Billionaire real-estate developer Rick Caruso said Wednesday he is reconsidering a bid for Los Angeles mayor \u2014 a turn of events prompted by a published story saying Mayor Karen Bass directed the watering down of an after-action report that detailed alleged failings of the Los Angeles Fire Department during last year\u2019s deadly Palisades Fire.<\/p>\n
Bass has vehemently denied the story, which was published online by the Los Angeles Times Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Caruso \u2014 who lost the mayoral election to Bass four years ago, and who said recently he would not make another run at City Hall \u2014 said in an interview with KNX radio on Wednesday evening that he will need to process Wednesday\u2019s news before he makes a decision on another mayoral run, but he did not rule out re-entering the 2026 race.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m worried about the city,\u201d Caruso told KNX. \u201cThere\u2019s no secret how much I love the city.<\/p>\n
\u201cI need to spend some time thinking about this. It\u2019s very fresh news. I\u2019ve gotten a lot of calls today, as you can imagine, and there\u2019s been a lot of posts on X and other places asking me to jump back in. I\u2019m honored by that, but let\u2019s give me some time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Caruso does not have much time to make such a decision \u2014 the deadline to file a declaration of intention for the June primary election is noon Saturday.<\/p>\n
In the KNX interview, Caruso said he was outraged after reading The Times story detailing Bass\u2019 alleged intervention in the after-action report. He said that any edits or efforts to water down the after-action report put residents at risk again and \u201cviolates the sacred duty that an elected official has to the residents.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFor months, we\u2019ve been talking about what has been labeled `Firegate.\u201d\u2019 he said. \u201cNow the city has attempted to cover up their failures in responding to the fire, and now we clearly know that this failure goes directly to Mayor Bass, which is, you know, beyond unacceptable, because you take an oath in office as a mayor to protect.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe intent of this report is to learn from the mistakes, understand the mistakes that were made, be honest about the mistakes that were made, just so it doesn\u2019t happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Times, quoting \u201ctwo sources with knowledge of Bass\u2019 office,\u201d reported that after receiving an early draft of the after-action report, the mayor told then-interim LAFD Chief Ronnie Villanueva that the report could result in legal liabilities for those failures.<\/p>\n
The Times reported that Bass held onto the original draft until after changes were made. It was unclear whether Villanueva or other LAFD officials, or anyone in the mayor\u2019s office, made \u201cline-by-line edits\u201d at Bass\u2019 specific instructions or if they imposed changes after receiving a general direction from the mayor.<\/p>\n
In response to The Times story, Bass\u2019 office said the mayor and her staff made no changes to the drafts, and that Bass reviewed an early draft of the report and asked only that the LAFD make sure it was accurate on issues such as weather and budget.<\/p>\n
Later Wednesday, Bass spoke on KNX and said The Times story was \u201cabsolutely false, 100%.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJust think about it for a minute,\u201d Bass said. \u201cI\u2019m the one who ordered the after-action report when the fire chief would not do it. I fired her. Why would I water down a report that essentially presented the information for why I fired her? That makes no sense.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Billionaire real-estate developer Rick Caruso said Wednesday he is reconsidering a bid for Los Angeles mayor \u2014 a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31138,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[12858,54379,3802,48,52,51,47,50,49,4415,8320,79620,79621,3044],"class_list":{"0":"post-164753","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-bass","9":"tag-caruso","10":"tag-fire","11":"tag-la","12":"tag-la-headlines","13":"tag-la-news","14":"tag-los-angeles","15":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","16":"tag-los-angeles-news","17":"tag-mayor","18":"tag-palisades","19":"tag-published","20":"tag-reconsidering","21":"tag-story"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}