After the fires, Rick Caruso aspires to a new role: the mayor of Los Angeles

Rick J. Caruso, the rich developer, spent $ 100 million to apply for the mayor of Los Angeles in 2022. After his decisive defeat, he approached the side of the public phase.

But this year, in the weeks and months following the devastating January fires, Caruso behaved almost as if he had won those elections. It was cheerleader activities that tried to reopen, offering advice to owners of houses looking for help to reconstruct and associate the woman who defeated him, the mayor Karen Bass.

While Mrs. Bass faced a control over her response to fires, Mr. Caruso-Con a staff of consultants and a high quality flow of videos-I have tried to present himself as a sort of shadow mayor, a business manager who can guide Los Angeles from this crisis.

“Hi everyone, it’s Rick Caruso, and I have great news for everyone,” he proclaimed the other day on Instagram, standing on a balcony overlooking the grove, his high -end shopping center in Los Angeles. “We have some small businesses that are reopening in the Palized and Altadena.”

In recent weeks, he has invited the administrators to reopen schools that have been destroyed by fires, he told the owners of houses to go to make sure that the body of the army engineers deleted their properties and prompt people to sponsor the few shops that reopened in the middle of the rubble. The commission for civil and corporate leaders that he created in the days following fires, called SteropaTa, made a show of money and propose how to reconstruct.

In many cases, Caruso is pushing the Town Hall to take measures he has already taken: Los Angeles has already started to issue quick construction permits for the Palisades and has conducted large campaigns by informing people about how to get debris. That Instagram post was published hours after the mayor visited the same activity whose opening was praising.

However, on social media and in the interviews and public apparitions that often seem programmed to compete with official events at the Town Hall, Caruso painted Mrs. Bass as in the lead and Los Angeles as slow to respond to fires and their consequences.

“The city must intensify and pay cleaning for small businesses and residents who are not insured and cannot afford to clean their properties,” he said in an X post. He sent an e -mail to supporters who criticize Los Angeles to “drown people in bureaucracy and drag the approvals while the whole community sit in limbo”.

At the same time, Mr. Caruso spoke against unpopular effort to remember Mrs. Bass led by Nicole Shanahan, a rich donor who was the race companion of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the presidential elections of 2024. But also in the opportunity of the call, Caruso returned to his central criticisms of the city. “This is a time when Los Angeles needs units, not expensive and expensive political distractions,” he wrote In an X post. “We must reconstruct our communities, bring people back to their homes and open activities that have been closed or lost”.

Caruso, 66 years old, a former republican and independent who changed his recording in democratic while preparing to challenge Mrs. Bass, is now taking into consideration the return of politics. His collaborators say that he is deciding whether to challenge Mrs. Bass or instead candidates for the governor in 2026, when Gavin Newsom, the historical democratic operator, will be forced to take a step aside due to the term limits.

“I am a great supporter, I have always been for my whole life, that the elected officials must be held responsible and take responsibility for their actions,” said Caruso in an hour’s interview from his third floor offices next to a SEE construction sites in the Grove. “The reason why I was critical during the fire is that I was absolutely amazed by the failures in the leadership that caused the destruction of thousands and thousands of houses”.

The mayor’s office observed that Mrs. Bass has, in fact, issued large executive orders to simplify permission, host those displaced by fires and encourage a more resilient reconstruction. The debris are eliminated. Power has returned online in the fire areas under its jurisdiction and drinking water has been restored. The city has issued its first reconstruction permits to the owners of houses less than two months after fires, about twice the response to other important fires, including the field and the fires of Woolsey in 2018.

“In a moment of tragic loss of lives and properties, it is a pity that he chose to undermine,” said Zach Seidl, spokesman for Mrs. Bass.

Mr. Caruso seems to keep his political options open while considering a race for mayor or governor. Both speaks of fire in the Palisades of the Pacific, which is located in the city of Los Angeles, and the fire of Altadena, which is located in a non -incorporated section of the county of Los Angeles, and therefore outside the jurisdiction of the mayor.

When he ran to the mayor in 2022, Caruso made a campaign as manager and manager with a successful construction and development record. It was a message that did not sound with most of the Los Angeles voters: Mrs. Bass drew 55 percent of the votesCompared to 45 percent for Mr. Caruso. But many Republicans and democrats suggest that after fires, Los Angeles could be accommodation for that type of appeal by a rich commercial leader.

“He is a type of boy of the results, and this could be his moment,” said Mike Murphy, a republican political consultant who is a longtime friend and adviser.

While Mr. Caruso criticized the performance of Mrs. Bass – “I have no confidence in her ability to supervise the city as she goes through this huge reconstruction project,” he said – he offered praise for the other officials at the forefront in the response to fire. They included Mr. Newsom, a Democrat and two members of the Board of Directors of the County, Kathryn Barger, a Republican, and Lindsey P. Horvath, a democrat, whose districts were captured on the Blaze route.

However, Mr. Caruso said several analysts, the risks undermine the authority of the mayor in a crucial moment, complicating and politically political a task of reconstruction already discouraging that Los Angeles has to face in the coming years and decades.

“The perspective is terrible,” said Stephen Comins, a professor at the Lush School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studied the government’s response to disasters. “I could write you a long screenplay for everything that went wrong in the city of Los Angeles but jump into the pile of dogs and hit people, or behave like you a parallel government, is very destructive.”

Isaac Bryan, a member of the democratic state that represents much of the south -ovest of Los Angeles and is an ally of the mayor, has criticized Mr. Caruso for the path he took. “This is not the time to attack,” he said. “This is time to get together and speak with a united voice.”

These events are a new chapter for Mr. Caruso, who seemed convinced for most of his 2022 campaign that would win the elections. He was discouraged by the greatness of his defeat, they said his friends, and mostly he brought his attention back to his prosperous activity. Mrs. Bass, a liberal note in a city to manage democratic, had hit the ground, running, safe in her popularity and in the breadth of her victory.

But the fires that crossed most of Los Angeles-Tract which Palisades of the Pacific, the coastal enclave where Mr. Caruso owned a high-end shopping center and where two of his children owned the political landscape of California. Hours after the outbreak of Palisades’ fire, he was in news, criticizing Mrs. Bass for leaving Los Angeles to participate in the inauguration of the president of Ghana, despite the warnings of a risk of fire on the way.

Shortly thereafter, he created his Los Angeles commission. Caruso said he called Mrs. Bass the day he announced his creation. “He postponed me a message, but he didn’t call me,” he said. He refused to share the text, saying only that he had wished for his group luck.

This moment is the last rebirth for a man who was on the outskirts of civic life in Los Angeles, the city in which he was born, since the mayor Tom Bradley put him in the police commission in 1986. He continued to serve as president and to become the president of the board of directors of the University of Southern California, where he went to college.

If Mr. Caruso should try again in politics, the path may not be easy, largely because of his history as a republican in a city he has grown more and more democratic Over the years and has become an epicenter for anti-trump sentiment. Caruso and President Trump have some things in common: party change developers who have never made much effort to hide their wealth.

“I was not a Trump supporter, but I’m glad he came,” said Caruso about the president’s visit to Los Angeles 17 days after fires.

In an episode that would probably be taken up by the opponents if it were to run, Caruso maintained a private firefighting force that protected the outdoor shopping center that built in the palisades. The ownership of Mr. Caruso is now unstoppable in the middle of rubble fields.

“The Democrats had a kind of rich businessmen who have never spent a day in charge for high places,” said Garry South, a long -standing democratic political strategist based in Los Angeles.

Mr. Caruso was forced to evacuate his home in Brentwood when power came out while the fires raged and while his family wanted to celebrate his 66th birthday. After learning that the hydrants were exhausting the water, he said, he made a call to Elex MichaelsonA journalist and hosts on Fox 11 Los Angeles.

Caruso rejected the suggestion that his criticism campaign against the mayor was motivated by political ambitions.

“You should interpret him as the father who heard that his daughter’s house just exhausted and all his dreams of growing a family there have gone down with it,” he said. “And so I refuse only this notion that there was some politics. It was a very personal thing.”

Laurel Rosenhall Contributed relationships.