Old Interview With $750k LA Water CEO Surfaces - Anyone Watching Should Have Known She'd Get People Killed
There’s been no shortage of ignominy and rightful condemnation to go around when it comes to the political incompetence that led to the Los Angeles wildfires. Now it’s the time for Janisse Quiñones, the $750,000-a-year CEO of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, to feel the wrath.
Oh, sure, there’s nothing as preposterous as Gov. Gavin Newsom pretending to take a call from Joe Biden, or Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass being in Ghana when the quite predictable fires broke out, or refusing to answer questions when she returned.
Those two aren’t the only ones getting blame, either.
Take Los Angeles Fire Department Assistant Chief Kristine Larson, a $400,000-a-year DEI hire who says she’d blame men for getting themselves in a position where she’d need to rescue them because she is unable to lift them.
Larson’s clip blaming men for needing to be rescued has been circulating for some time as a summation of everything that went wrong at bottom of the firefighting pyramid.
The scariest part of this woke nonsense is when she admits she’s not strong enough to carry a man out of a fire, but it’s really the man’s fault for being in that situation to begin with.
— Not the Bee (@Not_the_Bee) January 9, 2025
However, if she’s the end product of DEI policies infecting Los Angeles institutions, Quiñones may be the root of the problem.
If you saw Quiñones during this crisis, it’s likely during a news conference last week in which she urged people to conserve water “because the fire department needs the water to fight fires and we’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging.”
“Those tanks help with the pressure on the fire hydrants in the hills of Palisades,” Quiñones said after three million-gallon tanks were depleted, according to the Los Angeles Daily News.
“Because we were pushing so much water in our trunk line, and so much water was being used before it [went] to the tanks, we were not able to fill the tanks fast enough. So the consumption of water was faster than we [could] provide water in our trunk line.”
However, a few months ago, Quiñones was significantly less interested in talking about the fire and more interested in talking about equity in firefighting.
During an interview with KBLA-AM — their partner in “a massive year-long climate justice initiative meant to amplify equity in the environmental justice space,” according to the radio station — Quiñones was speaking with Dominique DiPrima about a program called (seriously) “Powered by Equity.”
DiPrima said that it was “really important for the DWP to put an equity lens on everything” under Quiñones, something she agreed with.
“That’s the number one thing that attracted me to this role,” Quiñones said.
“Coming from the communities that I come, seeing what I’ve seen through my career in utilities and through the military — I’ve been in the Coast Guard 19 and a half years now, so I’ve got six more months to qualify for my 20 years … it’s with an equity lens, and social justice, making sure that we right the wrongs that we’ve done in the past from an infrastructure perspective,” she said during the July interview.
She added that she wanted to “involve the community in that process.”
“This utility is serious about it, is authentic about it, and so I’m just super excited to be part of that movement.”
She went on to say that “in the past, we were, you know, putting lines from A to B and putting pipeline for water from A to B, now we’re looking at projects from a community impact perspective.”
“But ultimately, our goal is to enable another new middle class by creating good-paying jobs in those areas,” she added.
Well, as it turns out, neither fires nor houses care about diversity, equity, or inclusivity, or for public employment initiatives that sound, to the semi-trained ear, every bit like targeted initiatives that are just a notch above Keynesian ditch-digging if they don’t forward crisis mitigation and disaster recovery first and foremost. (Spoiler alert: They don’t.)
Who knew? I mean, aside from those with some sense, who knew she’d get people killed?
At least no one can say she wasn’t honest: She was up front with everyone about where her number one priority was, and it wasn’t keeping Los Angeles safe. It was power and water filtered through “an equity lens” — and at $750,000 a year, no less! That’s nearly twice what her predecessor made, according to a report by KTTV-TV when she was hired last year.
Let it not be said, therefore, that this attitude didn’t start at the top, first with Mayor Bass and Gov. Newsom, then with Quiñones and her “equity lens” at the LADWP.
Now that we’ve seen what that looks like in action, the question remains whether she should refund the people of Los Angeles for the job she’s done, or whether the people deserve it for voting for this disgraceful mess.
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