The past few weeks have been incredibly difficult for our community. Los Angeles is a beautiful place, and the pain of watching entire communities burn will stay with us for a long time. But what also stood out over these past two weeks—and what many of us will carry long after we rebuild—is Angelenos’  strength, compassion, and resilience throughout this crisis.

Neighbors opened – and continue to keep open – their homes, offering shelter and comfort to friends and strangers. At evacuation sites, people showed up at all hours with emergency supplies and open hearts, asking what they could do to help. As the Sunset fire spread last Wednesday, donations began pouring in within minutes of Pan Pacific Park opening as an evacuation site. People just kept coming—one after another—for five hours straight. Community groups and nonprofits like Our Beautiful Kitchen and hundreds of volunteers stepped up to make thousands of meals for first responders and anyone else who needed one. Members of my team worked around the clock at evacuation centers, setting up cots and helping evacuees access services. LA was in a true state of emergency, and Angelenos rose to the occasion in beautiful ways.

Recovery will take all of us working together, and this city council and the City as a whole must rise to the occasion. As the newly-appointed Chair of the City’s Budget Committee, I can attest that this work won’t be easy. Our city’s financial health is not where it needs to be, but we are committed to rebuilding responsibly and with urgency, by growing the pie instead of making it a zero-sum effort. That means securing state and federal dollars, taking a holistic look at our own budget and implementing efficiencies across our bureaucracy,  and ensuring that as we rebuild, we continue to deliver the core services Angelenos depend on: housing people, making our communities safer, and fixing sidewalks, among other key priorities. We will meet this challenge with intelligence, speed, and care for the people who need it most. In this newsletter, I’ll share updates on the legislation the Council adopted this past week to support Pacific Palisades recovery efforts, as well as highlights from productive conversations my colleagues and I had this last week with state leaders on working together to quickly rebuild.

As we move forward, our office is here to support you. Whether you need help navigating resources, have ideas to share, or just want to connect, don’t hesitate to reach out. Let’s stay safe and take care of each other. The road ahead will be challenging, but I’m confident we will meet it together.

All my best,

Katy

This week, the City Council approved a range of urgent measures (meaning they were introduced, heard, and adopted at the same Council meeting, avoiding the usual multi-week legislative approvals process) aimed at helping our city recover from the devastating fires and addressing the immediate needs of those directly affected. These motions focused on providing relief, rebuilding stronger, and ensuring we are better prepared for future emergencies. Key highlights include:

Together with Councilmember Nithya Raman, I introduced a motion to expand and improve the City’s Red Flag warning protocols. The fires revealed the urgent need for stronger measures to protect high fire-risk areas and ensure better coordination across city departments during emergencies.

In the past two weeks, both our office and Councilmember Raman’s office worked in real time with City departments and community leaders to coordinate park closures and limit non-essential vehicular traffic and activities that increased fire risk in hillside areas. Going forward, these common sense risk mitigation strategies should automatically take effect under certain high fire risk conditions. Our motion directs city departments to develop a comprehensive response plan that includes:

This motion will help make sure the lessons we’ve learned are applied to protect communities with clear, coordinated, and proactive systems for future emergencies.

On Thursday, I joined a roundtable with Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, hosted by Assemblymember Rick Zbur, to discuss with local elected leaders how the state can help Los Angeles recover from the wildfires. Our immediate priority right now is rebuilding—it has to be. At the same time, we also need to be thinking about recovery in terms of climate resilience. Experts estimate that climate change could cost California $113 billion annually by 2050, and given the destruction from these fires, that number may already be too low. We need to act now to reform how we fund recovery and ensure it’s climate resilient to minimize the likelihood of such catastrophic devastation in the future.

During the roundtable, we discussed several key areas of collaboration:

I’m grateful to partner with state leaders to make sure Los Angeles has the tools it needs to recover and rebuild stronger.