This city government veteran thinks Los Angeles is in deep trouble

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s Julia Wick, giving you the latest on city and county government.

Rick Cole has forgotten more about municipal government than most of us will ever know.

The 72-year-old former mayor (Pasadena), city manager (Ventura, Azusa, Santa Monica) and deputy mayor (Los Angeles) returned for a third stint at Los Angeles City Hall in 2022, bringing a depth of experience to political neophyte and then-newly elected City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s office as Mejia’s chief deputy.

After two and a half years in City Hall East, Cole announced last month that he would be leaving his post to focus on the Pasadena City Council, which he joined again last year.

Cole knew that holding down “a more-than-full-time role in LA and a more-than-part-time role in Pasadena” would be difficult to juggle, he wrote in a LinkedIn post, and ultimately decided he couldn’t do both jobs justice.

In a goodbye presentation to the L.A. City Council, he sounded the alarm, saying he has never been more worried about the city.

We sat down with Cole to discuss that speech and his fears. Here’s some of our conversation, very lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Tell me about the speech you gave at council. What motivated it?

I’ve never been more alarmed about the future of Los Angeles. I delineated the existential challenges facing the city, which have been decades in the making. Politics needs to be looking out at the future and not just reacting to the crises of the day. And Los Angeles needs bold, systemic reform to meet the moment.

Why are you so alarmed about the future of Los Angeles?

It’s a converging set of crises. You have a homelessness emergency, an affordable housing crisis, a billion-dollar structural financial challenge that’s resulted in the loss of thousands of key city jobs. You had a firestorm that destroyed an entire neighborhood. And you have the federal government at war with the people and the government of Los Angeles.

And underneath that, you have an existential challenge to Hollywood, which is unfolding. And you have crumbling infrastructure.

And you have people feeling that government can’t really fix any of these things, that the money we spend gets wasted, fair or unfair. That’s a challenge.

Do you think the government is wasting taxpayer money?

Every institution has some level of waste. The problem with Los Angeles government and the public sector in California is an aversion to innovation.

We’ve fallen behind the private sector in adapting to the new world of advancing technology and changing demographics. That’s fixable, and that’s what I was advocating for.

What would it look like to fix these problems? Who’s responsible, and who is currently dropping the ball?

The lack of responsibility is built into the City Charter.

Tell me more about what you mean by that.

The people who originally wrote the charter a hundred years ago intentionally designed the system to diffuse authority, which therefore diffused accountability. So it’s really difficult to know who is in charge of any given thing.

A clear example is that the department heads have 16 bosses. They report to the mayor, but in each of the council districts, the council members think that the department heads report to them. That they … have to make the council member happy with what’s going on in their district, whether it’s trimming trees on a particular street or fixing a sidewalk in front of a constituent’s home, the general managers [of city departments] are subject to extreme and constant political pressure.

That distracts them from fixing the system so that we’re doing a better job, so that there are fewer resident complaints, so that a constituent wouldn’t have to go to their council member to get their street fixed. The street would get fixed every 10 years.

But if you are have 16 bosses and and a continually shifting set of priorities, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to put in place systemic solutions.

And in terms of who do you blame: Do you blame the general manager? Do you blame the mayor? Do you blame your council member? Do you blame the lack of resources that the city has to allocate?

The answer is yes.

What needs to change?

What I advocated is designing the city to work in the 21st century, which means a chief operating officer who works for the mayor to make sure the city runs effectively across 44 departments. We don’t have such a person now.

It means a chief financial officer. The responsibilities of a chief financial officer are [currently] divided between four different offices in the city, so it’s difficult, again, to point to one person who’s in charge of keeping the city fiscally sound.

The charter calls for a one-year budget, but we could do a two-year budget and simply update it once a year and be consistent with the City Charter. But then we would have a much broader view of the city’s financial future, and we wouldn’t waste so much time on a budget process that takes 11 of the 12 months and produces very little change.

State of play

— SAFER CITY: L.A. is on pace for its lowest homicide total in nearly 60 years as killings plummet, according to an LAPD tally. The falling murder rate mirrors a national trend in other big cities. As my colleague Libor Jany reports, it also paints a decidedly different picture than the Gotham City image offered by President Trump and other senior U.S. officials as justification for the deployment of military troops in L.A. in recent weeks.

—MORE RAIDS FALLOUT: Mayor Karen Bass announced a plan Friday to provide direct cash assistance to people who have been affected by the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration raids. The money will come from philanthropic partners, not city coffers, and the cash cards will be distributed by immigrant rights groups.

—MOTION TO INTERVENE: The city and county of Los Angeles are among the local governments seeking to join a lawsuit calling on the Trump administration to stop “unlawful detentions” during the ongoing immigration sweeps. The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, Public Counsel and immigrant rights groups last week.

—IN MEMORIAM: Longtime former executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs Jaime Regalado died last month at age 80. Born in Boyle Heights, Regalado served in the U.S. Navy and was the founding editor of California Politics & Policy and the California Policy Issues Annual. He led the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State L.A. from 1991 to 2011.

—“SOMEONE GOOFED”: When L.A. County Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Janice Hahn co-wrote Measure G, a sprawling overhaul of county government that voters passed last November, they didn’t realize they would also be repealing Measure J, a landmark criminal justice measure that voters had passed four years earlier. Thanks to an administrative screw-up for the ages, that’s exactly what happened. The relevant changes won’t go into effect until 2028, so county leaders have some time to undo their oops.

—DISASTER AVERTED: A potentially tragic situation was averted Wednesday night, after all 31 workers in a partially collapsed Los Angeles County sanitation tunnel were able to make their way to safety. Work on the tunnel has been halted, and the county sanitation district board is looking into what caused the collapse.

—POSTCARD FROM SANTA MONICA: In the long shadow of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller‘s hard-line anti-immigration policies, local and national observers alike are paying renewed attention to Miller’s upbringing in the famously liberal enclave once dubbed “the People’s Republic of Santa Monica.” Join me for a deep dive into Miller’s time at Santa Monica High School and learn why some of his former classmates think he’s getting his revenge on Southern California.

QUICK HITS

• On the docket for next week: The city’s charter reform commission will meet Wednesday afternoon. The City Council remains on recess.
• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s program to combat homelessness was in South Los Angeles this week, according to a tweet from Bass’ office.
• A political poem to pair with your morning coffee: “I Am Waiting” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Stay in touch

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