By Stephen Witt, Los Angeles County Politics (opinion)
When it comes to politically plugged-in West Hollywood, LA County Supervisor Lindsey P. Horvath is boots on the ground. When it comes to the working-class Latino community of Pacoima, it gets the flyover treatment.
Those were my thoughts after covering last week’s Board of Supervisors meeting, in which Horvath greenlit a 30-day report on improvements at Whiteman Airport before a much-anticipated $2.1 million study she championed to determine whether the controversial airport should even remain open is completed.
Horvath deserves some credit for doing her homework. After two single-engine private plane crashes at Whiteman this year, she went to the record and found that the National Transportation Safety Board has documented approximately 35 crashes at the airport over the last 25 years, and that every single one has been attributed to pilot error or aircraft malfunction, not county negligence.
That’s an important finding, and putting it on the official Board record matters.
She also paid lip service to the idea that the community deserves more protection. But it would have helped if she had actually walked Pacoima’s streets, talked to local residents and community organizations, and gotten a boots-on-the-ground view of what this airport means to the people living in its shadow, rather than showing up at a Board meeting to greenlight a report.
What is particularly glaring is Horvath’s apparent failure to connect Whiteman Airport to its neighbor, Barton Heliport. The 184-acre Whiteman – home to single-engine private aircraft – sits directly adjacent to Barton, the sole headquarters of the LACoFD Air Operations Section, the aerial firefighting, search-and-rescue and emergency medical unit responsible for covering 2,300 square miles and 4 million LA County residents.
For a supervisor who showed up in West Hollywood on May 11 to celebrate a $500,000 federal investment toward a new firehouse, the contrast is hard to ignore. Nobody is questioning the need for a new Fire Station 8 in West Hollywood, but it would be nice if Pacoima got even half that hands-on attention.
Horvath’s neglect of Pacoima on this issue is less a personal failing than a structural one – and that’s where Measure G comes in.
Measure G, approved by voters in November 2024, expands the five-member LA County Board of Supervisors to nine members. Horvath’s district is a textbook illustration of why that reform was needed. Her Third District runs from Malibu and Calabasas through Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and Santa Monica on the west side, then swings north to take in Pacoima, Panorama City, Sylmar and the City of San Fernando in the San Fernando Valley. That is not a district – it is a contradiction.
Communities with almost nothing in common geographically, economically or culturally are lumped together under one supervisor, and the math of political attention inevitably favors the wealthier, more organized, more donor-rich end of the district. Pacoima and Panorama City are, at best, stepchildren.
We should note that Horvath has been one of the chief drivers of Measure G and is widely considered a frontrunner to become the county’s first elected Chief Executive Officer when that office is created. We also think she has done genuinely good work on homeless services reform, shepherding the transition away from a system that was poorly managed under the city of Los Angeles. Her record is not the issue.
The issue is that until Measure G’s expanded board is fully in place, she is paid to mind the entirety of her district – and Pacoima, Whiteman Airport and Barton Heliport deserve the same hands-on attention she gives West Hollywood.
