When the Pacific Palisades fire tore through hillside neighborhoods last year, Elaine Culotti wasn’t just watching homes burn. She was watching her faith in the City of Los Angeles collapse alongside them. In the days that followed while the smoke still clung to the air, state officials reassured residents that California had ample resources to clear debris. The numbers looked comforting, but something about them bothered Culotti. She has built a career in real-estate by understanding scale, logistics, and construction. When she looked more closely at the state’s figures, she realized the the numbers weren’t for the Palisades or L.A. County -they were for the entire state of California.
“It was misleading as people who lost everything were told help was coming and it wasn’t.” said Culotti, which was the moment was her call to take action.
Culotti, a developer known for creating the House of Rock in Santa Monica and recently a Discovery+ standout in “Undercover Billionaire,” suffered enormous personal losses in the fire with roughly 20% of her real estate portfolio, a blow that altered not just her finances, but her sense of how a major city responds to its own citizens in crisis. She watched her neighbors confront a maze of bureaucracy while attempting to rebuild, all while the city issued conflicting messages and offered no clear timeline for debris removal.
“It felt like nobody understood the scale of the disaster not the officials, not the departments in charge, not the people making the decisions,” she said. “If the people in charge don’t understand the size of the problem, they certainly can’t solve it.”
Culotti did what she has always done: she built a plan. Working with FEMA, Cal OES, ABC, and the Army Corps of Engineers, she designed a concept she called “Debris on Rail.” Instead of overwhelming local landfills - many in communities already weary of absorbing Los Angeles’ waste - her plan shifted debris from the Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena onto rail lines, moving it to a dedicated processing facility in Puente Hills. She believed this approach would not only avoid environmental and political backlash, but prevent the costs that will come when those communities inevitably refuse the next round of fire waste.
Her proposal was verified at multiple levels. She even flew to Washington, meeting with Appropriations staff in the Lee Zeldin office to secure federal alignment. The plan was ready, scalable and feasible. However, California declined to adopt it.
“That was when I realized Los Angeles isn’t just overwhelmed - it’s structurally incapable of responding to a disaster of this magnitude,” she said. “If we stay under this system, nothing changes.”
For Culotti, the consequences go far beyond one fire. They seep into property valuation, lending, permitting, and the ability of residents to rebuild their lives. “How do you value real estate if you can’t sell it, rent it, repair it, or build on it? How do you keep paying mortgages, security, maintenance, brush clearing, insurance with no path forward?” she asks. “No industry can survive like that. And no homeowner should be asked to.”
Her conclusion was for the Palisades must become its own city. Advocating for secession requires infrastructure that the Palisades currently doesn’t have. Culotti has been working to open a community center that could serve as a civic hub for education, coordination, and recovery resources. She recounts an example involving the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “DWP tried to penalize us for creating a space where neighbors could gather and get help - for free,” she said. “They treated it as if we were running a commercial enterprise."
This is where her vision expands beyond the post-fire crisis. Culotti believes the Palisades can become what she describes as a “pilot city,” a model for what local governance could look like when it’s sized correctly and accountable to the people who live there. The community’s demographic profile, civic engagement, and volunteer culture, she says, make it positioned to prove what intentional self-governance can accomplish. “We share very little with the rest of Los Angeles,” she said. “Our priorities, our scale, our challenges—they’re completely different. We need governance that reflects who we are.”
That belief led her into a statewide project that has consumed the last several years of her life: a documentary titled “M-A-Y-O-R: Mayors Matter.” Traveling city by city, she has interviewed 52 mayors across California to understand what works and what doesn’t at the municipal level. Her biggest takeaway? Size determines success.
“There is a natural size for a city,” Culotti said, “A sweet spot where a mayor can actually govern. Los Angeles is far beyond that. No mayor—Karen Bass or anyone else—can succeed in a system this overrun. It’s not about her. It’s about the architecture of the job."
Her documentary has also illuminated a deeper truth about California’s political climate: people on both sides of the aisle want far more of the same things than the news cycle suggests. “Mayors aren’t arguing about culture wars - They’re fighting for water rights, infrastructure, response times, budgets, safety. They’re desperate for Sacramento to understand their reality,” she said.
Those insights have sparked another possibility Culotti once would have dismissed: a gubernatorial run in 2026.
She is cautious when talking about it. With roughly 50 people expected to enter the race, she believes none of the likely candidates has the experience, operational understanding, or roadmap needed to “right the ship.”
“It’s easy to run for governor but It’s much harder to fix California. I won’t run unless I have a clear, plausible, data-driven path to victory. Not just belief. Not just momentum. A path, but if I don’t run, then Mayors Matter becomes the roadmap for whoever does. Because somebody needs to understand how cities actually work.”
For Culotti, the future of the Palisades and state depends on rejecting the status quo. “We can’t undo the fire. We can’t take back the loss. But we can decide what comes next. And what comes next has to work.”
Whether she ends up leading a new city, shaping a statewide movement, or launching a gubernatorial campaign, Culotti insists that one thing is non-negotiable: local control is the only path to local survival.
“This isn’t about leaving Los Angeles,” she said. “It’s about living. And I intend to make sure we do.”
Michelle Edgar, Special to the Daily Press