The setting looked almost cozy: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and a podcast host seated inside her home in two comfy chairs, talking about President Trump, ICE raids, public schools and the Palisades fire.<\/p>\n
The recording session inside the library at Getty House, the official mayor\u2019s residence, lasted an hour. Once it ended, the two shook hands and the room broke into applause.<\/p>\n
Then, the mayor kept talking \u2014 and let it rip.<\/p>\n
Bass gave a blunt assessment of the emergency response to the Palisades and Eaton fires. \u201cBoth sides botched it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
She didn\u2019t offer specifics on the Palisades. But on the Eaton fire, she pointed to the lack of evacuation alerts<\/a> in west Altadena, where all but one of the 19 deaths<\/a> occurred.<\/p>\n \u201cThey didn\u2019t tell people they were on fire,\u201d she said to Matt Welch, host of \u201cThe Fifth Column\u201d<\/a> podcast.<\/p>\n The mayor\u2019s informal remarks, which lasted around four minutes, came at the tail end of a 66-minute video added to \u201cThe Fifth Column\u2019s\u201d YouTube channel last month. In recent weeks, it was replaced by a shorter, 62-minute version \u2014 one that omits her more freewheeling final thoughts.<\/p>\n The exact date of the interview was not immediately clear. The video premiered on Nov. 25, according to the podcast\u2019s YouTube channel.<\/p>\n Welch declined to say whether Bass asked for the end of the video to be cut. He had no comment on why the final four minutes can\u2019t be found on the YouTube version of the podcast.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not going to be talking about any of that right now,\u201d he told The Times before hanging up.<\/p>\n Bass\u2019 team confirmed that her office asked for the final minutes of the video to be removed. \u201cThe interview had clearly ended and they acknowledged that when they took it down,\u201d the mayor\u2019s team said Tuesday in an email.<\/p>\n In the longer video, Bass also talked about being blamed for the handling of the Eaton fire in Altadena, which is in unincorporated Los Angeles County, outside of L.A. city limits. Altadena is represented by L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, not Bass.<\/p>\n \u201cNo one goes after the Board of Supervisors,\u201d Bass said on the original 66-minute video. \u201cI\u2019m responsible for everything.\u201d<\/p>\n Bass, in an interview with The Times, said she made those remarks after the podcast was over, during what she called a \u201ccasual conversation\u201d \u2014 a situation she called \u201cunfortunate.\u201d Nevertheless, she stood by her take, saying she has made similar pronouncements about the emergency response \u201cnumerous times.\u201d<\/p>\n In the case of the city, Bass said, the fire department failed to pre-deploy to the Palisades<\/a> and require firefighters to stay for an extra shift, as The Times first reported in January. In Altadena, she said, residents did not receive timely notices to evacuate.<\/p>\n \u201cThe city and the county did a lot of things that we would look back at and say was very unfortunate,\u201d she told The Times.<\/p>\n Bass was out of the country<\/a> on a diplomatic mission to Ghana when the Palisades fire first broke out on Jan. 7. When she returned, she was unsteady in her handling of questions surrounding the emergency response.<\/p>\n Both the response and the rebuilding effort since the fire<\/a> have created an opening for Bass\u2019 rivals<\/a>. Real estate developer Rick Caruso, who lost to her in 2022, is now weighing another run for mayor \u2014 and has been a harsh critic of her performance<\/a>.<\/p>\n Former L.A. schools superintendent Austin Beutner, who is running against Bass<\/a> in the June 2 primary election, called the mayor\u2019s use of the word \u201cbotched\u201d a \u201cstunning admission of failure on behalf of the mayor\u201d on \u201cthe biggest crisis Los Angeles has faced in a generation.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s admitting that she failed her constituents,\u201d Beutner said.<\/p>\n Bass isn\u2019t the first L.A. elected official to use the word \u201cbotched\u201d in connection with the Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead. Last month, during a meeting on the effort to rebuild in the Palisades, City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez said that Bass\u2019 office had mishandled the recovery, at least in the first few months.<\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s be honest,\u201d she told one of the mayor\u2019s staffers. \u201cYou guys have to be the first to acknowledge that your office has botched the first few months of this recovery.\u201d<\/p>\n Bass has defended her handling of that work, pointing to an accelerated debris removal process and her own emergency orders cutting red tape for rebuilding projects. The recovery, she told Welch, is moving faster than many other major wildfires, including the 2023 Lahaina fire in Hawaii.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s important to state the facts, especially because in this environment … there\u2019s a number of people out there who have been very, very deliberate in spreading misinformation,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Bass, who formally launched her reelection campaign over the weekend, has been giving interviews to a growing list of nontraditional outlets. She recently fielded questions<\/a> on \u201cNaked Lunch with Phil Rosenthal + David Wild.\u201d She also went on \u201cBig Boy\u2019s Off Air Leadership Series\u201d to discuss the Palisades fire<\/a> and several other issues.<\/p>\n On \u201cBig Boy\u2019s Off Air,\u201d Bass said she was in conflict with then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley over her handling of the fire. When she ousted Crowley in February<\/a>, she cited the LAFD\u2019s failure to properly deploy resources ahead of the fierce winds. She also accused Crowley of refusing to participate in an after-action report on the fire.<\/p>\n Bass told Big Boy, the host of the program, that firefighters \u201cwere sent home and they shouldn\u2019t have been.\u201d <\/p>\n She also called the revelation that the Jan. 1 Lachman fire reignited days later,<\/a> causing the Palisades fire, \u201cshocking.\u201d The Times has reported that an LAFD battalion chief ordered firefighters<\/a> to leave the burn area, despite signs that the fire wasn\u2019t fully extinguished.<\/p>\n Bass said that had she known of the danger facing the region in early January, she wouldn\u2019t have gone to Long Beach, let alone Ghana. <\/p>\n Asked where blame should be assigned, Bass said: \u201cAt the end of the day, I\u2019m the mayor, OK? But I am not a firefighter.\u201d<\/p>\n On \u201cThe Fifth Column,\u201d Bass spent much of the hour discussing the effect of federal immigration raids on Los Angeles<\/a> and the effort to rewrite the City Charter<\/a> to improve the city\u2019s overall governmental structure. She also described the \u201coverwhelming trauma\u201d experienced by fire victims in the Palisades and elsewhere.<\/p>\n \u201cTo lose your home, it\u2019s not just the structure. You lost everything inside there. You lost your memories,\u201d she said. \u201cYou lost your sense of community, your sense of belonging. You know, it\u2019s overwhelming grief and it\u2019s collective grief, because then you have thousands of people that are experiencing this too.\u201d<\/p>\n In the final four minutes, Welch told Bass that he viewed the Palisades fire as inevitable, given the ferocious strength of the Santa Ana winds that day. \u201cAs someone who grew up here, that fire was going to happen,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cRight,\u201d Bass responded.<\/p>\n Welch continued: \u201cIf it\u2019s 100 mile an hour winds and it\u2019s dry, someone\u2019s going to sneeze and there\u2019s going to be a fire.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut if you look at the response in Palisades and the county,\u201d Bass replied, \u201cneither side \u2014\u201d<\/p>\n The mayor paused for a moment. \u201cBoth sides botched it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The setting looked almost cozy: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and a podcast host seated inside her home…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98185,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[12858,1409,4300,4330,21606,1520,48,52,51,47,50,49,53606,53605,8320,592,17283,1435,1791,5050,26920],"class_list":{"0":"post-98184","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-bass","9":"tag-city","10":"tag-eaton-fire","11":"tag-firefighter","12":"tag-handling","13":"tag-interview","14":"tag-la","15":"tag-la-headlines","16":"tag-la-news","17":"tag-los-angeles","18":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","19":"tag-los-angeles-news","20":"tag-matt-welch","21":"tag-official-mayor","22":"tag-palisades","23":"tag-people","24":"tag-response","25":"tag-side","26":"tag-times","27":"tag-video","28":"tag-west-altadena"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98184","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=98184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98184\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}