Steve Soboroff, whom Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass named as “Chief Recovery Officer” after the devastating recent wildfires, left his post on Thursday after being sidelined by the city — and blasted the recovery effort on his way out.
Bass named Soboroff to his post in January, shortly after the fire. It was unclear what authority he would have, or whether he would be accountable to residents in any way. After Trump administration special envoy Ric Grenell revealed that Soboroff would earn over half a million dollars for three months of work, he agreed to work for free.
But Soboroff had already been sidelined by the mayor, who evidently did not like the idea of another public official sharing the limelight as she worked to repair her image, which was damaged by the fact that she had been overseas during the fire. (Bass traveled to Ghana despite days of warnings about an extremely dangerous wind event in L.A.)
The Los Angeles Times reported:
“They haven’t asked me to do anything in a month and a half, nothing, zero,” Soboroff said Tuesday in a free-wheeling, 90-minute exit interview with The Times.
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Soboroff said he now wonders whether the mayor wanted someone of his demographic — an older, white developer with longtime relationships in affluent Los Angeles — to provide political cover in the Palisades, a wealthy, majority white neighborhood that heavily favored her opponent, billionaire developer Rick Caruso, in the 2022 election.
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[H]e expressed doubts about Hagerty Consulting, the Illinois-based firm Bass tapped in early February to be the city’s main fire recovery contractor, assisting with infrastructure restoration and environmental mitigation for up to $10 million over the course of a year, according to its contract with the city. He believes that the city should have hired global engineering firm AECOM instead.
Soboroff had been, until now, silent about his concerns over Hagerty Consulting. As Breitbart News reported, Hagerty had been hired behind closed doors, for an undisclosed amount, despite concerns about its past record. (Soboroff had told Breitbart News that there would be a “competitive bidding process” for the role of overseeing recovery efforts.)
The New York Times added that Soboroff sounded pessimistic about local residents’ return to their community:
Mr. Soboroff made clear in an interview that he was leaving unhappily and reluctantly. His argument that he should stay in the post for two years was rejected by Ms. Bass and her aides from the outset, he said, and as their divisions deepened, even another 90-day stint seemed unfeasible. A low point, he said, was when he learned City Hall had started a search for his successor without alerting him.
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He predicted that fewer than half the 23,000 or so residents there would ever move back because labor shortages, tariffs and California’s high cost of living would make rebuilding too expensive. At a time of anxiety about how the fires will alter the character of the city, the prediction was a startling suggestion that even the most affluent areas may be in for dramatic change.
“I think it will be between 50 and 70 percent who don’t return,” he said. “That’s huge.” As a result, he said he expected the Palisades to become an international community with even more wealth, where homes would go for as much as $250 million.
On Thursday, Bass appeared at a joint event with developer Rick Caruso, her onetime political rival — whom Soboroff also reportedly saw as a rival, though the two had pledged publicly to work together.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
