As the City of Malibu begins the arduous process of piecing together exactly what went wrong in the Woolsey Fire, council members who were serving during the time of the fire will be taking a back seat to recently elected Mayor Pro Tem Karen Farrer and Council Member Mikke Pierson. Pierson and Farrer were elected in a 3-2 council vote to take two seats on the newly formed Disaster Response and Recovery Ad Hoc Committee “to coordinate disaster and fire evacuation preparedness and make recommendations to the City Council with respect to additional emergency preparedness actions.”
The selection of Farrer and Pierson came after one Malibu resident, Bruce Silverstein, spoke to urge Mullen, Peak and Wagner to sit out the committee.
“I don’t have any preconceived notion that anyone in the city did anything wrong, or did anything that anyone ought to be, at the end of the day, complaining about—there are complaints at this time, but I don’t have any reason to believe one way or the other what that’s going to be,” Silverstein said. “But if there’s going to be a conclusion—if there were a conclusion that the city did everything right, it will have no credibility whatsoever if people who are subject to that analysis were on or touched the investigation that led to that analysis. This has to be an independent process.”
The Woolsey Fire’s flames had scarcely been quelled before finger-pointing erupted over how evacuations were organized, how fire response was ordered and why exactly residents were trapped inside or out of Malibu for days after the fire ended.
Much of that blame has been cast at city staff and the Los Angeles County Fire Department, though council members have also come under fire for their visibility, or lack thereof, during the emergency.
This move to elect Farrer and Pierson the council’s representatives came despite protestations by current council member Rick Mullen, a fire captain who was working during the time of the blaze. Mullen was also still mayor of Malibu in November.
According to Mullen, the scope of the city’s ad hoc committee’s mission has nothing to do with an investigation; rather, it was to be an “after-action process” to analyze various elements of “what worked” and “what didn’t work” during the fire and the response immediately afterward.
“I’ve heard some people say, ‘You know, we don’t want Rick looking at fire response because he works for the fire department and he needs to recuse himself,’” Mullen said. “The actual investigation—because there will be an investigation—into the conduct of the fire department is going to be conducted by the County of Los Angeles, and the city does have a seat at the table.
“Our role should be to gather all the input and concerns and observations from the individual citizens here in Malibu—the residents—and send it up to those investigators and to get answers from them,” Mullen later continued.
But according to present mayor Jefferson “Zuma Jay” Wagner, it was a wise move to appoint committee members who were just starting out on new council terms, so that if the committee’s work lasted multiple years, there would be continuity.
According to Farrer, there was also a credibility factor in appointing her and Pierson.
“I would like to see this ad hoc committee be something that the community has confidence in,” Farrer said. “That’s important. Every single person has questions … I do want to see an ad hoc committee that the community feels, again, confident in the process and can trust the results.”
Pierson agreed.
“I do worry a little bit about, I guess, the optics of it,” he said, later adding, “I think Karen and I could do a very good job.”
