They Lost Everything in the Palisades Fire. Then L.A. Sent Them a Bill

Carol Sanborn spent more than 40 years in the same home at Pacific Palisades before the fire took it. When a $31 brush clearance fine arrived in her mailbox — for failing to maintain vegetation on a property that has no vegetation, no structure, and no walls, only dirt — she picked up a red pen, wrote “insulting and cruel” across the invoice, and mailed it back to the city. “We have no house, and we have no brush,” she said.Her neighbor Christine Martinez called a similar notice “one final blow” and made clear she has no intention of paying it. “It’s the principle of it,” Ms. Martinez said. She tried calling a phone number on the bill but found the voicemail box was accepting no new messages. “Their voicemail is full. Can’t leave a message,” Ms. Martinez said. “They said to write, so I wrote last week and haven’t heard anything.”More than a year after the Palisades Fire erased entire blocks of one of Los Angeles’s most storied neighborhoods, some survivors are discovering that the city’s enforcement machinery never stopped running.The notices, which warned that anyone missing a March deadline would face additional penalty fees, were sent to people whose properties are now empty lots. The automated system, as it turns out, does not know what the fire already told the city.A System That Doesn’t Know What It BurnedThe Los Angeles Fire Department’s brush clearance program is designed to prevent the buildup of fuel for future devastating fires and covers roughly 141,000 parcels in the city’s high-fire-hazard zones. The program exists for good reason: dry, overgrown vegetation is among the most significant contributors to wildfire spread, and clearing it from properties in high-risk zones is a genuine and proven line of defense against the kind of catastrophic fire behavior that devastated the Palisades in the first place. The L.A. County Fire Department’s separate defensible space program explicitly exempts homes destroyed in the 2025 fires from fees and inspections; however, the city’s LAFD program has not made the same update.The surge in citations is partly traceable to budget cuts that stripped the LAFD’s Brush Inspections Unit of staff, leaving the department to rely on inspectors from other agencies who, according to internal emails obtained by KCAL News, did not receive full bureau-wide training before heading into the field. Inspections across Los Angeles jumped 37 percent this year — to more than 14,000, compared with roughly 10,800 the year before.A senior fellow and co-lead of the Climate and Communities Program at the Urban Institute, Andrew Rumbach, tells The New York Sun these kinds of oversights are a predictable feature of post-disaster governance.“Our systems for everyday management of cities and towns are too often disconnected from our emergency response systems, and that needs to be corrected before disasters happen,” Mr. Rumbach says, noting that local staff are frequently overwhelmed after major disasters. He says the entire system of disaster governance should be made “as simple and efficient as possible.”This Is Not the First TimeThis is not the first brush clearance citation crisis to hit Palisades survivors. Last September, a news investigation found that more than 300 brush clearance citations had been issued on properties that were partially or completely destroyed. Mayor Karen Bass called those citations a mistake and said she would demand letters of apology to the property owners. The LAFD later said it had found only one email to a homeowner that cleared a citation, and that email did not include an apology. The department added that it would not pursue any of the notices.The September episode and the latest round follow the same pattern: Automated notices go out, public outrage follows, officials issue statements, and the system resets without being fixed. Ms. Bass called the most recent citations unacceptable, saying no resident who lost their home in the Palisades should have received the charge.A spokesperson for Councilwoman Traci Park said the notices were “entirely tone-deaf to those who lost everything,” observing that her office had just fought to waive rebuilding fees and was working directly with LAFD leadership to resolve the matter.Starting May 1, the LAFD is set to begin another round of annual inspections across all properties in the city’s Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone — including the Palisades — regardless of whether homes were damaged or destroyed. Properties that fail the first inspection incur a $31 fee; a second failed inspection adds a $758 non-compliance charge; and if the city ultimately clears the property itself, owners face additional costs of $1,740 in administrative fees plus the contractor’s bid price.A Recovery That Is Painful and SlowLast year, the Palisades Fire burned 23,448 acres across Pacific Palisades, Topanga, and Malibu, killing 12 people and destroying 6,837 structures. The broader January 2025 Los Angeles fires, including the Eaton Fire, killed 31 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures combined.As of early 2026, the pace of rebuilding has begun to sag; the number of permits issued in November and December fell markedly from the October peak, with the average wait time between application and permit issuance running 49 days.Governor Newsom’s office has described the permitting pace as moving nearly three times faster than during the five years before the fires, a characterization that the numbers complicate. As of early February 2026, Los Angeles County had received 6,116 rebuild applications, issued 2,894 permits, and seen the completion of just 28 buildings — out of more than 13,000 homes destroyed. Survivors navigating insurance disputes, contractor shortages, and bureaucratic delays are not always in a position to find comfort in the comparison.Mr. Rumbach says cities should use quieter periods to stress-test their systems against disaster scenarios before catastrophe strikes.“A lot of these issues are relatively easy to predict and plan for, but they need to commit time and resources to thinking through the potential problems and solving them before they cause unnecessary stress and harm to disaster survivors,” he adds.

They Lost Everything in the Palisades Fire. Then L.A. Sent Them a Bill

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