The Catastrophic Consequence Of That Ghana Trip The Los Angeles Mayor Took

While there’s plenty of blame to go around — including an empty reservoir — spin machines tell us the Ghana trip was not one of them. The truth is another story entirely.

They would have us believe the situation was being handled as well as possibly it could be whether she was in LA or halfway around the world in Ghana.

We’ve been told a lot of things by politicians over the years. How many of the ones that deflect blame have proven to be true? Not many.

So we won’t be shocked to learn that a critical window of opportunity was missed in the early stages of this fire specifically as a result of the mayor being halfway around the world.

Eric Spiegelman has pulled back the veil to explain why this was a real problem. And Justine Bateman is doing her part to make sure his explanation goes viral.

Here’s the social media TL;DR version:

The longer version, feaured in Bateman’s screenshot of Eric’s Substack goes into far more detail, giving chapter and verse.

His Substack opens with a relatively unreported fact most of us living outside of Los Angeles might never have known. If you aren’t in LA, you aren’t Mayor — even if you are.

When the Mayor of Los Angeles goes out of town, she temporarily gives up the powers of the Mayor. Automatically, the President of the City Council assumes the role of acting Mayor. This is how our government is designed, as codified in the City Charter, the constitution of the City of Los Angeles. When Karen Bass was in Ghana earlier this week, she wasn’t actually the Mayor of Los Angeles. Marqueece Harris-Dawson was.

If you’re not ‘technically’ mayor, you cannot exercise any official powers of the mayor, including the declaration of an emergency.

Look at the timestamp on the ALL CAPS warning. 11am on Monday. When did the acting Mayor issue his emergency declaration? 5pm, Tuesday. During the 30 hours between the warning and the declaration, half of the Pacific Palisades was destroyed. During those 30 hours, neither the elected Mayor nor the acting Mayor was in control of the City’s emergency response apparatus. They couldn’t have been, because the Charter requires a declaration to activate it.
[…] Everyone I’ve spoken to inside City Hall says Harris-Dawson wouldn’t do anything significant as acting Mayor without first consulting the elected Mayor. That begs the question, how much did Karen Bass’s absence contribute to the delay in declaring an emergency and assuming control of the emergency apparatus, which in turn led to the delay of state and federal support? Who was in charge of emergency response during the crucial 30 hours between the ALL CAPS warning from NWS, when cars were being bulldozed off of Sunset Boulevard and the fire hydrants were running dry?

What could have been different? From the closing thoughts of the Bateman tweet:

Do you think having Navy helicopters dropping water on a fire that was just getting going might have turned out just a little differently than the way it actually happened?

This mayor is the same woman who called for the dismissal of Senator Ted Cruz, who was NOT in the direct line of any decision-making, because he was in neighboring Mexico during a cold weather event; an event that led to the unexpected failure of the power grid. If she was in any way consistent, she’d have written her resignation letter and cleared out her desk by now.

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