Just what did Democrat leaders in Los Angeles and in Sacramento know about the collapsing fire-fighting infrastructure in Southern California -- and when did they know it? A new lawsuit might threaten to expose more than a decade of willful neglect by LA mayors and California governors -- if the Los Angeles Times hadn't beaten the plaintiffs to the punch this morning. 

Let's start with the lawsuit. A reality-TV couple lead a class-action lawsuit filed yesterday against the city after losing their home in the Palisades. They claim the city's neglect directly led to the loss of their homes, using a legal argument that will sound uncomfortably familiar to the city and state:

Reality TV couple Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt are suing the city of Los Angeles after losing their Pacific Palisades home in the wildfires that have torn through Southern California in recent weeks.

The couple, who rose to stardom on "The Hills," a spin-off of "Laguna Beach," filed the lawsuit Tuesday along with more than 20 other property owners and residents who were affected by the Palisades Fire. The complaint blames Los Angeles and its municipal water department for the water issues that hampered firefighting efforts and says it ultimately led to the damage to their properties. ...

The complaint filed by the couple and others mentions that the Santa Ynez Reservoir, which services the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, was offline and had been out of commission since February 2024 while awaiting repairs. The hydrants in the neighborhood were connected to three tanks that held 1 million gallons of water each and went dry within 12 hours, the complaint said, citing Janisse Quiñones, the water utility's chief executive and chief engineer.

This complaint relies on the same "inverse condemnation" doctrine that allows the state and cities to sue power companies for wildfires caused by their equipment and workers. Will the court allow the city to get hoist by its own petard, so to speak? Under the circumstances already known, it's hard to see how the court could object. The Santa Ynez reservoir was emptied and never refilled, and the city appears to have done nothing to replace its firefighting capacity despite the known risks of wildfires in that area. It's the main reason the reservoir got built in the first place.

However, the LA Times uncovers a much stronger fact pattern of gross negligence and incompetence in a new report. County officials had asked for three dozen critical upgrades and expansions of water infrastructure more than a decade earlier, at a projected cost of less than $57 million. Successive city and state administrations did absolutely nothing on any of those projects to move them from planning to production:

Many projects on a list of about three dozen “highest priority” upgrades compiled by county officials in 2013 have yet to break ground in communities devastated by the fires.

The county wrote that the upgrades would achieve “critical goals,” including ensuring the system had enough water to meet “fire flow needs.” The estimated cost was less than $57 million and construction would have taken about seven years.

Plans to build tanks that would have provided more than 1 million gallons of additional water storage in fire-ravaged Malibu and Topanga were left on the drawing board. Replacements of “aging and severely deteriorated” water tanks were postponed, according to county records, along with upgrades to pumping stations and “leak prone” water lines in the two communities, whose water system is run by the county’s Department of Public Works, or DPW.

The 2013 list wasn't the last time officials tried to press for repairs and proper resourcing. The report also notes that a similar list got compiled in 2019, narrowed to the top 13 most urgent projects, with a new price tag just shy of $60 million. And once again, the city dragged its heels, even though prompt action would have seen all but one of those projects completed by last September -- just in time for the wildfire season this winter.

It's not clear if Montag and Pratt have included this as part of their class-action lawsuit, If they haven't, you can bet that their attorneys are filing new briefs with the court tout de suite. In fact, we may actually see a lawyer shortage in Southern California as other victims of the fire follow in the footsteps of Montag and Pratt.

The LA Times' Connor Sheets raises another question that will come up in court. Was this really gross negligence, or was it intentional malice? LA and California governments have tried to suppress development for decades, especially in single-family homes, in favor of their "livable cities" fantasies. As the LAT reported yesterday, progressive activists and officeholders are already talking about pushing that agenda rather than allowing Palisades owners to rebuild. 

Look no further than Malibu, which sustained billions of dollars in damages from the Palisades wildfire and didn't have the infrastructure to fight it. That appears to have been by design, as activists in and out of government used the excuse of limited water resources to block development:

Anti-development sentiment has been an especially limiting factor in Malibu, where Pestrella said the city has at times used insufficient water access as an excuse to restrict new construction.

“The community is not demanding it,” he said when asked why so many projects have failed to move forward.

“They’re not pro-development. They’re still utilizing the water system as a way to restrict development in Malibu. That’s the bottom line. That’s why it’s not happening at the pace it could happen at.”

And this gets us to the petard-hoisting again. In their zeal to freeze Malibu and 'preserve' it in their preferred concept, progressives blocked water-system upgrades that might have saved it from getting destroyed, or at least preserved much more of it. Their obstinate refusal to allow development led directly to destruction. 

That isn't an accident, nor is it force majeure, as the city will undoubtedly argue if and when the lawsuits reach the trial stage. These are deliberate choices to ignore critical failures of basic civic infrastructure. The city, county, and/or state refused to invest $60 million over a five-year period (in 2019) while the city of Los Angeles received a revenue of $7.581 billion in FY2023 alone. 

That investment would have been 0.8% of that annual revenue ... and Los Angeles never bothered to invest it to protect its citizens and property from wildfire risks that are not just known but predictably cyclical. It's not just Karen Bass who abdicated that core responsibility but also Eric Garcetti (2013-2022), and arguably Antonio Villaraigosa too (2005-2013). The responsibility also falls not just on Gavin Newsom as governor but also Jerry Brown, both of whom spent billions of dollars on a mythical high-speed rail system in the Central Valley rather than the millions necessary to have proper capacity to protect Californians from preventable catastrophes such as these. 

And now the same progressives that mismanaged (or worse) their communities to disaster want to use the disaster to completely remake these communities to their own fantasy cities. It's despicable, and it should be a massive wake-up call for California voters about the incompetence and malice of progressive governance. Will it be? Count me as skeptical, but there can't be any clearer signal than the smoking wreckage of the Palisades juxtaposed with the empty Santa Ynez without any effective backups in place.