The revelations out of Los Angeles just keep getting worse as multiple wildfires continue to ravage the city. Mayor Karen Bass (D) has faced heavy scrutiny for being on a taxpayer-funded "diplomatic" trip to Africa during the crisis. Her return didn't quell criticism, as she had no answers for the many cascading failures that led to the most expensive wildfires in history. As I'm about to share, things have just gotten worse, though. 

SEE: Karen Bass' Week Gets Even Worse After Disastrous Press Conference 

One of the primary drivers of the devastation has been a lack of water due to unfilled reservoirs in Los Angeles County and unmaintained, failing infrastructure that caused fire hydrants to run dry. As RedState reported, the Ynez Reservoir was taken offline for maintenance during wildfire season, a decision that has turned out to be catastrophic. 

When three 1-million-gallon capacity water storage tanks in Pacific Palisades went dry Tuesday night, firefighters were forced to abandon efforts to save thousands of homes. LA Department of Water and Power (LADWP) CEO Janisse Quiñones has repeatedly claimed during press conferences that her utility did everything it could to prepare for the forecasted wind event and support the Los Angeles Fire Department as it responded, but left out one key fact: The Santa Ynez Reservoir in the hills above Pacific Palisades, which holds 117 million gallons of water and normally feeds those tanks, had been drained and taken offline for repairs to its cover even though the state's brush fire season was ongoing.

As Jennifer Van Laar noted in her reporting, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is run by a woman named Janisse Quiñones. She previously worked for California power supplier PG&E and was hired by Bass in the spring of 2024. That's where things get questionable.

For starters, Quiñones is being paid $750,000 a year plus a housing allowance to operate as the "CEO" of LADWP. As city officials go, that's a pretty sizable salary, even with the high cost of living in Los Angeles. For context, she makes twice what the President of the United States makes. 

To be fair, in a vacuum, that wouldn't necessarily be an issue. If Los Angeles wants to try to attract better talent by paying more, I suppose there are worse things for a local government to do. Is Quiñones a unique talent, though? She sure doesn't seem to be given how badly and quickly the infrastructure failed in this case. Not filling the Ynez Reservoir for wildfire season was bad enough, but clearly, the water pumping facilities and hydrant system were not prepared for what should have been treated as an inevitability. For context, the hydrant issue has been known about since at least 2021.

What Quiñones did do well, though, is push the preferred narratives of the far-left. When Bass hired her, the mayor touted the new "CEO" as a person who could shift the city to "100% clean energy," but take a wild guess what else Quiñones was really concerned with? If you said "equity" and "social justice," collect your winnings at the window:

What caused the dry fire hydrants? The new CEO of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Janisse Quiñones, told reporters on Wednesday that there was just too much demand on the system.

Quiñones was hired by Bass in April to run the city-owned LADWP at the eye-popping salary of $750,000 plus a housing allowance. She “has the skill set and leadership experience to advance the department into 100% clean energy by 2035,” the mayor said at the time.

“It’s important to me that everything we do, it’s with an equity lens and social justice,” Quiñones told a radio host in July, “and making sure we right the wrongs that we’ve done in the past from an infrastructure perspective.”

It's like clockwork at this point. It doesn't matter what role these people fill, they are all obsessed with DEI not just as a factor, but as a priority. Ask yourself this: Why does a person whose job is to keep the water flowing and power on need to be concerned with "social justice" ? Are pipes, pumps, reservoirs, and fire hydrants racist now? 

The entire thing is absurd. Even if you assume Quiñones is otherwise qualified for the job, city officials should not be wasting time and resources trying to socially engineer outcomes centered on left-wing ideology. Does the water work? Is the power on? Those are the only two questions with which Quiñones should ever be concerned. 

But this is what Democrat excess looks like, and it always ends badly. It turns city officials who have fairly simple jobs, at least in terms of scope, into social justice warriors with delusions of grandeur. Meanwhile, normal people suffer the consequences of pointless diversions when all they want is for their services to work and their streets to be safe. That dynamic is not going to change until voters demand it, and those in Los Angeles will have a chance in November's elections.