After a Rocky 90-Day Tenure, L.A.’s Recovery Czar Is Stepping Down

Three months ago, Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles appointed Steve Soboroff to oversee the first phase of the huge recovery effort that confronted the city after the January wildfires. “There is no one better equipped to create our rebuilding plan,” she said at the time.

Mr. Soboroff, 76, a developer and longtime civic leader, had known Ms. Bass, 71, for decades. They had worked together on initiatives from school bonds to the recovery from the Northridge earthquake. For 36 years, until 2018, he had lived in Pacific Palisades, one of the hardest-hit fire zones. She had spoken highly of him in 2001, when he ran unsuccessfully for mayor, and he had been a chairman of her 2022 mayoral campaign.

But Mr. Soboroff’s 90-day tenure as the mayor’s chief recovery officer came to an end on Friday, clouded by a sharp deterioration in his relationship with Ms. Bass and his influence at City Hall. There were clashes with her administration over the scope of his authority, his compensation and the extent to which the Palisades should reopen to the public.

Mr. Soboroff made clear in an interview that he was leaving unhappily and reluctantly. His argument that he should stay in the post for two years was rejected by Ms. Bass and her aides from the outset, he said, and as their divisions deepened, even another 90-day stint seemed unfeasible. A low point, he said, was when he learned City Hall had started a search for his successor without alerting him.

“How they thought that I wouldn’t find out about it — this is my town right here,” he said over breakfast at a deli in West Los Angeles. “I was the starting pitcher in an all-star game. Would I have liked to have pitched longer and won the game? Yeah. But nobody pitches more than three innings in an all-star game.”

Asked about Mr. Soboroff’s tenure, Zach Seidl, a spokesman for the mayor, said in a statement that “at times he sent confusing messages to residents but we are grateful for his service and contributions.”

At a news conference in the Palisades to celebrate plans to rebuild the recreation center on Thursday, the mayor said, “I think Steve laid a great foundation to follow up on. I’ve known Steve for years and years, and he’s not going to be that far away, so he knows I will stay in contact.”

Ms. Bass shared the lectern with her political rival, the billionaire developer Rick Caruso, and the coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, JJ Redick, the event’s organizer. Mr. Soboroff was not there.

The story of Mr. Soboroff’s short-lived return to government under Ms. Bass has been the latest challenge facing her administration as it has struggled to lead the city through its worst crisis in decades. Beset by criticism almost from the moment the fires started, she spent months dealing with turmoil over his appointment. This week, as her handpicked rebuilding czar stepped down, he warned that many Palisades homeowners will ultimately never return.

Ms. Bass turned to Mr. Soboroff during a moment of crisis, hoping for help as she faced criticism for being out of town at the start of the fires — and pressure to mobilize a recovery before President Trump, a longtime critic of Democrats in California and federal disaster aid programs, moved into the Oval Office.

It was not a surprising choice: Mr. Soboroff has long been a face of the Los Angeles establishment. He is a former member of the police commission and a Republican turned Democrat who has worked on some of the city’s most ambitious building projects. He presented himself as a reliable mediator for the competing factions vying to dominate the recovery, particularly in Pacific Palisades, one of the city’s priciest and most sought-after neighborhoods.

Jeff Millman, a Democratic communications consultant and associate of Mr. Soboroff, called him “collaborative and successful” and “a pillar of the Palisades community.”

But some of the mayor’s advisers and allies pressed her to look elsewhere, describing Mr. Soboroff as a remnant of Los Angeles’s past with a reputation for being something of a showboat.

“There were people who support her who were strongly against him because they feel he’s a bull in a China shop,” said Antonio Villaraigosa, an ally of Ms. Bass’s and himself a former mayor.

Ten days after the fire erupted, Ms. Bass announced Mr. Soboroff was taking the job. She directed him to develop plans to let residents access their properties safely and to ensure they took advantage of streamlined permitting and debris removal. And she instructed him to create a program to rebuild libraries and parks and to initiate a system for sharing resources and best practices for rebuilding.

The assignment was immediately fraught. At their first meeting, Mr. Soboroff told Ms. Bass he needed to be paid, saying the work was so time-consuming he would have to step away from a private business. “I said this is 17 hours a day, seven days a week,” he said. “I can’t volunteer for this.”

He added: “I thought I should make at least as much as an average lawyer. So I figured that would be like $300, $400 an hour, and then you start multiplying it out, and it comes to what looks like a lot.”

He said that he and Ms. Bass agreed that he would receive $567,000 for the three months, and that his compensation would come from private sources. But word leaked, and Ms. Bass and Mr. Soboroff came under a storm of criticism once The Los Angeles Times disclosed the deal’s details. After a series of increasingly awkward conversations, Mr. Soboroff said, he told her he would work without payment.

“I thought it was really poor judgment,” Monica Rodriguez, a Los Angeles City Council member, said of the compensation. “And that’s being kind.”

By all indications, that was the beginning of Mr. Soboroff’s decline in influence. He said he found himself excluded from news conferences with Ms. Bass and her aides discussing the rebuilding, and was not included when Mr. Trump flew to California to join Ms. Bass in a meeting with Pacific Palisades homeowners. “I should have been right there with her and Trump,” Mr. Soboroff said.

He wondered whether his voluble style had been the issue. “You’re not supposed to step in front of the mayor, but I mean, I’m operating on adrenaline,” he said.

Mr. Soboroff pulled from his back pocket a copy of the announcement of his appointment, in which Ms. Bass said he would be “charged with recommending a comprehensive city strategy for rebuilding and expediting the safe return of residents, workers, businesses, schools, nonprofits, libraries and parks in areas devastated by the fires that started last week.”

“Does that imply authority?” he said over scrambled eggs with lox and onions, after asking a reporter to read the announcement aloud. “I didn’t have any authority.”

Mr. Soboroff’s reduced profile has complicated assessments of his performance. Initial cleanup after a disaster is typically a joint federal and local effort.

In the Palisades, his work drew mixed reviews. Some residents praised the speed with which building permits had been issued. Some complained at the ongoing truck traffic. Some felt that the job should have gone to someone who could afford to do it pro bono.

“If you want to get paid, get paid — that’s the big city,” said Ken Karmin, a business owner and investor who lives in the Palisades, just outside the burn zone. “But there were a lot of qualified people who would have done it for free.”

Mr. Soboroff said he had fulfilled at least some of his assignment, including the beginnings of an expedited permitting process and a blueprint of recommendations. “She just wanted me to put the trains on the tracks,” he said of Ms. Bass.

He’s leaving the job concerned about the immediate future of the Palisades, where 6,000 homes were leveled. The other major community destroyed by the wildfires, Altadena, is outside the city’s jurisdiction in Los Angeles County.

He predicted that fewer than half the 23,000 or so residents there would ever move back because labor shortages, tariffs and California’s high cost of living would make rebuilding too expensive. At a time of anxiety about how the fires will alter the character of the city, the prediction was a startling suggestion that even the most affluent areas may be in for dramatic change.

“I think it will be between 50 and 70 percent who don’t return,” he said. “That’s huge.” As a result, he said he expected the Palisades to become an international community with even more wealth, where homes would go for as much as $250 million.

Mr. Soboroff said he admired Ms. Bass, but suggested that she obtain more expert oversight to manage the recovery’s next phase.

“She has a style that I loved from the time I met her at the Community Coalition,” he said, referring to the grass-roots nonprofit Ms. Bass founded in 1990 in response to the city’s crack epidemic. “And that style needs to be supplemented in this situation, because she can’t do it. It’s not her fault, no mayor could do it.”

For all his difficulties in these recent months, he added, he bore his longtime ally no rancor.

“I would not feel awkward about, you know, going to breakfast with her now, or her with me,” he said. “I can’t imagine she won’t call me in the future and ask what I think about this or that. But that’s their choice.”