Collaborative Community Engagement for Infrastructure Rebuilding after the LA Wildfires

Project Description

Local and state transportation agencies will face competing pressures as they consider how to restore transportation infrastructure and services in the Altadena and Pacific Palisades communities most heavily damaged by the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. Many residents and political leaders will be urging agencies to rebuild quickly, which will favor repair and restoration of roadways and services as they existed prior to the fires. At the same time, contemporary regulatory standards, public priorities, and fire impacts will put pressure on agencies to consider infrastructure designs that are more resilient to the current and future risk landscape — including fire but also floods, landslides, and extreme heat — and that support other transportation system goals, including safety, accessibility, equity, and greenhouse gas emission reductions.
A race to rebuild transportation infrastructure may preclude or increase the cost of other community-defined priorities that could emerge during the long recovery process. Once roadway repairs and reconstruction are underway, it becomes more difficult to pursue alternative transportation pathways, such as building complete streets or designing grids for more effective evacuation. Rapid transportation rebuilding also could forestall actions that are beyond the realm of transportation agency authority, such as undergrounding power lines or implementing neighborhood-scale electrification.
The task of rebuilding therefore requires a community engagement process that is broader in scope than what transportation agencies typically use to promote public participation in transportation decision-making. In the current context of post-fire recovery, a community engagement process should be place-based; community-driven; inclusive of multiple infrastructure domains; and collaborative across public agencies, community-based organizations (CBOs), and residents. It requires structures for diverse groups to reach agreement on community-level priorities and decision-making authority that can propel implementation within arenas of fragmented and overlapping government jurisdiction.