There’s a saying that the late L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan cited during his tenure when it came to government red tape, and it came in handy amid a catastrophe that, until last week, was a notch higher on the list of L.A.’s worst natural disasters.
“It is better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission.”
You can say sorry later, Riordan said.
From former council persons to aides, it’s a well-worn memory of a leader’s mantra, gleaned from the no-nonsense mayor, when making government work during and after an epic calamity.
Thirty-one years ago this week, Riordan put it to good use, and it echoes on the anniversary of the Northridge earthquake as a kind of playbook — lessons learned amid the city of L.A.’s and the county of L.A.’s collective response to the region’s latest devastating catastrophe.
Many Los Angeles-area residents remember the moment well. 4:30 a.m., Jan. 17, 1994.
In the massive, 6.7-magnitude shake, buildings and freeways were toppled. Eight seconds later, dozens of people had died, thousands were hurt and rubble lay from Cal State Northridge to the 10 freeway. Billions in losses were recorded.
And there was Riordan, fresh off being elected the year before, in a city still reeling from the wounds of the L.A. Riots, leading the response in a metropolis once again in crisis.
Lesson 1: Say sorry later
From the start, Riordan was fueled by an intense urgency to break through red tape between and within agencies at the city, county and state levels to get things working amid the rubble.
When he learned that the only detour around a destroyed section of the Santa Monica Freeway involved three intersections in the neighboring Culver City, Riordan said in a 2015 reflection on leadership at the Brookings Institute. “Okay, fine, just take them over.”
There were contracts to sign, architects and engineers to deploy. But it couldn’t happen on a business-as-usual timeline, when some of the most used and populated freeway systems and other infrastructure were downed in one of the biggest cities.
Frustrated by his early encounter with the city’s emergency operations, Riordan pushed to create what became the Department of Emergency Management, and voters approved in 2002 a massive bond proposal resulting in the construction of the new high-tech Emergency Operations Center.
From Gov. Pete Wilson, Riordan got engineers and architects out to determine the damage to bridges that first day, and they developed a bonus program to complete repairs on the Santa Monica Freeway.
The work on that portion of the 10 freeway was completed in 66 days.
Riordan — a successful lawyer and businessman who came to politics late in life — died in 2023 after serving two terms as L.A.’s mayor and having run a failed bid for California governor.
But lessons from the Northridge disaster — an anniversary that understandably passed without much fanfare on Friday — live on in a playbook playing out now amid the destruction of the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires.
The toll of the destruction has yet to be fully calculated. So far, the 55%-contained Eaton blaze has destroyed or damaged 7,000 structures and killed at least 17. The Palisades fire has left at least 10 dead and destroyed or damaged at least 5,000 structures.
Those who knew Riordan, and who were familiar with his playbook amid crisis, acknowledge much is different between the two disasters, making them “apples and oranges” in multiple ways.
But they agree that how leaders respond in getting the government and the bureaucracy to respond does matter, setting a tone and environment for recovery. And in L.A., the response to the Northridge quake set a modern template for leaders, they said.
“Yes. It is still a lesson,” said Joel Fox, policy director for Riordan in his bid for governor. “That was his philosophy for his response to the earthquake, and it still is a good philosophy today when you are facing a crisis of this magnitude.”
Moving to rebuild quickly by removing red tape was underpinned by the the idea that “if I ask for permission, I have to wait for an answer. Bureaucracy gets involved,” Fox said.
Cutting red tape amid the Northridge quake devastation meant confronting difficult choices when it came to getting agencies to act swiftly.
“For example, on the earthquake, a natural disaster like that, the state constitution provided that the county would take over control of the emergency,” Riordan reflected during his Brookings Institute talk in 2015, remembering the downed bridges and how they would need to be repaired.
“I ignored that. The county never complained that I took over control, the state never complained, nobody ever complained. We just went smoothly through things. And we went over the map of the city, and then the next meeting we had on that took place at the governor’s office, Pete Wilson’s office, next morning.”
Within a day, his team was meeting with Wilson.
“We had agreements with all of the contractors to repair the bridges, there were five of them, and within two months, we had repaired all of them. And they earned bonuses.”
It was about saying sorry later, Fox said.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and L.A. County officials may already be tapping that playbook amid destruction wrought by the Palisades and Eaton fires, as well as scattered other blazes.
“Red tape, bureaucracy, all of it must go,” Bass said in a recent news conference, discussing what will be a long post-fire recovery. “We must not rely on the old way of doing things. We shake up the system and move forward with new strategies and possibilities.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom has set a similar tone, issuing multiple orders that promise to streamline the recovery process.
L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, whose district is in much of the Eaton burn area, echoed the mantra of cutting red tape.
“I’m thinking about how to clear the bureaucracy,” she said. “And get the bureaucracy out of the way to allow these people to rebuild.”
There are signs the wheels are turning.
Bass issued an executive order on Monday that officials said establishes a “one-stop-shop” to quickly issue permits in all impacted areas. The order directs city departments to expedite all building permit review/inspections, bypasses state CEQA discretionary review, allows rebuilding “like for like” and waives city discretionary review processes.
The order also streamlines debris removal and directs the Department of Building and Safety to fast-track “temporary certificates of occupancy” for 1,400 units of housing currently in the pipeline across the city.
At the state level, Newsom issued an executive order on Jan. 12 to streamline the rebuilding of homes and businesses destroyed — suspending permitting and review requirements under CEQA and the Coastal Act.
Indeed, Bass, at least at some point, appeared to have taken note.
“In the wake of the Northridge earthquake, Mayor Riordan set the standard for emergency action,” she said last year, acknowledging the quake’s 30th anniversary. “He reassured us and delivered a response with an intensity that still pushes us all to be faster and stronger amidst crisis.”
Observers said Bass and other leaders do well to take from the playbook, and they are.
They acknowledged that criticism of Bass being out of the country when the fire broke out was “not a good look” but said it’s managing the aftermath that will really count.
“She’s got to handle the post-fire assertively and quickly, and she has rhetorically said, ‘I’m going to put aside all these regulations to get the job’. Now she’s got to do it,” Fox said.
“I thought Riordan wasn’t as concerned with the rhetoric. He just did it. And she just has to do it,” said Fox.
Lesson 2: Support from Sacramento
It didn’t hurt that Riordan had support from Sacramento.
Wilson aligned with Riordan on the GOP political spectrum. That meant cooperation.
It’s a parallel that can serve Bass on the city side and supervisors on the county side of the recovery, with a politically aligned governor who himself has taken executive actions to “cut the red tape” on recovery and rebuild.
It can only help Bass that Newsom appears to be striving to set the same “clear the government obstacles” tone.
State lawmakers have also introduced bills to expedite recovery and rebuilding efforts.
Lesson 3: Set the tone
It also didn’t hurt that Riordan had a way of setting the scene, people who knew him said.
“It was the atmosphere he created. He just empowered the bureaucracy to do what needed to be done,” said former L.A. City Council member and then-Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, whose districts spanned from the San Fernando Valley to the Westside and were heavily impacted by the Northridge quake.
Riordan himself said that among the things he learned from the Northridge experience was that “perceived power” is genuine power.
“People think you have power,” and that can move people to get things done in a crisis, he said.
Yaroslavsky, who was an L.A. City Council member during the quake and a supervisor during the recovery, noted that the “only silver linings” in such terrible tragedy are the lessons learned and the changes that can be made for the good in the aftermath.
“And this is a sudden change on steroids,” he noted, looking back at Northridge and other L.A. crises, such as the Bel Air fire in 1961 and the L.A. Riots in 1992.
They go way beyond Riordan’s “apologize later” mantra, of course, but go to the heart of local laws and policies.
The Bel Air fire, which broke out on Nov. 6, 1961, destroyed nearly 500 homes in the exclusive L.A. community.
The blaze, in a tightly packed community of homes on an L.A. hillside, prompted city fire safety reform, including a ban on wood-shingle roofs on new houses, Yaroslavsky said. It also prompted a tough brush clearance policy.
At the time, it was a kind of “Pearl Harbor” for the fire services, he noted.
“They got a surprise attack. The 1961 Bel Air fire caused a total reassessment of how you fight a wildfire,” he said.
In the wake of the Northridge quake, the L.A. City Council strengthened building codes.
And these fires will bring their own tough lessons.
“This is another Pearl Harbor for the fire services,” Yaroslavsky said, noting lessons for government and residents. “There’s going to have to be a deep dive.”
Yaroslavsky noted that these fires moved so fast, and so fiercely, that “this was a fire that was impossible to fight,” but officials will still need to look at building codes and the materials used to rebuild homes. The city and county will need to build the capacity to process the flood of permits.
And the recovery in itself, at least from government, would be well served to be handled not by the mayor at all but by a kind of recovery “czar,” he said.
“Bring someone out of retirement. Someone who knows government, who can get stuff done. Have him on there for six months to move this agenda forward at warp speed,” he said.
Lesson 4: Tell the truth
Experts agreed that even with the speed at which effective leaders can move the government, there’s a long rebuilding road ahead, much like after Northridge.
“We didn’t solve the problem in 30 days,” Yaroslavsky said, noting that even 20 years after the Northridge quake, there were still some properties still unrepaired.
“What Riordan did, and what our current mayor and the board of supervisors can do, is say ‘we’re here to help. We’re here to clean out the drain that blocks progress,’” he said. “But don’t overpromise and underdeliver. Underpromise and overdeliver.”
The key was being honest, Yaroslavsky said. People get it. It’s gonna be a long road, but leaders who have been through a recovery said that while people impacted by the recovery want results, they also want to be told the truth.
Lesson 5: Federal support
It also doesn’t hurt to have the federal government on your side.
Despite public clashes with Newsom over the state’s fire response, there are signals that President-elect Donald Trump, who will be sworn in on Monday, will visit the fire-ravaged areas.
That visit will follow outgoing President Joe Biden’s executive orders enabling federal aid to flow in.
Local officials, including Barger, Rep. Judy Chu, and Newsom, have all invited the incoming president to visit to survey the devastation, despite Trump’s social media posts that Newsom and Bass’s “gross incompetence” led to it.
Leaders who worked on the Northridge quake recovery said former President Bill Clinton’s support was vital.
“When Clinton landed at Bob Hope Airport, following him down the steps was half the federal government,” said Yaroslavsky, referencing the heads of agencies such as FEMA and the Department of Transportation.
But that may be easier said than done this time. Trump is a longtime critic of California leadership and has waged a very public war of words with Newsom.
Lesson 6: Have something to prove
Clinton wanted to show that his administration had learned the lessons from Hurricane Andrew, which just a few months before had brought extreme destruction in Florida, Louisiana and the Bahamas. The devastation also brought criticism from local officials and disaster relief experts over what they said was an inadequate government response.
Riordan, too, had something to prove, wanting to show he could lead a strong and swift response on the heels of the aftermath of the 1992 L.A. Riots. Then-Mayor Tom Bradley and then-Police Chief Daryl Gates had a tense relationship, one that devolved over a course of years. Critics pointed to their lack of communication as making it harder for Bradley to manage the crisis.
Current leaders have much to prove, too.
Trump is about to embark on his second term, and aims to establish that his policies are more effective that California’s Democrat-dominated status quo, which he’s spent years condemning.
Bass, meanwhile, has to overcome the full-court-press scrutiny she’s endured for being away while the fires began, for the response that failed to halt the flames in the unprecedented Southland firestorm and for fierce criticism of the city’s readiness.
“I think we need to take a page,” Yaroslavsky said, “out of the Riordan-Clinton playbook.”