Keating: The LA Wildfires

January 14, 2025

by Barry Keating, Ph.D.

Private entities, both for-profit and nonprofit, behave differently than public entities. Although we often hear that “government should be run more like a private business,” we know that is nonsense. It’s as difficult to make a cat bark as it is to get a government agency to behave as effectively as a private firm.

The Palisades fire in Southern California has provided us with a reminder of the differences between private entities and government agencies. The scenes from the Palisades fire have been stark; whole city blocks remain with nothing but a few concrete walls standing here and there. Estimates indicate that 10,000 structures have been obliterated in the Palisades and nearby fires; tens of thousands of residents are now “former residents.”

But one picture from the news recently struck us as odd. A structure surrounded by the Palisades fire remained standing while all around it the fire leveled everything. This building is known as the Getty Villa Museum. It’s an impressive place to visit; the Villa contains a world-class collection of antiques and ancient artifacts. The Getty Trust oversees the privately run museum under President and CEO Katherine Fleming.

Fleming was asked by NPR (National Public Radio) why the building survived the fire. She responded “The Palisades fire, within which the Getty Villa is found, has grown over the course of the night, moved further north and further east … And thankfully, because we had been planning for an event of this sort, but certainly not of these proportions — we’d been planning for a long time. A lot of the brush had already been cleared out over the course of the past year before the fire arrived.”

She further explained “What we have done is just constant and really extensive brush clearance around all of our buildings, done all sorts of improvements. We do what’s called fuel reduction. So, you prune and you thin the trees. You do everything you can to lift — raise the tree canopies up from the ground. I mean, none of it’s sexy, but it’s all super important at a moment like this. You thin out low-level plant materials to reduce the mass. And that really helps to reduce the fire load and, you know, takes a lot of the velocity out of the fire as it comes through.” 

The Getty Trust employed an “indicator” for their fire prevention efforts. The indicator was simple: “How much undergrowth, low-lying brush, and plant materials have we removed?” The Getty set a target of almost complete cleanliness of their grounds. This indicator directly targeted the goal of fire prevention. 

It worked. 

But if it’s as simple as “cleaning up,” why didn’t the Los Angeles Fire Department do the same thing? Well, the answer to that is simple too. The Fire Department and the Mayor’s Office of the City of Los Angeles had little incentive to use an indicator, such as the percentage of undergrowth removal, to target safety from fire. A private trust director, by contrast, would likely be held responsible for fire damage; she therefore spent significant resources to prevent what was a predictable occurrence. 

Private firms use metrics to determine if the output of their desired outcomes is increasing or decreasing. Perfect assessment measures do not exist, and individual private households face a collective choice problem. However, for firms motivated by mission and a willingness to face reality (and significant expense), even deficient tools are useful. A nonprofit firm will never be able to guarantee individual results in return for a payment but it can provide information on whether a targeted goal is likely to be met. 

The indicator and target approach is a pragmatic methodology for improving performance in the nonprofit sector, but it can also provide a similar result when applied in the government sector. The methodology originates in the assumption that no one has complete information to determine output as policy filters through an organization. The “mechanism of action” between policy and results is often unknown. The nonprofit or government agency has to set up targets and indicators to measure the intensity and direction of effort. The Getty Trust did just that; the City of Los Angeles did not.

Barry Keating, Ph.D., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, is Professor Emeritus of the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame.



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