Rick Cole has spent several decades running cities, both as an elected official and as a planner. He has worked in suburban Azusa, California, and progressive-dominated Santa Monica and currently sits on the Pasadena City Council. Yet as he looks out at the urban future, he feels despair—most particularly, about the city of Los Angeles, where he recently departed as deputy mayor and chief deputy controller.
“The progressives are not focused on governance,” he suggested over sushi in Little Tokyo, a stone’s throw from City Hall. “They prefer virtue-signaling to running a city.” Cole’s is not the complaint of a conservative but someone who identifies as “a pragmatic progressive,” even a “sewer socialist.” The problem, he says, is that today’s progressives lack a “results-oriented approach” that actually helps residents.
Innovation is barely possible at the moment, he says. Los Angeles has a special place in this lifelong Catholic’s heart: he went to college here (to Occidental, like Barack Obama), raised his kids here, and considers L.A. “the most fascinating city in the world.” But his head tells him that progressive mayor Karen Bass and an increasingly far-left city council have failed to address, among other major problems, a swollen budget, decaying infrastructure, and awful schools—to say nothing of their staggeringly inept response to the recent wildfires…