s organizational apparatus, but mayors are not professional administrators. There is no career civil servant in charge of the city’s 45,000 employees. Despite his title, the Chief Administrative Officer is more like a CFO and acts as an advisor to the Mayor and Council; he has no administrative control over other departments. This dispersed and siloed organization is what makes it so hard for city departments to act in a coordinated way when LA must address complex issues like homelessness.
The Council itself is fractured. Although California’s local government offices are nonpartisan, there are clear ideological divides among Councilmembers. At least four members (Hernandez, Soto-Martinez, Jurado, and Raman) are closely associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (not to be confused with the Democratic Party). Four others (Park, McOsker, Rodriguez and Blumenfield) are more moderate. The others fall somewhere on the spectrum between the two, usually depending on the issue. This divide partially accounts for the haphazard way homelessness policies are applied throughout the city. For example, the city’s anti-camping ordinance is generally enforced in Park’s district, but it is actively opposed by Raman. The practical effect is that encampment dwellers simply move locations, and it also explains why shelters in DSA-aligned member districts are usually surrounded by large tent encampments. The DSA members’ close relationship with homelessness advocacy groups also explains why shelters like the one in Griffith Park (Raman’s district) are so poorly managed; she has done virtually nothing to hold operators accountable for their operations. It also explains why millions of dollars have been spent on making physical improvements to MacArthur Park (Hernandez’s district) while almost nothing has been done to address long-term problems like drug dealing and sex trafficking, which Hernandez views as abstract consequences of economic inequality instead of crimes that affect real people. In an interesting use of philosophical sleight-of-hand, Councilmember Hernandez, a confirmed advocate of defunding the police, turned to the LAPD to help in a clean-up effort in the park earlier this year; that clean up came only after several businesses, including the legendary Langers, threatened to leave the area around the park.
The fractures in city government run deeper than just political philosophy and homelessness policy. Like a malfunctioning machine, the city exerts a tremendous amount of energy for minimal results; in this case, “energy” takes the form of spent tax dollars. Despite spending $14 billion in this year’s budget, LA seems unable to provide basic services to most residents. Besides the aforementioned problems with the city’s 3-1-1 request reporting system, streets are pockmarked by potholes, and about 10 percent of the city’s 223,000 streetlights don’t work. LAist did an in-depth review of streetlight complaints and found that 40 percent are due to wire theft. The other 60 percent are a consequence of deferred maintenance. Deferred maintenance has a snowball effect; the longer the city delays routine upkeep, the more streetlights fail, the more complaints are filed, and the more it costs to make repairs. Even the City’s most high-profile infrastructure project in decades, the Sixth Street Bridge, has fallen victim to LA’s fractured government. Opened in 2022 to great fanfare, the bridge has suffered from regular vandalism, like graffiti and wire theft, so that now it descends into darkness every night. As a local news station reported, possibly with unintended irony, one advantage of the wire theft is that the graffiti can’t be seen at night.
The consequences of LA’s fractured government can be far more serious than broken streetlights and graffiti. While DWP dawdled with bringing an important water reservoir online after repairs took far longer than anticipated, the Palisades fire broke out last January, leaving firefighters without 117 million gallons of water to fight the conflagration.
When a hand mirror cracks, the glass may stay in the frame, but it reflects different images from each fragmented piece. The city’s residents experience the same conflicting images when they look at LA’s services. They can’t get their streetlights fixed; many haven’t seen a street cleaner in years. A 2019 City Controller’s report said street trees are trimmed every 14 to 18 years, three times longer than the ideal five-year cycle. Many residents are left wondering what our elected officials see when they look at the city. Most Councilmembers seem more interested in promoting their worldviews than in dealing with real life in Los Angeles.
Perhaps the fractured dichotomy between what officials see versus what residents experience is most apparent in the way the City addresses homelessness. Over the past year, officials have tried to convince residents homelessness has decreased and more people than ever are in transitional or permanent housing. They’ve assured us the city is making substantial progress, when in reality, the reductions, if they’re real, are inconsequential given the depth of LA’s homelessness problem, especially in light of the billions of dollars spent on the crisis.
While most residents can’t rely on the city to provide common services, encampment inhabitants and advocacy groups are demanding ever more from the city. A 2023 “open letter” from Knock LA and members of an encampment on Aetna Street presented a list of demands, including regular meals and city-sponsored community college enrollment, all of which would be paid for by tax-paying residents who can’t even get their trees trimmed. Working class Koreatown residents, who crowd into small apartments so they can afford the rent, have endured living next to a homeless “community” where drug use and fights are commonplace occurrences. Yet, despite claims that more encampments than ever are being cleared, the City seems powerless to abate this one because it is on private land and the owner seems uninterested in taking action. Despite the obvious risks to the health and safety of residents and encampment dwellers, city officials have dithered instead of declaring the lot a public nuisance while the camp grows, and local renters become ever more exasperated.
Indeed, it often seems the City and other agencies are so fractured they are working against residents’ best interests. A recent Westside Current article describes the consequences of the delays implementing SB-43, a bill approved nearly two years ago to broaden the description of “gravely disabled” to include people with profound untreated mental illnesses and substance abuse disorders. The bill was intended to address the needs of people who pose a danger to themselves or others but who refuse treatment. The bill’s requirements should have been implemented in 2025, but County Mental Health officials asked for a delay to January 2026, and the Board of Supervisors rubber stamped the request. After nearly two years and millions of dollars in staff time and planning, the County announced it’s ready to implement SB-43, adding just 75 beds in secure mental health facilities. Most professional studies estimate people with untreated mental illness or substance use disorders make up between half and three-fourths of the unhoused population. Seventy-five beds will be negligible in addressing the needs of thousands of people. In the meantime, LA’s residents are expected to shoulder the costs of ineffective programs and live with the sometimes-fatal consequences of local government’s inaction. Its not just residents who bear the burden of the city’s and county’s fragmentation; the unhoused themselves are left to suffer in isolation or in fetid encampments while local government obsesses about processes and rules.
Regular readers may recall I’ve mentioned my father was a skilled mechanic. My first job as a teenager was working in his service station. Although I didn’t inherit his mechanical skill, I learned something about cars. When a car overheats, it may crack the block, the central part of the engine. That fracture allows water to enter the combustion chamber and mix with fuel. If you’ve ever seen a car billowing white smoke while the engine sputters, you’ve seen a car with a cracked block or a cracked head. Although the fracture can sometime be repaired, more often than not the engine needs to be replaced. Perhaps that’s what’s needed in local government--replacing a dysfunctional system (and its officials) with one that works for all of LA’s population.
(Tim Campbell is a longtime Westchester resident and veteran public servant who spent his career managing a municipal performance audit program. Drawing on decades of experience in government accountability, he brings a results-driven approach to civic oversight. In his iAUDIT! column for CityWatchLA, Campbell emphasizes outcomes over bureaucratic process, offering readers clear-eyed analyses of how local programs perform—and where they fall short. His work advocates for greater transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness in Los Angeles government.)
