Commentary
The firestorm is still in progress in Los Angeles, priorities first and foremost are saving of lives and property. The calamity in Los Angeles is still early in the situation, ongoing, and not yet under control, but some basic facts can be established at this point in time.
- Janisse Quiñones PE (She/Her) is the CEO and Chief Engineer at Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP).
- Janisse Quiñones was hired with a $750,000 Salary, nearly twice that of her predecessor.
- LADWP operates ten major active reservoirs and over 107 smaller storage facilities, all of which create operational flexibility to balance water supplies and customer demands.
- A key reservoir in the Pacific Palisades fire was inoperable.
- Multiple locations of the service area that Quinones oversees are a raging inferno and short on water for firefighters.
Water for the LADWP Service Area comes from the following sources:
- 73% is purchased water from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) which is both an aqueduct to State Water Projects in upper California and the Colorado River Aqueduct.
- 15% is water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct which is fed from water close to the Nevada Border.
- 10% is local groundwater.
- 2% is recycled water.
LADWP Strategic Initiatives reflect Religion of Woke-ism
Now that some of the basic facts are established, the reality is that one of the largest urban fires ever experienced in the U.S is in progress. It looks like World War II-era firebombing in progress. The severe water shortages, War on Dams, and ideological virtue signaling are well known in Governor Newsom’s California. But Water and Power are essentially apolitical and based on science, fact, and best practices of civil engineering, correct? A peek at the LADWP Strategic Initiatives refutes that luddite view. Here are the four, strategic imperatives for LADWP:
- Leading with Equity
- Clean Energy Future
- Resiliency and Reliability
- Our Sustainable Water Future
What do these pithy titles mean? They are abstract, street theater platitudes that disguise hard-core leftist retribution intended to collapse and destroy existing society. People are dead and dying, and large swaths of Los Angeles are being destroyed because of this Religion of Woke-ism. This Religion could not care less about facts, science, efficient delivery of public services, or reality. Earlier this year, Janisse appeared on a podcast with a title, “Why Equity is Key to Solving the Climate Emergency w/ DWP CEO & Chief Engineer Janisse Quinones.” DEI hires are not focused on efficient delivery of effective services to all the Citizens. Controlling these positions is another opportunity to weaponize government against the Citizen for angry retribution clothed in George Takai happy talk.
As Scott Adams has pointed out, “Having the wrong leaders with the wrong priorities gets you everything we are witnessing this week”.
Pervasive Public Service Corruption in Los Angeles and California
I’m all for highly paid Civil Servants. But, I believe in the Singapore Model, in which Civil Servants are highly paid, but in return are expected to perform with absolute fidelity, deliver outstanding results, and will be held to account for their performance.
And if they don’t meet these requirements, they get shown the door, or worse. Quiñones has had a meteoric rise. Now there is a Biblical level disaster under her watch. I’m not upset that Quiñones was able to negotiate such a healthy salary, but she should be held accountable, which also means a return of salary, fines, and possible prosecution.
If one has not been paying attention, the Los Angeles region, under a Blue monoculture, has been a cesspool of Public Sector Corruption for decades. Even the New York Times gets it right occasionally and says, “Prosecutors say that corruption is rising in California cities as one-party rule, inattentive voters and weakened news media have reduced the traditional checks on power”. Chinese malign influence has been front and center in the pervasive corruption of California:
“A Chinese real estate company was fined $4 million and placed on five years probation (sic) Friday for bribing former Los Angeles City Councilman José Huizar with more than $1.5 million in cash, gambling trips and escorts in exchange for the then-councilman’s support of a planned downtown hotel project.
Although he was also charged, Shen Zhen New World I’s billionaire owner Wei Huang fled to China after the charges were announced and has never appeared in a Los Angeles courtroom in connection with the case.”
The DEI Cult brings equal misery, death, and destruction for all
Woke-ism and DEI are not about reconciliation, they are about retribution and intentional collapse of society – Marxist and Maoist core tenets. Hosea 8:7 (KJV) is timeless in its guidance, “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind”.
That’s exactly what is happening as Newsom was shifting into “Trump Proofing” California, whatever that meant. The results of years of Blue, One Party is coming together in a cataclysm. When everything is virtue signaling and the basics of math, planning, civil engineering, and agnostic, non-politicized science-based decision making is considered a manifestation of privileged culture, anything goes. And when anything goes, anything goes and society collapses.
If Janisse Quiñones was able to negotiate a $750,000 salary, good on her. But her focus has not been on the best delivery of services to the Citizens. With her own words, she is focused on the wrong things. Pay can be great for great leaders, but one has to take responsibility for the bad as well as the good. $750,000 a year brought mediocrity and failure, and Janisse was the one holding the bag when the lights came on and exposed the corrupt nature of the Religion of Wokeness. Time for her, and others in California, to pay up.
All viewpoints are personal and do not reflect the viewpoints of any organization.
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