L.A. Mayor Responds to Rick Caruso’s Criticism Over Palisades Fire Response: “He Is Sad and Bitter”

L.A. mayor Karen Bass and a billionaire developer with an outsize footprint in the city, Rick Caruso, are at it again.

In an appearance at Bloomberg’s Screentime event Wednesday night, Bass offered a sharp rebuke to Caruso’s statement earlier that day that “failure of government on an epic level,” starting with her leadership, was responsible for the devastation of January’s Palisades Fire.

“Well, the way he characterized me sounded like Trump,” she said. “But I just was saddened by it, honestly, because that response was beneath him.” The mayor added, “I think he is sad and bitter.”

She continued, “It’s exploiting tragedy, it’s exploiting grief. This is when the city needs to stand together. Why would you do that? So he’s better than that and I was just disappointed and sad.”

Bass added that Caruso had been in her office a couple of weeks before as they worked together on a solution to issues raised by the so-called mansion tax, a property transfer tax that went into effect in 2023 and generally applies to properties with a gross value of over $5 million.

Caruso, the impresario behind The Grove and The Americana at Brand shopping centers, had excoriated the government’s response to the fire in a statement on Wednesday. Caruso was responding to the news that a Florida man had been arrested for allegedly setting a fire Jan. 1 that smoldered and was whipped up into the massive Palisades wildfire by strong winds a few days later.

“What makes today even harder is that everything we feared about this disaster being preventable turned out to be 100 percent true,” he said in a statement. “This was a failure of government on an epic level, starting with Mayor Bass. Her and the city’s incompetence, mismanagement, and failure to plan, prepare, and predeploy directly led to people dying, thousands of lives being upended, and put on full display the consequences of ineffective and incapable leadership.”

Bass and Caruso battled it out in the mayor’s race in 2022, which Bass won after Caruso spent a historic $104 million on his campaign. Bass will be campaigning for re-election next year, which she promised in her Screentime appearance will be her last. Caruso has said he is considering a run for L.A. mayor or the governor of California.