They could be playing with fire.
Three of LA’s lefty councilmembers on Tuesday tried to torch efforts to clear homeless encampments from tinderbox hillsides, voting to stop authorities from removing camps on privately owned land in the city’s most extreme fire-danger zones without owner permission.
The motion, which ultimately passed 11–3, directs city agencies to explore legal ways to cut through the red tape that ties the hands of police and firefighters, preventing them from clearing entrenched camps on private land in “Very High Fire Severity Zones” when absentee owners fail to act.
“The hazard to our city and other hillside residents is very real, very palpable,”Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez, one of the authors of the measure, warned on the council floor before the vote.
“The threat is immediate, not hypothetical,” she added, arguing that when property owners fail to address dangerous conditions during periods of extreme fire risk, “we have a duty to act.”
She described the effort as a preventative safety measure, not a crackdown.
“This is actually helping to protect residents in hillside communities that are under threat, particularly on red flag days,” Rodriguez said, adding that the goal is to give city crews “the tools that they need” to address encampments that pose an imminent fire danger.
“These areas are often a mix of ownership,” the motion states, warning that identifying parcel boundaries in steep canyon terrain can be “difficult and time-consuming” — time communities don’t have during peak fire season.
The three no votes were from Democratic Socialists–aligned councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez, Hugo Soto-Martinez and Ysabel Jurado.
Soto-Martinez said the measure could be used “to push homeless folks from one side of the street to another hill to another hill,” while Councilmember Ysabel Jurado called for more study — despite the fact that the motion itself orders a study.
Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos
