Los Angeles SHOULD find a way to replace botched Mayor Karen Bass

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass admitted this week that she had “botched” the devastating Palisades Fire, yet somehow she’s still favored to win re-election next year.Yes, the field of likely opponents is that weak — at least for now.Bass made the impromptu remark at the end of a podcast, in a segment that her staff pushed the host to delete.It wasn’t the first time the mayor has suppressed the truth about her performance.In March, she admitted that she’d failed to preserve her text messages from the early days of the fire — a violation of state law and local code; the mayor claimed her phone had somehow been set to delete her texts automatically after 30 days.Yet the truth can’t be covered up forever — and Bass knows it.The mayor was in Ghana during the fire: That not only broke her campaign promise to not do international trips, for this junket she ignored warnings that extreme winds were coming to town.In her absence, the city declined to deploy firefighters to an area in Pacific Palisades that an arsonist had burned just a week before.Then, as the fires began to rage, the LAPD struggled to evacuate residents: Every motorcycle officer was assigned to then-President Joe Biden, in town on a family visit.The city’s utility company had left the main Palisades reservoir empty, after taking it offline for maintenance nearly a year before.And the failures didn’t end there.Bass appointed a “recovery czar,” Steve Soboroff, without any public input, promising him $500,000 from private donors — then proceeded to squabble with him publicly and cut him out of key decisions; he left after three months without achieving anything.Then the mayor promised to waive permit fees for residents who want to rebuild their homes — but neglected to push her proposal through the City Council, which still hasn’t OK’d the reprieve.And after Bass promised to suspend Measure ULA, an ill-conceived transfer tax that has slowed rebuilding, she missed the deadline ...