The Daily Signal - Pacific Palisades Should and Can Seceding from Los Angeles | Elaine Culotti

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

With Los Angeles consisting of nearly 4 million people, more than 400 residents are assigned to each LAPD officer, which has an annual budget of about $2 billion. During the fires last year, an estimated more than 25% of emergency response equipment was broken. All this begs the question: What happens to a neighborhood when it has become irrelevant to the city it is in? Answer: They should start exploring de-annexing and fusion safety models for more cost-efficient emergency response services, argues Elaine Culotti in this special video commentary for The Daily Signal. 👉For more videos like this, subscribe to The Daily Signal’s YouTube channel and enable notifications to be alerted the second a new video drops: https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Here we are one year later and we have no resources to fix it. My goal here is to give everyone an example of what it would look like if cities could advocate for themselves when they have become basically irrelevant to the city that they are in. The more that we tear apart our civil servants, the harder it is to recruit and have them come to work. And the larger our cities get, the harder it is to pay our civil servants a fair wage because we have bloated government and not enough money coming in. It's been a year. L.A. can't do it. Sacramento can't do it. Let the people who own the palisades who live there, who are invested there, and who care about it, fix it. Hi, I'm Elaine Kalati for the Daily Signal. You can also find me on all

platforms under hashtag lipstick farmer. If you like this podcast, please like and subscribe, and please write comments. Comments are so helpful, especially if I'm talking about something technical. I love input and I love information that I don't already have. With that, this podcast is about de-annexing or secession, whatever you would like to call a large city losing its patrons inside of the city to create smaller cities. In this case, my example is going to be the Pacific Palisades and the Fires and Los Angeles. And my case study is going to be something called, which I think is really important. It's called the fusion, police, fire, and EMT course, which is basically safety officers. This was proposed in my other case study, which is Sunnyvale, in the 1950s and has stuck.

The reason I'm using a category is because people will make the argument when you want to separate from a large city that you won't be able to afford your own police, fire, and EMT. This is one of many things that cities would have to pay for if they did separate. My goal here is to give everyone an example of what it would look like if cities could advocate for themselves when they have become basically irrelevant to the city that they are in. And there is no better case than the case made for the Pacific Palisades. With Los Angeles being nearly four million people, 3,300 of its citizens are assigned to one officer. That is how short we are on officers and fire and EMTs in LA. In other words, we have way too many people for the size of the force.

And with that, that force costs $2 billion to operate. Imagine that. And during the fires, more than 25% of the equipment was estimated to be broken, not working, or not in service. So we had a terrible outcome when a fire broke out in LA. And here we are one year later and we have no resources to fix it. Let's talk about Sunnyvale. Sunnyvale is about $100,000. 60,000 people, and they have about 300 officers. But what's different there is each officer, police, fire, and EMT are trained as safety officers, if you want to call them that, or public safety commission, and they can do all three jobs. What is the purpose of this? Well, they use their equipment all of the time. They get paid more, and they don't have burnout from being a police officer if they want

to swap over and be a fireman for a while. It works very well in Sunnyvale, and it also costs a fraction, and guess what? They have enough police officers that there's only 500 people in the city per police officer instead of 3,300. It's a big, huge difference. In addition, they can pay the officers, firemen, and EMTs more. They pay them there, or it averages around $350,000 per person versus in Los Angeles, which is about $158,000 per person. As you can imagine, it does make sense to combine things if they're going to get better pay, better coverage, better use of equipment, and better use of resources. So this example is one of many that I think would be very great for California. I especially think it would be great for California to adopt it in its large cities,

where you could create smaller municipalities within the city and then you could create these fusion academies where police officers, firemen and EMTs alike could train for better wages to have a combined job. I think in Los Angeles, it would be absolutely instrumental in recruiting because we have such a huge problem in L.A. and San Francisco and San Diego with getting people wanting to even be police after what we have done with the defunded the police movement. The more that we tear apart our civil servants, the harder it is to recruit and have them come to work. And the larger our cities get, the harder it is to pay our civil servants a fair wage because we have bloated government and not enough money coming in. Deannexing is a very

important thing to look at. What it basically is is putting a map around a zip code and separating it from the city in which the mayor and the city council and the board of supervisors all regulate. Now, sometimes these de annexings or these secessions are not complete separation. In other words, certain things are still tied. In the case of the Pacific Palisades, however, I think it might be interesting to create a pilot city. This would create a lot of pushback, and I understand. understand that, but what are we going to do here? Let's be realistic. There's no money in Los Angeles. The mayor has no power to do it on her own, and there's not enough know-how. No one in L.A. that's at the top has really experienced something this incredibly devastating. And so they

have a learning curve that is so big that they cannot get in front of it. In addition to that, other resources in Los Angeles are completely stretched. Let me give you an example of a few of them. let's just take a look at the building department. For goodness sakes, 600 permits are issued for 18,000 structures between the three fires. Malibu is looking like it might not rebuild at all. It's just terrible. The building department cannot possibly get to all of it. There's just not enough people. How amazing would it be if the palisades had its own building department or they were allowed to hire private planners? Or the people in the palisades that really spend a lot of time there, like Rick Caruso and Steadfast, could become the mayor and management of,

of the city. They could be voted in by the residents of the city. And then when the city decided to put money into the city, it would go into their own coffers. This to me seems like the only way that these cities will be able to rebuild. And what's really important is the people that live there would get to make more of the decisions, which I think is the biggest problem in California, is that we seem to think that Sacramento should be allowed and should force unfunded mandates on cities across the state and force them how to re- build, put things on these cities that are completely depleted that they cannot fight back because they don't have the money, the funds, and they're being forced into high-density housing or handing out syringes to homeless people instead of putting homeless people in places where they would be better off. These things come from Sacramento down. And if a city is completely burned down and they don't have any business and they don't have any way of advocating for themselves. Doesn't it make sense that they would have the opportunity to choose to try to do it by themselves? I feel like they're on their own anyway. What is the harm? I mean, what could possibly

go wrong? Like at this point, it's been a year. L.A. can't do it. Sacramento can't do it. Let the people who own the palisades, who live there, who are invested there, and who care about it, fix it. Why not? Why not let them do it? I think that we should look at de-annixing across California for large cities that have run amok. This is an ongoing problem, and I'm sure California is not the only place that has suffered this kind of insanity. In the beginning, I thought it was just Prop 50 and just taking away power from Republicans and giving it to Democrats. But that's not really true. It's really taking a power away from everyone. It takes power away from Democrats, too. if you let Sacramento continue to take control over your land, your sea, and your air,

then you have no power. And they come in and they make unfunded mandates. They call them that. And they tell you what you're going to do, how you're going to do it, when you're going to do it. And if you don't listen and you don't do it, they hire people to do it for you with your tax dollars. It's incredible, really. So I would like to propose that, California look into these fusion style public safety groups that combine these resources and combine these dollars and provide better service with better pay and allow police officers a break to become a fireman so they don't have deal fatigue and they're not exhausted and they're not disliked because everyone loves a fireman. Everyone loves an EMT. Yet without police and without

proper guidance in our towns, we have high crime. And from filming Mayors Matter, which I'm in the middle of, I am learning that high crime, no crime, slow crime, and everything having to do with crime is fundamentally one of the most important items with all of the mayors thus far. And the second, believe it or not, I've said it a hundred times, it's economic development. Everybody wants economic development. An economic development starts in Sacramento. It starts with a boss man that wants to bring business into the state, not a boss man who wants to drive business out of the state. So economic development and police really do drive all of the mayors that I've spoken to thus far. And what I would like to propose is the opportunity for a small city like the Pacific Palisades to become a

pilot city to see if there is a better way to run California one small city at a time, one good leader at a time, one good manager at a time, and return the power back to the cities and take it away from Sacramento. This is something that's fundamentally so important. And anyone running for governor that wants to be the leader of the state should be thinking like this. They should be thinking how important these cities are with the structures that they have, the mayors that they have in place, and take the good ones and use them as examples for what the ones that are failing could be. And with that, my name's Elaine Kalati with the Daily Signal. Please like this video.

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