After the Ashes: A Beautiful Altadena Podcast

Episode 1: Introductions and What's Next

• Shawna

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Introductions, a little bit about us and our backgrounds, what to expect and how to reach us with your questions and comments

SPEAKER_02:

So good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whenever you're joining us. I am Shauna Dawson Beer, as most of you know me. I am also Beautiful Altadena. Beautiful Altadena is a decade-old group that has been online for some time. As those who I'm sitting here with know and probably many of you listening, we developed on Facebook because we had no mechanism as an incorporated county to have any real means of communications And we had advocacy issues where we didn't feel we were represented. So that is the void that we were filling. I thought that we would completely get off Facebook and disappear onto Substack, where we also are, and perhaps a bit on Instagram, where we also are, around COVID. But then COVID happened, and it turned out we still had no real comms channels and no real representation. And we got really sucked in. Every time I try to get out, we get sucked in. And then we, you know, after a little pandemic, and then somebody burned our whole town. So here we are now starting this fabulous podcast. For those of you who are not familiar, we are a Facebook group of 15,000 across our Facebook group, primary group and our subgroups. You can find us and a few thousand friends on Substack and us and a few thousand more friends on Instagram. And we welcome everyone, new and old, here in Altadena to come and join us. So this is our podcast. I'm going to start out with a huge thanks to Kimberly, who who is also Surge Altadena sitting with me, and Steven Sachs, who you'll hear me call Steve, or occasionally Steve-o, because I like to, who is our local Altadena policy wonk, as is the title of his substack, which is pretty fantastic if you don't read it. And I'm going to let Steve take it from there. Hi,

SPEAKER_01:

everybody. I'm Steve Sachs. I am the Alta policy wonk. I started the substack in April to try to provide a voice and a plan to go forward. or because having lived in Altadena and seeing how long it was taking for government to come with a solution, I felt it was important that we had something substantive that we could start talking about. You know, it started with one post and then two posts, and now we're over 220 posts. Some of you know it's a couple posts a day. But the idea is to provide insight beyond just what you're seeing on paper or what you're hearing, but to understand the why. And the why is important because as we rebuild, it's going to be necessary for us to be able to make choices as a community. And so understanding the context of what this legislation and what these solutions look like, why they're being implemented, are they the right solution or not for our community. I just felt like it was important to have something that people can talk about. And so that's why we created the Substack. And I hope you all read it. And it'll be fun to talk about some of these issues here on this podcast.

SPEAKER_02:

And to look through some of the issues that are facing us because we have no shortage, right? From renters issues to property tax issues for those of us who are lucky enough to own our homes to the environmental fallout, right? Soil, hexavalent chromium six in our air apparently. Every day is another good day. a good time, right? But to look at all of that through the lens of policy and how that impacts us, because I know that's something that, frankly, those of us mired in this every day don't always have the ability to take that kind of 10,000-foot view and look at that,

SPEAKER_01:

Steve. Well, and also effectively advocate. I think that's really important, is that a lot of communities struggle with advocating their positions. So our hope is to be able to provide that context and provide the education and help our community be able to have the right asks when we're in the room with the right people.

SPEAKER_02:

Right. So before we totally dive in, because we will, because this is what happens every time we start talking. I want to make sure that we also introduce Kimberly Berry, who aside from Surge and being another Altadena resident, who like myself was a total loss, you know, again, as we were lucky enough to own our homes, unfortunately, you know, also to lose it all, right? And Kimberly's here in the context of our producer, which is amazing, you know, as people are actually making time to do this for the community and for which we are eternally grateful. And also our co-host and moderators because, you know, Steve and I can get a little, we can get a lot of things, which we'll talk about and you'll hear about. But I'll let Kimberly take it away. Sure. So I think the first thing we'd like to do is just hear from Steve. I think you were talking about what are some of these influences and what are the contexts where we're seeing some of the solutions that are coming forth for Altadena. So we want to understand what is happening, what's next. And again, like you said, like how can we better advocate for ourselves and for for a beautiful recovery for Altadena. So if you can maybe talk a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_01:

Sure, yeah. I mean, the way I see it right now and what I'm hearing from a lot of the legislators is this session has been extraordinarily busy creating bills because that's what we do in California. We use bills to drive policy. And they've been focused a lot on Altadena. And so how these bills have been created, particularly some of the bills we'll talk about today, which is AB 797, AB 787, SB 782, SB 79, we may touch on a little bit. And some of you may have recognized SB 549, which was killed, but that was another bill that was talked about. The Palisades was very anti that one. And a lot of these bills were designed to address some of the concerns that were coming out of the fires, especially back in February and March when visibility was very limited. And so you had this push then to try to create these solutions because people were craving it. And they knew it was gonna take seven to eight months, but there were so many pieces up in the air, especially from the federal government. What was their role going to be? Was there gonna be any money that traditionally follows onto the FEMA money that we've seen for disasters historically? Was that gonna happen? I think we asked for$40 billion or thereabouts. And so, how do we structure all of this? And that's what a lot of these legislative pieces were doing. And we're now at the last part of the session in Sacramento, And we're now at that point where the rubber's meeting the road. Some of the bills are being killed in committee, but the vast majority are going to make their way through. One has already been signed relating to mortgage relief. And so we've reached that endpoint, or we're reaching that endpoint. And I guess the big thing coming forward is going to be this is what we're gonna live with. These are the bills that are gonna be structured. We're not gonna have a lot of opportunity in the next session to add more bills. And so we'll go into a reason why that is, but that's sort of where we are today.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and could you say a little more about that? Why won't we have the opportunity to write new legislation?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so my understanding is that the current leadership in the assembly, at least, has limited the number of bills that a member can introduce. Because in California, we introduce so many bills every session to address everything from global warming and down to dog tags. I mean, it's crazy what the legislator's will, you know, implement. And so this session, they kind of said, look, you know, we have this huge regulatory regime because we have all these bills that are created and put in place and nobody knows how to, you know, enforce them. It's the old, I think it's Confucius or Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher that said, the more laws you make, the more laws you break. You know, it's become so hard for the government to even govern in California because everything is done through legislation. So in this session, this session being the two-year term that's, you know, going to expire in 26, the leadership had said, we're going to limit the number of bills that are available to legislators to try to corral this growing state and to focus the legislators on issues that maybe are a little bit more topical for their constituents and for California as a whole.

SPEAKER_02:

That's a good segue just because I think we started this podcast to ask some very simple but not very simple questions, right? About who is writing the rules of recovery, which ultimately does come down to all of this legislation and these bills that are happening largely or entirely without community input, frankly. And separate of that, where is the money coming from to do any of these things, right? We have all these things we've got to recover. We know that we need, you know, our rebuilding and recovery is not millions of dollars. It's not hundreds of millions of dollars. It's tens of billions. It's tens of billions of dollars. And where that money is coming from, because we know it's not coming from the normal channels it would from the federal government. We know it's not coming from the state, and we sure as heck know it's not coming from the county. So where is it, right? And then ultimately, where is other money going? Like, where is our fire aid money? That's a whole other conversation we shouldn't get into today. But

SPEAKER_01:

that's its own episode. That's$100 million out of the tens of billions for just Altadena, and then you've got tens of billions for the Palisades as

SPEAKER_02:

well. Right, right. comes down to, and again, saying that piece that there's not a lot of, or if any, community input, it's who gets left behind again, right? Because there's always someone that gets left behind.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, and that's why effective advocacy is crucial to ensuring that you're not left behind.

SPEAKER_02:

Yep.

SPEAKER_01:

But effective advocacy is not just pointing out the problems. Effective advocacy is also creating solutions to allow yourself to be at the table. And that's something that's been missing from a lot of post-fire or post-disaster situations. It's how can we take this situation and provide a solution that meets the needs of the time. And the time has changed. I mean, we have a different administration today. There are different rules that we're living by. And whether we like it or not, this is our reality. And we can't just wish it away because it's not going to go away.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, there's no waking up from this nightmare. Good times. But I think to your point about advocacy, before we can even be our own advocates or seek others to be our advocates or demand that advocacy through whatever channels we have to do that, we need to actually understand all of this, right? We need a baseline. We need to know what the legislation is. We need to know what it means. We need to understand how nuanced a lot of this is, you know, that frankly, on a lot of topics, not just the bills that we're going to discuss and cover, but even just some of the more singular issues that are facing our town. Again, property tax, the environmental fallout, soil and air pollution. Lack of accountability. Lack of accountability on the fire response, all right? That's a big one in our group, from me, et cetera. Again, that'll be the topic of its own episode or multiple episodes to do any kind of justice to that because we're going to get really fucking angry talking about that. I'm going to get really fucking angry talking about that and probably you too because we're both West Altadena in the no evacuation, no sirens, no nothing except for neighbors dying in their homes. Yeah. Yeah. So again, that's a That's a hot-button topic for all of us. But my point, very simply being, we have all of these things where we need to have this level of education to advocate for ourselves, and we don't. And I think most of us don't even know about any of this policy. I know if it were not for you, Steve, I would not have my head around all of this policy, and even spending as much time as I do with you. I, at times, struggle with it. And there's also the fact that unless you live and breathe this, as you do, unless this is your universe, it is very difficult to understand what these bills necessarily say as they are deliberately written in a somewhat vague way with some abilities to interpret things in different directions. Well,

SPEAKER_01:

look, the bills are reflections of the policy consideration in the first place. So you have to understand the why to understand why the bill was created. And so that's important as well. It's an education beyond just, it's different layers, as I like to tell people. You know, there's the first layer, which is the public layer, which Everybody sees, you know, we're going to create this bill to do good, blah, blah, blah. But then there's the second layer, the why and what it really means in those right rooms and those conversations when we're sitting down and, you know, the lights are off and the microphones are off and we're having that real moment. And what is this truly doing and what is the plan? And in many cases, we probably subscribe more nefariousness to it than it actually is. It really is Occam's razor. You know, electeds are typically overwhelmed by just the sheer amount of things that they have to take care of. You know, when I go to Washington and I sit in the office and, you know, I look at the people coming in when the members are in town, and you have these members that have a meeting with me talking about, you know, post-fire recovery financing and these, you know, very complex financial strategies. And then the next meeting's about veteran issues. And then the next meeting's about, you know, climate-based issues. stuff, and then so on and so forth, it gets to the point where you almost have appreciation for the electeds that, and they have five minutes to understand complex issues. Like, it's everything. And, you know, I struggle with it. And I just, I live this stuff. I can't imagine what they're going through every day. And then they have to make decisions on that split moment. And so I have sympathy for them.

SPEAKER_02:

No, I'm with you on that, especially after having spent, you I love, whose name I'm not forgetting, Stefani. Well, we love hair. We like hair beading. Oh, you said ours. You said ours. You love

SPEAKER_01:

hair beading. Yeah, John's a friend. I want his hair. I want his hair. We'll

SPEAKER_02:

get there. We'll get there. Well, yeah, fair, fair.

SPEAKER_01:

That's what I always tell

SPEAKER_02:

him. But Steve, for anyone who's listening, Steve does have his hair. No, I do not. I do not. You do. You do. You're not even doing the comb over. It's natural. There's a product. Give me about two years. Embrace it.

UNKNOWN:

Shh.

SPEAKER_02:

Don't whisper it out to the universe. Don't do it. Nutrafol. We should have an ad for Nutrafol. There you go. No, I wasn't finished. Okay, keep going. But when you're done, I want to ask you about the third layer. So keep going. Are you going to get on the third layer?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, the third layer is like the really, that's where the lobbyists live.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. I was just going to say that I do appreciate that. No, I was thinking about our San Francisco assembly person, Stefani. Oh, yeah, Stefani. Right? So Stefani came down here in March and ended up spending hours with me in March. my, you know, at the time, new rental home that was completely empty, sitting at a donated table with some very random chairs with me, looking at a lot of primer white walls in this empty place because, you know, this is what happens when very curiously everything you've ever owned is gone overnight. It's a very strange, surreal reality. I don't think anyone could understand unless you're living it, right, Kimberly? But, you know, I really did appreciate that she wanted to try and understand what the myriad issues were that were facing our community. And she took a notepad, I mean a notebook practically worth of notes, just sitting with me trying to get her head around that. And she was one of the few assembly people who very quickly made time for us when we did go up to Sacramento to have some conversations around this legislation and communicate what the reality is on the ground for us here and what people want and need and what they don't. And it is, I can't even, you know, again, I just can't imagine that either. I don't want to side rail us too much, but it takes you to also how we got here in the first place with Catherine Barger managing the 5th District, which is larger than most states. She is responsible for, what is it, like 60 different towns? We comprise just a tiny percentage of the vote when we elect a 5th District supervisor. Her district is so crazy. It's so unwieldy. It's bananas. Of course this happened. Of course it happened because you don't even have to be asleep at the wheel for this to happen, because you show me someone with 60 kids, and I show you 55 that are neglected.

SPEAKER_01:

And that goes back to my point about the sympathy for the electeds, being in those positions and having to take on all of this. And then on top of it, she's the mayor of Altadena. So she's also imbued with that requirement. Is she, though? Other than the photo ops, is she? Yeah, but she is. I mean, at the end of the day, she has two million constituents that she has to take on. care of. She has a land mass far exceeding any other supervisor. I mean, you look at Solis's district and District 1, it's very compact. Lindsay Horvath in District 3, who has the, that's where the Palisades is, is basically the city of Los Angeles and, you know, mostly the city of Los Angeles and, you know, Malibu. Janice Hahn has District 4, she's got the South Bay, so she's got a few more of the mix like Catherine does. But I mean, like you said, 60-something communities is a lot of It's

SPEAKER_02:

not realistic for anyone to manage all of those well and to understand the nuances and needs of each one of those communities. But to your point of having empathy or some sympathy for the electeds in those roles, I would if those electeds were not actively combating every opportunity to divide that district and make it more manageable with an additional supervisor.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, she's against the supervisor changes.

SPEAKER_02:

I'm aware. That was

SPEAKER_01:

my point. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be...

SPEAKER_02:

It's like if this is what you want, if you really want this, if you want to have this power, this control, you want to have it all, then figure out how the hell to manage it because we are not managed.

SPEAKER_01:

But the purpose behind the five supervisors is nice from a governance perspective because you only have to get three votes. And for the city of Los Angeles, there's always the complaints about the 15 council members and how hard it is to try to get anything through. Adding four more votes to the council county potentially creates more friction and makes it more difficult. I mean, right, wrong or indifferent, I see both sides of this one. We'll see what happens because the measure G, measure J situation is a bit of a problem. And it could potentially end up in a lawsuit and or one of those being negated in which one, it'll be interesting to see how that plays. According to the LA Times at least.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. On that, should we, as we wrap up this first episode, We're not going to delve into each one of these bills today because I would fall asleep, let alone our poor listener. We want you, dear listener, to actually find this to be helpful and perhaps even entertaining and engaging.

SPEAKER_01:

There's a sub stack if you want to read.

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, if you want dense, it exists on sub stack and it's not mine. I try to keep it light. It's a little fiery, but light. That said, do we want to top line for today some of the bills that we will be talking about in the upcoming episodes, both independently with us and with guests. Kimberly, I know we plan to have some guests on. I know we would like to have some opposing viewpoints on because I think it's really important to hear all sides of every single one of these issues and perspectives as we try and balance it out. Can you give us a top line run through of everything that we're facing right now? Okay, let me rephrase that. Just the topics. That

SPEAKER_01:

reminds me of somebody saying to me the other day, hey, I got a text. Affordable housing. Figure it out. give me five bullet points. I'm like, excuse me? That's why

SPEAKER_02:

they pay you the big bucks.

SPEAKER_01:

They don't pay me anything. I'd say we would probably start top line, top bills. I'm thinking structurally. I think that that's where we need to start. We can understand what the structure of this recovery is going to look like for Altadena. I'm not going to get into the specific issues per se. We will touch on them because of these bills, but if we We start with AB 782 because that's going to create the district that we are going to live under. And that's

SPEAKER_02:

a county district,

SPEAKER_01:

so people understand that. Correct. It's called an Economic Infrastructure EIFD. I've got to look it up. Sorry, I can't. There's so many acronyms in my brain right now. Too many acronyms. And when I see E, I always think eat and fire or something or other. I know.

SPEAKER_02:

You and me both. We already this morning had like, wait, which one? Is it EFSN, EFRU, who's who? Oh, it's Enhanced Infrastructure Financing Districts. Thank you. Beautiful. There it is. And I thought this one was environmental.

SPEAKER_01:

See, that's why we have a producer. That's why we have a producer. Even though it's a climate resilience district, but we'll get into that a little bit more. I think the other one I'd like to talk about is 797, AB 797, because I think that that one's very important from a financing perspective, especially without the federal government coming in, how we're going to address these concerns and bring in money that's going to allow us to address the various policy considerations. And I can go into, I think there's four tranches of policy considerations we have to pay attention to. And

SPEAKER_02:

for people who don't immediately know what AB 797 is, that's John Harabedian's

SPEAKER_01:

bill. Yes, yes. And 782 was Sasha Perez's bill. The other bill that I think is important to talk about is, because there's a lot of misinformation around it, is SB 79. That is a bill that Scott Wiener introduced up in San Francisco. However, it has a lot of application to density, which is gonna be a discussion I think we're gonna have. It's cussing and discussing, I think we're gonna be doing a lot of in Altadena around density. So this is something we, The governor exempted density for Altadena, and then this bill is going to potentially pass. And I think it's important to understand what this bill means from our perspective. The last piece is SB 549. This was a county-wide rebuilding authority. It was in competition with SB 782. It's been shelved for the time being, but just because it's shelved doesn't mean it's dead. I

SPEAKER_02:

think it's important to note that that one got shelved for two reasons. One, the Palisades came out so hard against it. And two, even Mayor Karen Bass came out

SPEAKER_01:

against this. I think it's more the latter. I think that because you had 782 and 549 coming through at the same time, and I think you were in the committee meeting, weren't you, Sana, when they said, the chairman of that committee meeting said, listen, I can't give you both, figure it out. And if 782 has both the city and the county on board and 549 doesn't, then 549 shelved, regardless of what the there was misinformation used there personally, I think it goes back to more, which is more practical.

SPEAKER_02:

I'd like to talk about Spencer. I'm fascinated by Spencer.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I think that that was a nice excuse for shelving the bill. I think ultimately that bill was shelled because it didn't meet the city's needs. So why have it pass? And let's say the Blue Ribbon Commission didn't have all the support of all the different groups. So this was a cleaner way. That was

SPEAKER_02:

another fun meeting I sat in on.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And the Blue Ribbon Commission was behind 549. So I think those are the bills that I think will allow us to delve into, start to figure out how to start discussing some of these broader questions with an example that's tangible for us to start with.

SPEAKER_02:

And I want to say again that we are discussing what these things are, what they mean, how they're going to play out in our community, how we may advocate for ourselves within the confines of them. And I say within the confines of them because I think it's it's important to note and create context of the sense that, you know, the ship has sailed on these, largely.

SPEAKER_01:

For all intents and

SPEAKER_02:

purposes. Right? I mean, from a legislative perspective, the time to demand, you know, via community pressure and mechanisms, any kind of real change or amendments of which we, we, meaning like little old me, Serena Covarrubias, who is kind of our third musketeer who is not here because she's dealing with her own fire fallout. mess right now, though I should be here with us today having this conversation. And Steve, you know, we were, well, Steve couldn't join us, but Serena and I, you know, were up there having the conversations around these things because, again, Altadena is not being represented. But it's so critical to have that kind of understanding that we're not going to change anything, that these things are going to pass with or without us. They largely already have. And so now it's figuring out the third layer, right? It is the third layer. And now it's the third layer. How do we, it's still important to understand these, it's still important to know what's coming and how, frankly, too, there's going to be more. There's going to be more in the future with the next session. How do we want to shape that when we're better

SPEAKER_01:

informed? There's going to be very few in the next session. The next session is going to be more business as usual. Remember, electeds like Harabedian and Perez already have other constituents besides Altadena. Altadena is right now the important consideration, but they still have to to take care of the day-to-day. And so we've been very fortunate to have their attention this long and they've done what they can do, but I think we also have to be understanding of where they are as electeds. Yeah, so, and I think it's important to, as you've said, Shauna, I mean, so much of this is, we're gonna delve into a lot of the underlying purposes. And I think that's, what's gonna be really important is so that people understand the context of why and understanding too, the interplay between the federal, state, and local governments and how they interact here because You can't go to ask a federal to do something that the county's supposed to do and vice versa. You can't ask the county to go handle federal legislation. I mean, they just don't have that yank. Yes, there is influence, but if they did, we'd have$40 billion today. So we have to understand these things within the context of these broader questions and how they're going to fit. I hope that helps.

SPEAKER_02:

Me too. It does. Well, I think, Shauna, as you were saying, we're just going to be wrapping up here. So as we talk about these bills and just what they mean for our future, we're going to want you not just to listen but to speak up and call your representatives. We're going to talk about some effective advocacy. So this is going to be an interactive podcast as well, giving you some tools and giving us all some tools together to collectively advocate for our beloved towns And I would say on that note, for anyone who's listening to this, you know, if you have questions that you want us to address, right? If there are things that, frankly, you don't understand, I want to say I welcome what I would call, you know, if you feel like you have a dumb question, ask it. Because I guarantee you're not alone thinking it. I have said to Steve a thousand times that I need policy 101 for dummies. Like, where's my policy for dummies book? Because it's a lot, right? For the layman, especially the layman who's dealing with with, you know, the fallout following a fire, right? Like our lives are already chaos. We already have multiple full-time jobs and now we're supposed to become experts in policy so that we don't get further screwed. Okay, cool. Sure. Why not? Yeah. And just to add to that, if you are interested in being a guest on our podcast as well, feel free to ask us and we can see if we can make that happen. Absolutely. So where can people do that? They can do it through, if you happen to be a member of the Beautiful Altagena group, that's obviously a really simple, straightforward way to do that. If you happen to be a to my or Steve's Substack. Mine is Beautiful Altadena. Steve?

SPEAKER_01:

The Alta Policy Wonk.

SPEAKER_02:

Right. You can find us both on Substack and you can message us through Substack. Separately, my email address for Beautiful Altadena is BeautifulAltadenaOG as in official group, but you can also take that for whatever you'd like it to be, BeautifulAltadenaOG at gmail.com. And we also are on Instagram at BeautifulAltadena and you're welcome to hit us in the DMs too. Great. Awesome. Thank you for that. So this is Kimberly signing off with After the Ashes, a beautiful Altadena podcast. And let's make sure the next chapter of our town is written by the people who live through the fire. Amen.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you.